Types of Landscaping: A Guide to a Prettier Yard

A yard is more than just a patch of grass around a house. Your yard helps complete your home. It is a reflection of your personal style and an oasis of comfort in a world that is chaotic and stressful.

A lot of people don’t realize just how much they can do to personalize their yard. There are a massive variety of types of landscaping that a homeowner can look at. The trick is finding the right style or combination of styles that will create your perfect, personal environment.

Your yard can be a low-maintenance hang-out spot, a colorful showcase of regional plants, a playground for your kids, a focal point for your gardening hobby, or just about anything else you can imagine. 

In order to create the beautiful yard of your dreams, you need to understand the differences between different landscaping styles. Using that knowledge, you gain better insight into the materials and level of maintenance that your yard will require to reflect your preferences.

Elements of Style

Before diving into different examples of landscaping, it can help to brush up on the elements that are used to make a design come to life. These are essentially the tools a landscape designer will use to make your dream yard a reality.

When most people think of a yard, they picture grass and shrubs. And indeed, those are often (but not always) the elements that tie the entire yard together. They are the foundation upon which every other element stands.

Trees are also very common elements. These can be flowering trees, evergreens, or even palm trees in the right climates. Trees add height, texture, shade, color, privacy, and more. 

Hardscapes are valuable elements that provide structure to your yard and garden. They can be as simple as a pathway to your door or as complicated as a fountain or gazebo.

Finally, planting beds are an increasingly popular piece of design. These can be raised boxes or can be at ground level. They can be used for flowers or vegetables—whatever you want to be a part of your yard.

From the use of these elements, we get the basic parts that create design.

Getting a Grasp of the Basics of Design

When it comes to types of landscaping, it is best to take the time to learn the basics of yard design before diving into specific ideas for your own home. By understanding the building blocks of design, you can better identify the elements you want for your yard.

The different types of landscaping tend to fall into a combination of one or more of four basic styles. It is rare that any yard will adhere completely to one of these four categories, but they lay out the central ideas that coalesce into more specific landscaping styles.

Those four basic styles are as follows:

• Informal: These yards seem like they aren’t designed at all. Plant groupings are kept naturalistic and there will likely not be a straight line to be found anywhere. 
• Formal: These yards are typified by smooth textures, straight lines, plenty of symmetry and very little plant diversity. Everything in these yards has a very specific place.
• Modern: These yards also prioritize straight lines and crisp angles. Look for interesting contrasts in the height and texture of the elements in these styles. 
• Traditional: These yards embrace curved lines and ornamentation as well as the use of flowers and shrubs to provide bright pops of color. 

From these basic styles, a wide range of landscaped lawn styles emerge. You may have a yard that is mostly traditional with a few formal accents or a modern design that embraces the colors of flowers that are more associated with traditional design aesthetics. 

By mixing and matching these types of landscaping, you can find the yard you want. Of course, since landscaping has been around for a very long time, many of these combinations and variations have been developed and named.

Popular Types of Landscaping

None of these styles of landscape design prescribe exactly to any of the four basic landscaping philosophies. They are each a blend of elements that provide unique design identities. Your personal style may match one of these examples of landscaping or they may serve as a jumping-off point for your ideas for your own yard.

Either way, it’s a good idea to familiarize yourself with some of the most popular styles to get an idea of what great types of landscaping look like.

Formal Traditional

When you think of classic English or French landscaping examples, you are probably thinking about Formal Traditional design. These designs are a textbook combination of traditional and formal philosophies.

A Formal Traditional yard will incorporate very ordered rows and lines through the use of boxwood hedges along with straight rows of flowers. These yards will very rarely incorporate decorative grasses, letting your shrubs, trees, flowers, and standard grass provide variations in color and texture.

Often with this style of yard, the goal is to provide a comfortable, ordered outdoor environment that also compliments the house itself—drawing the eye to your home and creating a complete picture for everyone who is lucky enough to see it.

Desert Style

This style of yard is pretty low-maintenance. Instead of using grass as a ground cover, you will most often use gravel. Most commonly, this will be pea gravel or decomposed granite. 

The plants incorporated into this kind of design tend to do well in drought conditions and don’t require as much attention as plants in some other design styles. Most of these plants—like aloe or various species of cactus—do well in a variety of environments. So you don’t have to live in a desert to make this style work for you.

Some Desert designs will rely on naturalistic planting patterns, while others will add a bit more structure to give their yard a more modern look. 

Xeriscape

Similar to Desert style, a Xeriscape yard will not necessarily rely on grass as a ground cover. In Xeriscape designs, plants are used to accent your hardscapes and gravel.

More often than not, the plants used in a Xeriscape design will be native to the geographic region of the home. They provide a clean, organized showcase for some of the most beautiful plants in your area.

Xeriscapes are great for homes where good yard drainage is key. This is because the primary groundcover will be gravel—similar to a Desert Style yard. By using permeable gravel, you ensure good drainage without sacrificing aesthetic beauty.

Meadow Style

When you focus on a Meadow Style yard, your goal is not to have a home surrounded by a wild meadow, but a yard that evokes the colors and feel of running through a prairie without sacrificing the precision of good design.

By planting clusters of flowering plants that change from season to season alongside decorative native grasses, you create a yard that shifts and changes throughout the year to give you slightly different looks depending on the month.

This design is great for someone who loves growing and nurturing flowers as a hobby. Growing and showing off clusters of perennials will make your home stand out no matter the season.

Modern Bohemian

When you talk about mixing and matching, Modern Bohemian style yards really mix and match. This style is all about lounging about with friends, surrounded by lush plant life—either in contained areas or planted in a pseudo-naturalistic mode.

The furniture in your yard does a lot of the heavy lifting in this design type. Finding furniture in many different styles that show unity in color takes the Bohemian aesthetic and makes it modern. More often than not, you will find neutral color palettes in a Modern Bohemian yard.

Rustic Style

A Rustic yard is a tribute to the colors, textures, and overall feel of the natural world. That doesn’t mean that this aesthetic can’t be combined with modern or formal influences. Clean lines and hardscapes can really show off the beauty of naturalistically planted trees, for example.

Using mulch, locally sourced gravel and accent stones, native trees and wood accents, and other textural elements make Rustic Style designs feel like they are a part of the natural world around you. But they are still curated for your maximum comfort and enjoyment.

These Are Just the Beginning

These are only a few examples of different types of landscaping. Some are more traditional, some more contemporary, and others could be classified as modern. They each blend traditional, modern, formal and informal elements to create their look and feel.

There are so many more landscaping themes and design styles that you can explore. From Mediterranean to Tropical to Japanese and more, the styles described above are just the tip of the landscaping iceberg.

All of these styles come with benefits and drawbacks, so how can you best decide on the right type of landscaping for you?

Work With Experts

Even if you already know exactly what you want your yard to look like, the chances are good that you do not have the tools or know-how to make the image in your head into a reality. And if you mess up your DIY landscaping project, fixing it is going to be difficult and expensive.

So it’s in your best interest to consult with people who know what they’re doing. Tracer Pool & Landscape has the design expertise and an extensive record of successful installations. 

We can help you make your dreams for a beautiful yard a reality—and we can also help you avoid making mistakes. For example, a Tropical design style with palm trees and so forth may not be the best idea in a region like Minnesota with intense winters. 

But that does not mean that you can’t have a design that evokes the textures, colors, and feel of a Tropical yard, no matter how far north you are. A great designer who understands what plants will thrive in what climates and how these elements can best blend together can accomplish just about anything.

If you don’t take advantage of the experts available to you, though, you can find yourself investing a great deal of time and money into a landscape that will barely last you a year. 

Plan Ahead for Success

No matter what types of landscaping you prefer, the biggest key to creating a beautiful yard is to plan ahead. Use the winter months to strategize and finalize your designs. You may even be able to find some good deals on the elements that you will use in your yard by ordering them in off-season months.

You’re also more likely to secure time with design experts in the off-season with fewer wait-times. Once the planting and installation season gets going in the spring, it can be hard to get as much face time as you’d like with anyone at a good landscaping company because they are out on jobs.

So talk to us as soon as you like to get your ideal designs for your yard figured out and made into a beautiful reality.