If you are feeling the urge to redecorate your backyard, but are not sure where to start, here are some suggestions that will hopefully give you some inspiration. All these ideas are based on the principle that variety is best: a mix of colors, shapes, and materials will keep your backyard fresh to the eye and stop you from becoming bored with the sight of it within a few weeks.
1. Use edging on your lawn
A clean, uniformly cut lawn has been a staple of American backyard design for decades, but it can quickly get boring to look at. If you are not quite ready to say goodbye to your lawn for something different (wildflower meadow, anyone?), you can improve your lawn with edging and create some neat-looking flower beds. Edging means surrounding a flower bed with a small steel bar which will keep the soil out of the surrounding lawn and will give your backyard a clean-cut, geometric look. You can also use edging to create straight or curved backyard edges and to delineate the borders between different parts of your backyard, such as a patch of lawn and an area planted with trees.
2. Choose a variety of flowers
Whether you like your flowers in flower beds, on trees, or in planters, make sure you choose ones of many different colors and shapes so there will always be something different and interesting for you to look at. Consulting a seasonal flower chart will help you choose flowers that bloom at different times in the year, so your backyard can look colorful for as long as possible. Remember to include an evergreen or two to give your backyard a bit of color even in the winter; you could even plant a Christmassy plant like holly, yew, or mistletoe and cut a few branches every winter to decorate your house with.
3. Plant some wildflowers
Wild plants get an unfairly bad rep among many backyarders. Who decided that buttercups were unwanted weeds—have you seen a buttercup? Aren’t they some of the most beautiful flowers out there? Making some space in your backyard for wildflowers will give your outdoor space more variety and color, and it will have the enormous advantage of attracting birds, fireflies, bees, and other essential wildlife. With bees and birds endangered, we all need to do as much as we can to limit the destruction of our environment. If you’re feeling brave, you could even turn your whole lawn into a wildflower meadow.
4. Add some bird feeders and birdbaths
Speaking of helping the birds survive, if you add some bird feeders and birdbaths to your backyard, you will be visited by lots of little winged friends, and you can feel like Snow White in the Disney movie! Choose a variety of seeds to attract as many different types of birds as possible, and you could even get yourself a pair of binoculars and a bird guide and keep track of which birds visit your backyard.