If you’re not especially green fingered, or even interested in gardening and landscaping, then you may have just left your front or back yard in a kind of minimum acceptable standard: clean paving stones, grass kept short, and that’s it. It’s neat, tidy and doesn’t bother anyone, so that’s fine, isn’t it? No, it’s not.
If you’re living in Victoria and not taking advantage of professional residential landscaping services in Melbourne, then you’re missing out on a raft of incredible advantages for your home and property. But what are these advantages? Let’s take a closer look.
Table of Contents
1. Providing Shade and Keeping the Home Naturally Cooler
One of the biggest and most immediate benefits of good landscaping is the planting of trees and other vegetation that provides natural shade both for your outdoor and indoor spaces. If placed correctly, especially on the south and west side of your property, you can get temperature drops in your attic by 15-20 degrees, not to mention lowering glare through your various windows.
The added benefit to natural cooling of course is that you can run the air conditioner a lot less during the summer months, which also brings financial savings to your household bills. In whatever degree you landscape your interior, provided there is grass and/or trees, you’ll be reducing the ambient temperature around your home because concrete and asphalt, of course, does a lot to increase it.
2. Benefits the Surrounding Environment
The trees you plant as well as other vegetation including your lawn grass is contributing to our everlasting battle against excessive carbon in the atmosphere. If a neighbourhood of residential properties is well landscaped with the right kinds of trees and vegetation, these beautiful additions won’t just look nice, but will actively contribute to a better environment. The trees also help to keep the soil tied together, preventing soil erosion, which is important if heavy rains are on the horizon.
Besides preventing soil erosion, trees help to prevent various sediments and other contaminants in stormwater from running into local drinking water supplies. They are a kind of natural buffer that helps deal with the water like a filter, taking on the more harmful elements to us humans.
3. Improves Property Value
If you have in mind that you might sell your property one day, perhaps after retirement, for example, then you would surely be interested in the fact that adding great landscaping can do wonders for the property value. Obviously, how much impact it can have depends on the marketplace, but in a very outdoors-friendly location like southern Australia where people like to spend time outside, good landscaping can bring anywhere from a 5 to 12 percent increase in overall property value. That’s a big difference that should see a good return on investment to get the job done.
4. Gives a Property More Curb Appeal
Besides the financial benefit of landscaping when it comes to selling, we also can’t ignore the obvious aesthetic attraction that comes with good landscaping in a home. When a property looks nice — has “curb appeal” — you can sell it faster if that’s your aim, but you can also just experience the sheer joy of living in a better-looking property, and a more attractive neighborhood. Everyone benefits and you’ll likely be a reason everyone feels better about where they live.
5. Boost Your Quality of Life
Landscaping isn’t just about beautifying your home’s outdoor spaces but also building more functionality and living value into them. Imagine creating space in your new outdoors for a vegetable or herb garden where you can grow your own produce, or a play area for the children, a water feature that helps generate a sense of relaxation…the possibilities are endless.