The RX-8

GARDENING
Landscaping
driveways
for curb
appeal
Nothing is less inviting than a
bare concrete driveway as an
entrance to your property.
With the need to
accommodate more cars
than ever, the nation’s front
gardens are fast becoming
ugly old parking spaces. But
you can do better than that,
even in a small space.
The entrance to your driveway is also the
entrance to your home as a whole. How your
driveway entrance is landscaped sets the
tone for the viewer’s perception of your
home. This is especially so when a property
is bordered by a fence or wall, which focuses
even more attention on a boring driveway.
Driveways are a necessity in front gardens
but they do have a tendency to dominate the
area. Without some added areas of interest,
a driveway exists as a purely functional scar
running up and down your front garden.
Landscaping with a little creativity can bring
some much needed curb appeal.
Landscaping driveways can consist of both
hardscape and softscape. Hardscape options
consist of walls and fences, while your
softscape options include flower beds,
ground covers, ornamental trees and shrubs -
space allowing.
The possibilities for landscaping driveways
are greatly enhanced if you plan on
including walls. This sets a backdrop for
pots, shrubs and flower borders. Hardscaping
can either parallel the driveway along its
whole length or meet the driveway at the
opening to the road, perhaps with a gated
entrance.
Decide whether the purpose of the
landscaping is to accent the entrance of the
driveway, run the length of the driveway or
44
With a little imagination, you can make your
driveway an attractive front garden feature
rather than an eyesore.
both. Just accenting the entrance can
certainly be cheaper, which is important if
your budget is small and your driveway
large.
Accenting the entrance to your driveway
adds depth to your front garden. It
interrupts a viewer’s gaze from looking
directly at the house. While you can use
softscape to do this, consider the possibility
of theft or vandalism of planting areas close
to the street. Shrubs planted too close to the
side of the road have been known to
disappear or be trampled all over during the
night. A sensible choice would be both a
combination of hardscape to clearly define
your garden boundary with shrub planting
tucked safely behind the wall or fence.
As with any design feature, you should be
thinking about where you would like a
viewer’s gaze to be drawn. This involves
choosing a feature of your property to
emphasise or, indeed, disguise.
An effective budget choice is to plant beds of
colourful annuals along the sides, which will
draw the viewer’s gaze to the final
destination of your driveway. If that
destination is a rather ordinary looking
garage that is in plain view from the street,
then drawing attention to this is not the
best idea. Likewise, if your property is
already dominated by too many straight
lines, then planting your driveway’s edges
with straight flower beds may add to the
severity.
Another useful trick of the eye would be to
complement an accented driveway entrance
with an accented doorway to the house. By
drawing the eye from the landscaping of the
driveway entrance to the front door, the eye
will bypass a boring old driveway. With two
visual points of interest, viewer’s eyes will
feel welcomed twice over.
Block Paving Contractors:
G.P Installations - 01983 617171 - 07831 513616
R.G Dixcey - 01983 526508 - 07814 005840
C.J Construction - 01983 401647 - 07899 930244
Landscape Gardners/Designers:
Tony Ridd - 01983 740067 - 07966 292334
S P Landscaping - 01983 614573 - 07855 820556
Tim Brayford - 01983 551412
Island Life - www.islandlifemagazine.net