As y’all know, I’ve been doing a lot of thinking about landscaping lately. I met with a landscape designer last week, and I got an email yesterday from him saying that he has our plan just about finished. So I’ll be meeting with him next week to see what ideas he has. In the meantime, I’ve become a bit obsessed with two particular sources of landscape design inspiration, and I wanted to be sure that you know about them if you’re looking for inspiration for your own landscaping.
Over the last two weeks, I’ve been binging videos on the Garden Answer YouTube channel every single chance I get. I cannot get enough of this woman’s landscaping! Never in my life would I have thought that I’d sit and watch an hour-long video tour of someone walking through their landscaping and explaining all of the details, and yet, here I am doing just that. And I can’t get enough. I’ll share a few screenshots of her June Garden Tour to give you an idea of what her videos look like.
The woman’s name is Laura, and the landscaping around her home is absolutely gorgeous. But I love that it’s still a work in progress, and she has quite a bit more to do. In her videos, she shares the process of picking plants, explains why she picks what, and then explains why she puts certain plants in certain areas.
She uses such a beautiful combination of plants, hardscape, and decorative garden items like fountains. She’s obviously been doing this for a long time because she’s very knowledgeable, while at the same time, she’s still learning as she goes.
I’m continually impressed by her vast knowledge about the plants that she has planted all around her two-acre lot. She can rattle off the names of the plants effortlessly. It’s really amazing! And her gardens are what made me really fall in love with the idea of a gravel driveway and pathways. They’re just so charming.
I also love the variety of areas that she has planted. She has lots of landscaped areas that are just supposed to be pretty and inviting, like this gorgeous area below…
But then she also has a fenced off vegetable garden that’s just as pretty as the rest, but actually produces food for her chickens and her family.
And then there’s the chicken coop with beautiful plants around it, and other beautiful gardens that you can stroll through and enjoy just for their beauty.
And then she has another area with beds where she plants berries (blackberries, I think), and then she has this large area specifically for a cut flower garden.
Speaking of which, she also creates some gorgeous cut flower arrangements, so those are fun to watch as well.
So if I had to choose my absolutely favorite, the Garden Answer YouTube channel would be my choice. I could seriously watch her videos all day long.
The Bobby K. Designs YouTube channel is my favorite for very practical information like, “How much is that going to cost?” Bobby is an actual landscape designer, and he takes real world homes and does these wonderful mock ups using whatever computer program he uses. I love actually watching the process as he takes a plain yard and starts creating his design on the mock up. He explains the process, and why he’s choosing certain elements. I also really like that he does mock ups of homes all around the country so that you can see what will work where.
Here’s a screenshot of one house before he did his mock up.
And then using his program to do the mock up, this is the design he came up with.
What I also really appreciate about his videos is that he gives actual estimated costs depending on if you want to DIY the project, or if you want to hire someone to do the installation for you. You can see on the screenshot above that it has the DIY estimated cost, where the one below has the estimated cost for a company like his to install it.
Here’s another example that he did, starting with a home with no landscaping at all…
After designing the house in his program, he started adding landscaping to the lot, explaining why he chose the things he chose.
And then he wrapped it up with an estimated DIY cost…
And then an estimated cost for a landscaping company to install it.
That practical information is so useful for someone like myself who has never done much landscaping at all, and has no clue what to even expect or to budget for projects like this. So if that interests you, check out the Bobby K Designs YouTube channel.
Those are my two favorite go-to landscaping inspiration resources right now. Any time I have some downtime, I head to YouTube and search one of these two channels for a video I haven’t watched yet. I love the inspiration, and I’m so anxious to get started on our landscaping!
If you have any go-to resources for landscaping inspiration, please share them! I’d love to add more to my current very short list of go-to landscaping inspiration sources.
Sidenote: Y’all, I’m so sorry about all of the technical difficulties with my blog this week! It’s been kind of a nightmare with my blog going down about 30 times a day, and my website host not being able to figure out what was causing the problem (and really not putting much effort into it, according to the emails they were sending me). I had my website switched over to a new website host yesterday. They are awesome, very hands-on, and I’m pretty sure everything is working smoothly again. I still don’t know why the comment section looks so crazy with that ugly font, but that’s the least of my worries. I’ll figure that out eventually.
Addicted 2 Decorating is where I share my DIY and decorating journey as I remodel and decorate the 1948 fixer upper that my husband, Matt, and I bought in 2013. Matt has M.S. and is unable to do physical work, so I do the majority of the work on the house by myself. You can learn more about me here.
I hope you’ll join me on my DIY and decorating journey! If you want to follow my projects and progress, you can subscribe below and have each new post delivered to your email inbox. That way you’ll never miss a thing!
