A beautiful rain garden design will enhance the pleasure that people feel in their homes. The family room with a big screen television might be a wonderful room, but a rain garden design in the yard will be a very special place. A yard established with this type of design will provide a great place for meeting with friends and family.

A rain garden design in the backyard will be full of life and vibrant color. Your Yard will become the envy of all your friends who will probably want to know how you managed such a beautiful rain garden design. Most rain garden designs are the specialty of dedicated gardeners.

Dedicated gardeners do not go to the nurseries and choose the latest sale item to throw into the backyard. These people think long and hard about a design for their gardens. They are very familiar with the most popular designs, and they decide which of these designs will be best for the space they garden. The rain garden has special characteristics. Many of these dedicated gardeners choose the rain garden design for the special qualities involved.

A Rain Garden Design Makes Great Use Of Natural Resources

A rain garden design is structured to make the best use of natural resources especially water. A rain garden should be good news for those paying the water bill. This bill should be substantially reduced by those with a rain garden for their landscapes.

This type of garden is carefully planned and constructed to capture as much water as possible for use to nourish the plants in the garden. The properly constructed rain garden design should capture water that has run off the roof or gutter of a house.

A properly planned rain garden design should also help to eliminate some of the waste that runs off the soil into fresh water sources. The plants and the soil in this type of garden are carefully planted to keep waste and pollutants from causing the damage that they often do in other gardens. Therefore a rain garden should not be located too close to buildings because this could damage these structures.

These gardens must be carefully placed to capture the water. A rain garden should be placed where the plants will get plenty of sunshine. The sunshine is necessary for the growth of the plants in a rain garden. A beautiful rain garden design will add so much beauty to a home, and those people who would like to establish a garden should look carefully at using this design.

Designing a water garden is fun and easy, it can be created by a person or by a professional landscaping company. A water garden design should factor in the space allowed, the plants desired, and the climate of the area the garden will grow in.

Digging A Hole

Making a water garden in one’s back yard begins by digging a hole in the ground. When planning the dig, gradually slope the sides to allow different plants optimal growing conditions. Some water plants flourish in deeper water and others are suited for shallower water.

Some water garden designs will begin with a shelf for plants that enjoy one foot of water or less and from that point the pond will slope to around eighteen inches and the deepest point over twenty-four inches deep. This will allow for a variety of plants to be grown in one water garden.

Choosing Pots

A water garden design should be planned similarly to a container garden because that is essentially what a water garden is. One difference is the type of pots needed for water gardens, water garden plants will do best if they are fabric pots which allow the water to flow freely around the soil and the roots.

Also even the smallest water plants will need a pot at least ten inches wide to allow the water plants room to grow. Water garden designs should figure places for pots to be placed to allow the particular plant the most sun, water depth, and soil that it needs to be healthy and thrive. Some plants will need the long “window box” type of plastic planters to allow the plant room to grow.

If fabric pots are unavailable or undesired plastic pots will also work well for water garden designs. The pots can be placed on cinderblocks while young to encourage them to grow faster and lowered slowly as the plant matures.

Choosing The Types Of Plants

There are too many beautiful water plants to talk about each in detail; however there are some general buying guidelines to follow when selecting appropriate plants for the region in which one lives. The United States is divided into ten climate zones; these zones are based on the date which there is no longer a risk of frost for that year.

Water plants labeled tropical will only do well in extremely hot conditions; they prefer the very edge of Florida, Texas, and southern California. Most other areas even in the south will not have consistent favorable temperatures for enough of the growing season.

Plants labeled hardy will grow in most areas of the United States except for extreme climates such as Alaska and a few other pockets of the country. Hardy plants are ideal for most peoples water garden designs as there is a large variety of plants that can suit anyone’s taste.

Most people who own a yard will do not much more with it than mowing it now and than and making it tidy. Especially during our working life the yard usually needs to take as little time as possible. Unless gardening is your hobby or you have some extra time on your hands because you are retired for example, the yard stays a boring piece of land around your house. However this is not necessary, with some good landscaping designs you can make a real garden from this land and it does not need to take you much time at all.

Where to start with landscaping designs?

First of all you need to know where you should start with getting some good ideas for that boring piece of land around your house, the best thing you can do is take a bike and start by looking around in your own neighborhood, are there yards or gardens that you like? What did your neighbours do that catches your eye, what kind of greens did they use, what kind of flowers, do they have slopes or structures you could copy. Make notes when you move around with your bike. Looking at how your neighbors are doing it is a good way to get some ideas but you should not emulate their designs.

The next thing you need to do is to look at your own yard and see how the sun is moving through it and where the shade is during the day. Where you would like your sitting area and where you would like a pool, if you have space for a pool. And there are much more of these things you can visualize in your mind. There is however a limit to your imagination, the plants you imagine need to be able to grow in your climate and this is something you can also see in your neighbours gardens, what plants do you see that do extremely well in your climate and which ones do you like?

Let your imagination flow

There are some elements in landscaping that are popular with many people, for example in many yards you see trees with circular flowered borders under them and if you think this would be a nice element for your own yard you need to think about the place where it would be in your design, is it sunny enough, are the flowers you would like to use suitable for shade of the tree, and will they grow on the root system of the tree?

You should also think about trees and bushes, these are the most important feature points in a garden and you need to plan exactly where they need to go, you need to think about how big the trees will be and in how many years. You need to know if the trees and bushes need to be pruned and when this needs to be done. And you need to ask your self if the amount of work they require is possible for you. But bushes and trees are very important for structure, shade and privacy so they are something you should do some research about.

For more information about landscaping design and all the things you should think about before you get your hands dirty you can read about it on hour site, there are many tips about landscaping, (organic) gardening, low maintenance gardening and much more.