How to find landscaping ideas, landscaping pictures and gardening

Each of the following steps plays and equally important role in succesfully designing your landscape:

1. Identify your dream landscape
List every feature you want, no matter how frivilous it seems.

2. Establish a budget
This will determine whether you need to scale back and plan to do some work yourself.

3. Determine your style
What are your tastes?What makes sense for your property?

4. Understand the element of design
Proportion, light, colour, mass and texture are the key concept

5. Develop a concept
Now that you know what you want, you can start to make it a reality.

6. Start planning
Take photographs, make notes, and draw sketches to commit your ideas to paper.

(Erler,C.T.2000 Complete Home Landscaping.New Jersey:Creative Homeowner book)

Here, I'd like to share with some of my experience. On this lens you will find information about:

Palm trees
-Roystonea oleracea
-Livistonia chinensis

Wood bench
-Outdoor wood bench
-Books on woodworking at Amazon

Bamboo fences
-Bamboo privacy fence

Caring for bamboo plants
-Shelter
-Watering and adding soil
-Natural fertilizer
-Shade
-Pruning bamboos

Walls and Fences
-Cast concrete
-Concrete block
-Brick
-Natural stone
-Dressed stone
-Knapped flint

Pergola

Wall Signage

Pictures of places.

It is nice to have palm tree within house yard or anywhere around your home. Palm tree is easy to maintain and it gives good shade if you plan it by following certain ways.

Palm gives a tropical atmosphere that unlike other tree can provide. Unlike landscaping using other trees, landscaping using palm trees have many advantages.The long and slender trunk plus a small canopy spread makes palm an ideal choice of tree to have inside your house yard. Put emphasize at the beginning of planting so that it will grow succesfully.

How to prepare and choose location
There are several factors to be considered when you are going to plant a palm. One of the important aspect is the size of the palm when it grows old or reaches its maturity.

Some palms are very small in nature and some can grow very tall when they grow old.Palms like Raphis humilis is very small, the maximum height when matures is around 100mm, while coconut tree(Cocos nucifera) and Betle nut palm or (Areca catechu) can grow up to very tall height around 90 feet.

Also don't forget to consider how the palm will accommodate itself in the landscape in years to come say 10 or 15 years hence when it reaches maturity.

A big numbers of palms have quite a large canopy spread diameter. Palms planted near to the overhead utility cables can pose danger as its canopy getting bigger and the frond get longer. So, think and plan well.

Also take into consideration where the underground cables and irrigation lines are located. In term of specfication the things that you have to put into consideration prior to planting are:-
1. Overall height(O.H) when reaches its maturity
2. Trunk diameter - avoid planting too close to any object
3. Trunk height - lenght at the beginning of the trunk to the lowest frond

Here are general rules that I find best when it come to plant a palm:

1. Small house yard with 1 storey houses will look exceptionally beautiful without looking overcrowded if you choose medium size to smaller palms. Example of small palms are Manila palm (Veitchia merilli) and Sago palm(Cycas revoluta) Medium size palms are Foxtail palm (Wodyetia bifurcata) and Cane palm (Chrysalidocarpus lutescens)

2. For residential with large open areas , large and tall palms such as Royals, Cabbage, Cocos, Alexanders and Silvers will add an exclusivity look to your home. For your information and to make it easy for you to purchase at your local nursery outlets below are botanical names for the above mentioned palms:

i. Royal - Roystonea regia
ii. Cabbage - Roystonea oleracea
iii.Coco - Cocos nucifera
iv. Alexander - Archontophoenix alexandrae
v. Silver - Bismarckia nobilis

Planting arrangement
There are 3 types of planting arrangement for landcaping using palm trees.
i. Linear
ii.Cluster
iii. Zig-zag

(cont'd)

Roystonea regia is a spesies of palm which is beautiful to be planted.

This palm are famously planted along avenues, path way or in large gardens. The palm is native to the Carribean and its achieve maturity height at about 25 metres tall.

This palm needs full sun light and moderately high percentage of humidity making it most suitable to be planted in tropical zones.

It is also known as the Cabbage palm. It has a larger diameter at the base of the palm and goes smaller as the height increases.

Here the palm are planted along the pathway straight to the horizon.

Here at Orchard Road, Singapore the Landscape architect uses Livistonia chinensis(Chinese fan palm) to enhance the landscape of this lush tropical garden nation city of Singapore.

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1. Shelter

Shelter the bamboo plants from blowing wind.

2. Watering and adding soil
Watering will moistened the soil and add soil that is rich with organic matter.Make sure you get the best of soil mixture. This can be found at nurseries selling soil mixture.

3. Natural fertilizer
Left the fallen leaves of the bamboo to decompose by itself. This will serves as natural fertilizer for the bamboos.

4. Shade
Certain type of bamboos grow very well under the shelter of tree canopy.

5. Pruning bamboos
Prune or remove the new bamboo shoots early in the summer. This will avoid the clumps of bamboo from become too dense. Leave the ones that you choose to mature.

Wall

Function of Wall

1. Wall define the areas or boundaries of the land.

2. Walls wheter internal or external serve as shelter and give privacy to the owner of the land.

3. Wall also act as barriers or buffers to noise,vehicle emission, smoke, wind blow and dust.

4. Wall is also used to support climbing and creeper plants.

Type of walls

1. Cast concrete

a. Various shape and skin texturecan be made by these type of wall.

b. Finishes and patterns created depend on the 'formwork'that contains it during the setting up process.

c. Another way of making pattern or finishing of the wall is by using mechanical tool such as

power drill, carver and sand blaster.

2. Concrete block

a. The come in various sizes from small to the big block of concrete and the texture of the skin can be rough with large pores and large sand granules or fine surface with tiny micro pores and small sand particles.

b. The rough skin texture of the concrete block gives off an illusion of receding view of the wall.

c. You can also change dull or old looking wall into vibrant and lively stucture by using spray texture or splatter pain finish

3. Brick
Brick is a tough, long lasting and have strong resistant to the weathering agent.That is why brick is widely use as walling materials.

4. Natural Stone

Natural stones is something that forms by itself. In other word it is made from the process of the earth thousands, tents of thousands to millions of years ago. You can find natural stone being used in different application of decorating the wall.

Natural stone by itself is formless. The are mined in quarry and then transported to the factory where it began to have its shape. Two commonshapes of natural stone are block and slate. Another thing related to natural stone is not all natural stones share the same hardness.

There are soft sedimentary rocks like sandstone or slate. The other is hard stone like igneous. These igneous stones type are grits, flints and granite. Let us go into the prices of natural stones. The price will become more expensive the farther it travels out from the place it is
being quarried.

Other factor that influence the price of natural stone is the way it is being shaped. The more beautiful the pattern and the more uniquely the stone is dressed, the more expensive the price it has. Now let us go to the types of stones available or commonly used.

4.1 Dressed stone
Try to take alook at historical buildings that uses natural stone and will find out that they look so superb, majestic and sturdy structure. The construction must have been made by very crafted and skilled person so it will last hundreds of years.

4.2 Knapped flint

Knapped flint are stones that has different irregular shapes.It is installed to the wall by setting it in the mortar. For example, this type of stone are laid as complex or irregular patterns in ways that the mortar is hidden beneath or between the flint stones.
This produces a beautiful pattern but time consuming craft work justify the high price charged by the skilled crafter.

Here is pic of wood pergola with decorative stumps made of washed-pebbles. Notice that the creeper plant already covers the top of the pergola. The botanical name for the creeper plant is Lagerstroemia indica.

Take a look at the pergola pictures above.Beautiful isn't it? See that creeper plant there? It's Bauhinia indica. It gives shade to the peoples walking down below.

A tropical plant that is useful for pergolas and trellis.





Can you see the pebble stones laid on the walking path beneath the pergola?
It's river pebbles or stones with variation in colours:white, yellowish, greyish, black and so on. Also it is laid in certain patterns that double as reflexology path. A good way to massage your foot sole.

This wood pergola is fitted with stone bench. The pergola is made of treated hardwood. Look at finishing of the pergola, it is from dark coloured varnish.

The benches are simply made of concrete with light coloured paint finish.

The flooring is brownish red in colour and the deisgner has chosen imprinted finish. The lower part of the pergola columns are decorated with granite tiles with colours of dark gray and brown-ish red.

This picture was taken in Terengganu at the Turtle Information Centre.

Just look at the signage, it's awesomely beautiful! And it goes well with the turtles too! :)

Here you could see a family of cycling tourist passing by the Turtle Information Centre. Family of explorers!They must had been cycling from the nearest town that is 60km away from this place.

Life is more meaningful when you can share the beauty of nature with your love ones.

Here, the designer uses Tower tree or Schizolobium parahybum as the botanical name refers, at the back of the wall. This slender tree can grow to a height of more than 30 metres above the ground.

Here we could see a wall signage using palm trees as the background scape. Notice that 6 numbers of palm trees of Caryota mitis(Fishtail palm) are used to decorate the background scape.

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These wall signage are erected just before the entrance of the guarded apartment houses.
Simple and cheap wall mosaic are used as the finishing.

This unique wall signage construction material consist of sandstone as the finishing.See that the background of the structure are filled with Roystonea oleracea palm. These planting of palms helps to soften the hard lines generated by the wall signage.
Washed pebbles in size less than 3mm are used as the coping finishes.
Also notice that the automatic barrier post are cladded with sand stones.

Feast your eyes with this picture. Taken at Lake Town Resort in Ipoh, Malaysia. This popular holiday resort also known as Bukit Merah Lake Town Resort.

Notice that at the entrance the deisgner uses Bismarkia nobilis or Silver palm(fan shaped palm leaves) and Heliconia spp to decorate the entrance. This resort are surrounded partially by large mass of lake with clear blue water.

- higher resolution pictures available -