If you think your garden view is too boring, now’s the time to spruce things up!

Like most gardeners, you’re probably a visual guy. You’re going to need to have elegance for me. It comforts you, encourages you, and raises your spirits when you have a sad or frustrating day. It’s what you feed on to survive.

In your house, you surround me with the artwork of others. You enjoy vivid colors, vegetable garden painting (of course!), clean lines, and encouraging tweets. Outside of your house, you can surround yourself with your artwork – your garden. You love to grow plants. That’s a massive part of the reason you recently finished a lawn replacement project.

Yet, you enjoy the profound beauty and pleasure that the garden brings to your life.

Your garden is just outside your living room bed, and when you wake up in the morning, you’re looking through the curtains to get a dose of visual garden candy for breakfast. It’s hard to bring into words the inner spiritual boost you get when you get a view of your garden. It’s like your heart’s going to stop for a little backflip of joy despite the cost of sod.

You can find your everyday inspiration in the greenhouse. It is how you can find things any more exciting.

Fix up your lawn.

Look at your backyard, and the most shape you’re going to see is your lawn, whether you’re resodding lawn or not. If it’s an excellent, solid form, the whole garden would be on the right track. And note, it doesn’t have to be a rectangle—try an oval, a circle, a cube, or an oblong form. For a great cut, try the compact, lightweight, and cordless Bosch Isio Shape and Edge Kit, perfect for cutting trees, short leafy hedges, and lawn edges with up to 50 minutes of running time.

Plan your plants.

The best garden designs begin with structural plants packed with lovely, flowering plants. Using evergreen shrubs at the end of each boundary functions as punctuation along the way. After sodding a yard, you can include small shrubs, such as box balls, or large evergreens, such as mahonia, for larger areas. When you’ve got this picture, fill the holes with beautiful flowers. But try to stick to just five or six different styles and organize them in repetitive patterns for an organized and harmonious effect. A meter or deeper is the right size for a border, allowing you ample room to place smaller plants on the front and larger ones on the back.

Small, low-planted beds may establish seating or dining areas, rows of planted-up troughs, and select evergreen scented plants, such as lavender or Mexican orange blossom. Containers, though, provide the most versatility, enabling you to pass them around suits. Creeping rosemary is a perfect container edging herb. It trails rather than grows upright, is evergreen, coated in blue flowers in the spring, especially after a resodding lawn activity.

Create a beautiful pavement.

Even with the cost of sod, your pavement’s color and style and how you lay it out will provide a clear design direction for the whole garden. E.g., a gray or white stone set in a random pattern would set the stage for a French country look. Black or silver pavement, arranged in a regular style, forms the ideal backdrop for a streamlined and futuristic design, while goldstone, set in a mixed pattern, creates an English country feel.

Will you need some inspiration? Butter Wakefield created an intricate pavilion design of 10 interlinking circles in her Ribbon Wheel Garden, each different in design and scale and linked to each other by a “ribbon” of York pavilions. The rings, made from a blend of limestone and York stone, are arranged in a mixture of setts and cobbles, creating a beautiful effect. If you want to create a garden of your dreams, attention to detail is everything. Build a stunning scheme by matching your plants with your option of flooring. 

For instance: Gray or white stone looks fantastic with purple and white flowers after sodding a yard. Black and silver pavement looks wonderful with intense colors such as red, orange, and gold. Golden paving works with flowers with soft shades of pink, lavender, and chalky yellow.

In any case, it’s a smart idea to build a flow of movement from your house to the garden. Ensuring that your flooring is the same level as your indoor flooring will blur the boundaries between the property’s interior and exterior.

Set up similar staging levels

Is your garden in various stages, huh? If you don’t like the concept of adding stone steps, you can have a smooth look for your current lawn, for example, letting the flow from one room to the next. Use grass stairs, incorporating them into the existing property to connect the lower patio to the tiny sun terrace above.

Are you looking for suggestions for the deck? Decking is an ideal and cost-effective way to level it out if you have an irregular or sloping garden. Decking will also have divided levels that require stairs, making it the perfect space for dining furniture. Due to its use, a decorated garden area usually has to survive heavy foot traffic.

Environmentally sustainable, anti-slip, and maintenance-free, composite decking boards are a revolutionary combination of polyurethane and mineral blend, providing the elegance and flexibility of real wood without maintenance. This wood-free deck has a non-porous outer coating, meaning it’s practically self-cleaning so that the rain can do some hard work.

Consider placing outdoor furniture.

For smaller courtyards and patios, folding chairs or bench seats are hidden under a dining table while not in use. L-shaped sofas can be shockingly compact, but they look and feel comfortable. Larger rooms will take full seats, matching benches, sofas, tables; sun loungers, day beds; or on-trend hanging chairs or swing seats.

Invest in a decent collection of garden furniture that will last for years to come. Consider the space to allow enough room for each person to sit comfortably and take out the chair without bouncing. And note, you’re still going to need space to walk around the table for everybody sitting down. It takes a lot more room than you would expect!

A dining table fits well in the garden area with the full or partial sun in the early afternoon—place in a smaller sitting area where you can enjoy the evening light.

If you can’t move your three-piece suite indoors over the winter, for example, buy furniture covers to secure and prolong its life. And whatever garden furniture you purchase, don’t forget to provide accessories with outdoor pillows for extra convenience.

And let’s not forget other garden must-haves, including fire pits, patio heaters, chimneys, and barbecues – preparing space for them is essential, as is where you can keep them until it’s winter.

Louie is the father behind the travel blog Browseeverywhere.com. He has a background in photography, E-commerce, and writing product reviews online at ConsumerReviews24. Traveling full time with his family was his ultimate past-time. If he’s not typing on his laptop, you can probably find him watching movies.