Design errors can create a lack of harmony and comfort in your garden. Here are the most common landscape design mistakes.

Not Fitting In With Your Surrounding
Try to generally match your neighborhood. A wild-flower meadow in your front yard might not be aesthetically pleasing if lawns cover the front yards of other homes on your street. Instead, have some lawn or a single species of low-growing groundcover and plant wildflowers closer to the house or in the back yard.

Planting Before Planning
You could design your garden in trial – and- error fashion, digging and moving plants and changing patio and other walk lines as working progresses. But it’ll be a lot easier on your back if you first move the plants and walk lines with pencil and paper.

Installing Plants in a “One of Each” Fashion
Do you have trouble choosing the colours of flowers you wanted and get one or tow of each? This can happen from not planning before planting. The same colours should have been planted together. The bulbs you planted last time should have been massed the same way, at last 10 of the same species and colour together. You have to be strong-willed enough at the garden centre to choose just a few colours and stick to your guns. This holds true for most plant choices.

Installing Plants without Ascertaining Mature Size
It would be great to install a tree or shrub at the size you want. However, plants are dynamic, living, growing entities with a mind of their own. It takes seven to 10 years for shrubs to begin to reach their full potential, longer for tress. Placing plants too close together against the wall of your house (unless you are training it to grow there) can create a maintenance headache and waste costly plant material.

Mulching Beds Too Copiously With Ornamental Bark
People mistakenly think that ornamental hardwood bark improves soil. So in their efforts to enhance the landscape and soil, they pile it higher and deeper. Deep layers or mulch keep air, moisture and nutrients from reaching the roots and kill plants when piled against a tree’s bark. Use bark mulch sparingly to prevent weeds, hold moisture and give a clean, finished appearance to planting beds. Never spread more than a two - five cm layer.

Designing Stairs without Considering Lighting
This is often the least considered aspect of stairs. Light all steps from above without casting shadows that hide the walking surface. Homeowners usually think about how their decks and yards are lit, but not the stairs that get you from one place to another. The best time to see how lighting will look is to check it at night.

Designing “Trip Steps”
People generally do not notice a single step in a path. Where there are slight grade changes you’re better off installing two low steps than one “trip step.” Risers of varying heights in a set of stairs are also a good reason to walk cautiously. The disparities in height will throw users off balance and send them to the ground, even when the difference is barely perceptible. The most comfortable sets of stairs have 16 c, risers and 35 cm treads on each step and at least two and no more than 10 steps without a landing.

Shrubs or Trees Obstructing Visibility at Driveway Entry
Many home owners plant shrubs or trees to mark property entries and create privacy. But if you can’t see 100 meters in both directions from your car before approaching the street, the plantings are making it difficult to see oncoming pedestrians or autos before pulling into traffic. Check your sight line from the driver’s seat while your car is at the entry of your driveway.