Top Tips On Landscaping For Small Spaces
Just because you have a small space doesn’t mean it can’t look great. In fact, if you’ve ever stepped into a well-designed small home, you’ll often find that it feels much more cozy and homely than other larger homes.
Similarly, when it comes to your outdoor area, with the right elements and proper arrangement, your small space can look cozy and welcoming, with the added benefit of requiring much less maintenance than a larger space.
Here are 6 tips for turning your small outdoor space into a welcoming urban retreat.
1. Know What You’re Up Against
To effectively plan and create a stunning and functional small landscape, you need to know the obstacles you’ll face so that you can effectively plan for and deal with them.
Overcrowding
One of the biggest challenges, or perhaps the biggest challenge with small landscapes, is overcrowding.
Unlike with a larger space where you can easily fit a lawn, a water feature, a seating area, and a patio, and still have space for an outdoor kitchen, you don’t have that luxury with small areas.
When you’re considering what to include in your small area, make sure to be very conscious of the measurements and arrangement, because even just a few items are enough to clutter up a landscape with limited space.
Sunlight Exposure
If you have a small space, there’s a good chance that a decent amount of it doesn’t get as much sunlight as other areas as those areas might be shaded by fences or your home building itself.
With bigger spaces, you could just use that place as a seating area or something like a patio, or even just not use it. But with limited space available, you need to maximize every bit of it, so you have to find a way to make full use of even areas with lesser sunlight.
So these are two extremely common challenges when trying to landscape a smaller space. With that in mind, almost all of these tips deal with those challenges in some way or another, so fret not, there are many ways to overcome them.
2. Vertical Gardens
One of the best ways to maximize space is to grow more plants in the same amount of space with vertical gardens.
A staple in any small garden, when done right, vertical gardens can look absolutely stunning. Vertical gardens can sometimes even outshine larger spaces due to the fact that you have a wall of beautiful plants as compared to barren walls in a larger space.
In fact, in extremely small areas, vertical gardens may be all the plants you have, and that’s perfectly fine. As the term vertical gardens suggests, each vertical garden is a garden in itself and can hold as many plants as a small garden can.
The key to making vertical gardens work is choosing the right plants, which is exactly what we’re covering next.
3. Choosing The Plants
First off, even a bit of clutter can really mess up a smaller space, so you want your plants to all be arranged neatly, especially for your vertical garden. For your vertical garden, they don’t have to be the same variety, but they must all be of similar sizes for each vertical garden structure.
Climbing plants like ivy are also great choices for living walls and vertical gardens.
For the rest of your garden, the last thing you want is for huge plants to fill up your garden quickly, so in order to have more variety, you’ll want to go with plants that are smaller in size or can be pruned to easily remain small.
You’ll also want to have lots of evergreens, because for smaller size landscapes, trying to fit too much color can make the whole place feel cluttered.
4. Dealing With Shaded Areas
There are many ways to deal with spots that don’t get as much sunlight as others. Here’s how to not let them hinder your landscape.
Select Plants That Require Less Sunlight
This is a rather obvious one, but you can simply opt for plants that need lesser sunlight to thrive. It’s not hard to find plants like that, but the challenge is in putting in the time and effort to observe and find the areas with lesser sunlight. Once you’ve found them, it’s really just a matter of using these plants there.
Grow Lights
Another way is to increase the lighting yourself. Grow lights are designed specifically for this purpose and can even be used to grow plants in darker areas like indoors.
However, grow lights need to be connected to a power source, which can be extra costs and work, and the wires may even disrupt your aesthetic. Nevertheless, you may not have a choice if most of your outdoor area is shaded.
Elevate Your Plants
If you have a specific plant that you really like that isn’t shade-tolerant and you don’t want to use grow lights, you can still grow them in shaded spots by using a stand to elevate the pot such that it doesn’t get blocked by any structures.
Make Use Of The Shade
There are many features that actually require shade, so if you already have a spot that is shaded, you can use this shade to your advantage.
One way is to put some chairs or benches and tables and turn it into a nice cool sheltered spot.
Another way is to install shaded sails to enhance the shade and turn it into a spot that’s not only sheltered from sunlight, but also the rain.
5. Space-Saving Structures/Furniture
Ah, what better way to landscape a small space than with space-saving structures and furniture? Talk about stating the obvious.
But seriously, there are many structures and furniture pieces that are pretty ingenious and will help maximize your space.
Here are some examples.
Railings
Railings or bars allow you to hang plants from them. If you’re using climbing plants, then a wall will suffice, but if you’re growing potted plants, you’re going to need railings to hang them on.
Foldable Furniture
Furniture that can fold will take up less space when not in use, helping to declutter your space. These can be anything, from chairs and tables to even sofas.
Seating With Storage
Your seats already have empty space underneath, so why not use them to store things like utensils for your outdoor kitchen, your gardening maintenance equipment, or even shoes?
6. Design Principles
Now for the most important part of all. You can have all the right features and elements, but if you don’t put them in the right places, your space is going to look really disjointed and out of place.
Have A Single Focal Point (Or None)
When planning for limited spaces, trying to create more than single focal point will only lead to there being none.
Focal points are focal points because the features around it complement and draw attention to it. If you’re trying to use limited elements to draw attention to two different focal points, chances are, you won’t have enough complementing features, and the focal points won’t be highlighted enough, or both will be competing for space and clutter up your landscape.
Instead, make sure you’re highlighting only a single feature, whether that’s a water feature, a statement tree, a sculpture of some kind, or even a fire pit.
Alternatively, if you find that you don’t have enough space to work with or you want to fit more plants into your design, it’s absolutely fine to not have a focal point too. Instead, when people walk into your garden, their focus will be on the plant all around them rather than a single element.
Clean Lines And Shapes
Unlike bigger gardens where random shapes and curves are less noticeable or can still fit in nicely as long as the rest of the landscape is neat, for your smaller garden, a single out of place curve is very noticeable.
As such, make very sure that your structures and plants are arranged in clear, distinct lines and shapes. Otherwise, you’ll end up with areas that take up more space than they’re supposed to or eat into other spaces. This then leads to areas that aren’t clearly defined, and just overall a weird landscape where you’re not really sure what the designer (aka you) was trying to do.
Final Tips
At the end of the day, landscaping for small spaces is all about planning. You don’t have the luxury of throwing a bunch of nice water features and sculptures into your landscape to beautify it, so you’re going to have to rely heavily on making everything into your little haven come together like pieces of a puzzle.
Small mistakes are accentuated due to the fact that everything can be seen at a glance, so again, planning is of paramount importance.
If you’re not confident, don’t be too ambitious. It doesn’t have to be complicated. You can fill your space with more greens, and go the more minimalist route with more open space and less elements.
Unlike with bigger spaces where repeating the same thing throughout can be really boring, since you only have a small area, repeating the same thing throughout actually gives your garden more organization and makes it feel more sleek.
With these tips, you should be well-equipped to transform your small outdoor space into a cozy extension of your home!
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