While most people design their porches, lawns, gardens, and backyards, often the front of the house gets overlooked. The pale boring concrete driveways make your home look bleak and sad. However, we have for you our list of landscaping ideas for driveways that will bring life back to your dull concrete driveway and make it colourful and vibrant and make your house stand out from the rest of the homes in your neighbourhood.
Benefits of Landscaping Your Driveway
Besides making your house look more beautiful, landscaping your driveway can lead to some other advantages for you.
Here are a few good things about landscaping your driveway.
- Suitable For The Environment:
Cooler temperatures are supported by trees and grass and serve as barriers against strong wind gusts. Trees intake carbon dioxide and give out oxygen which also helps cool down the environment. They give shade and eliminate glare from the sunlight. They create a barrier to rainwater.
The trees and plants also help filter the air, giving you fresh air.
- Economically Efficient:
It reduces the cost of your heating and cooling expenses by quite a big margin.
- Reduces Pollution:
Trees help reduce the noise and air pollution around your house.
Things To Keep In Mind
Your driveway is a significant aspect of your landscape, as it provides the first view of your house to visitors and neighbours. Your driveway is also the part of the house that gets driven on regularly. That means it needs to be sturdy and practical, in addition to looking pretty.
A well-designed driveway should take your house’s natural setting and your house’s architectural theme into consideration. Additionally, the width and shape of your driveway can influence how open your home is.
There is a range of construction choices for residential driveways that you can select according to what you need and what would look good on your driveway.
Your next choice is to pick the right material based on your budget and pave your driveway.
To survive tyre marks, oil drips and deicing chemicals, the material you choose for your driveway must also be durable enough. You may also want to consider accessories, such as gates and lighting, that make your driveway safer and more appealing.
A Few Tips
Here are a few tips from professionals that will give you the proper landscaping ideas for driveways.
There are four main factors to consider when determining the best driveway layout. The three most common driveway layouts are straight, circular and curved.
Based on your driveways’ configuration, you must purchase the products you will use. Recovered asphalt, tar-and-chip driveways, and stamped and coloured asphalt are the various choices for driveways. These are the various cosmetic alternatives for concrete driveways, including stains, integral colours and design stamping.
You can accentuate your driveway with flagstone, pavers, concrete decorative borders, bands and aprons. It would be best to consider critical variables such as accessibility to pedestrians and vehicles, overhangs, and atmosphere when choosing landscape plants for bordering a driveway.
A Few Landscaping Ideas For Driveways:
Here’s a list of landscaping ideas for driveways to help you make your decision.
The Grand Entrance
Allocate the driveway with matching trees on each side and ensure they are positioned parallel. Use landscape lighting to light up the trees and plants for more drama if you want visitors to know where to park. You can prune your trees to make them look more appealing architecturally and avoid blocking the view while backing up vehicles. This is a fine example of a landscaping design for driveways that accentuate the space and beauty and give your guests a feeling of royalty and grandeur when they pull up in your driveway.
Pots and Plants
Another driveway landscape principle is to use plants to decorate your pavement. The positioning of large pots in strategic positions can make your driveway look a lot more exciting, and the trick is to position them where cars are not going to mess and use containers that are wide enough to see clearly. Small pots would look fussy, and they would be tough to see. However, these bigger pots have a confident presence and appeal which work perfectly.
All Rock and No Roll
You can use rocks to accentuate the spaces around your driveway. It is another means of stopping vehicles from rolling into your gardens. Rocks, particularly when combined with beautiful plants like these evergreens, can be functional and ornamental simultaneously. There are different types of stones you can choose from; you can use big rocks and small pebbles together, paint your pebbles, and have much room for creative expression.
Go Formal
This formal driveway gives your house a sophisticated look which involves low, sheared hedges and topiary shrub. It might look like a lot of work, but it’s not much work with a slow-growing hedge-like boxwood and store-bought topiary shrubs (available at independent garden centres).
Properly pruned hedges that draw lines around your pavement can help accentuate your space and make it look clean and all business while also making a statement that you know what you’re doing.
The Focal Point
Circular driveways not only provide a touch of class as space makes their use, but they also have a functional purpose as they remove the need for backing up your car. A monument is surrounded in this situation by a formally sheared boxwood hedge, which often stops cars from coming too close.
Your centrepiece can be a beautiful sculpture that reminds you of ancient times or a majestic fountain that gives your house that extra grandeur. Tall trees also fit well into the aesthetic here.
With an easygoing ground cover, such as creeping euonymus or periwinkle, you fill the interior and have an enticing focal point. However, these driveways require a fair amount of space, so this one is definitely for you!
Conclusion
Your driveway is an excellent place to attract and draw people’s attention to your house, putting it on show. The style can vary from plain and practical to sweeping curves that appeal to your home and front yard’s overall appearance.