Beautify Your Driveway With Landscaping

Your driveway is an often overlooked aspect of your home's curb. The patch of land that leads to your garage is not defined by its functionality alone. Create a beautiful and welcoming driveway with border landscaping through a company like Oliver's Landscaping & Garden Service, LLC filled with flowers and grasses.

Flowers for Landscape Edging

The first step to beautifying your driveway is with color in the edging. Flowers add the most vibrant splashes of color. While almost any flower is suitable as a driveway border, the key is to select flowers that won't sprawl out and mar the outline of your driveway. The following flowers work well as border plantings:

• Alyssum: This annual flower features tiny white, pink, cream or lavender flowers. Alyssum grows up to three feet and is suitable for cool, moderate and warm climates.
• Geranium: Geraniums are hardy and suitable even in cold climates, though they require at least partial sun. This perennial grows up to three feet and blooms for long periods of time.
• Sedum: You can almost never go wrong with sedum, a flower that comes in dozens of varieties and colors. Sedums grow up to three feet and can withstand even cold temperatures.
• Snapdragons: These beautiful flowers actually like cooler weather. They grow as tall as eight feet and offer blooms in green, white, orange, red and pink.
• Petunias: Petunias are known for being nearly fool-proof. They grow up to eight feet, don't mind inclement weather and offer many colors of blooms.

Ornamental Grasses for Edging

To create a truly attractive driveway border, mix the colors of your flowers with the texture of ornamental grasses. The following ornamental grasses mix well with flower borders:

• Feather reedgrass: This popular ornamental grass grows up to eight feet and somewhat resembles wheat. This grass is known for maintaining its attractive look even in cold weather, making it a good pick for any climate.
• Little bluestem: If you think grass can't be pretty, you probably haven't seen little bluestem.  This hardy prairie grass is resplendent in gray-green blades that transform to orange, red and purple in the autumn.
• Fiber opticgrass: This funny little plant is often utilized in containers, but its attractive spray would work to hide the awkward stems of taller plants. It only grows up to six inches.
• Purple millet: If texture is your goal, then purple millet is your grass. This tough plant grows up to five feet of burgundy and purple foliage topped by fuzzy cattails.

Sample Border Design

When designing your border, keep in mind the colors, textures and heights of the plants. Tall plants go in the back, of course, and shorter plants fill in gaps. Use a stone or brick border to keep the front plants from encroaching your paving.

Try the following border design for a mid-length driveway:

• Plant a row of white snapdragons in the back.
• Intersperse two or three feather reedgrass plants with the snapdragons.
• Plant a row of two-tone purple petunias.
• Intersperse three or four little bluestems.
• Add Anglelina sedum between the petunias and the front row.
• Fill in the spaces in the front with fiber optigrass.

The above design features complementary colors of purple and yellow with the balancing white. The grasses not only add texture, they also ensure the border looks attractive year-round.

Update a plain driveway with attractive landscaping. Select plants that frame your pavement while complementing each other. Beautifying your driveway adds curb appeal to your whole home.