23 Landscape Ideas to Inspire Your Backyard Upgrades (2024)

Create a Corner for Relaxation

Carve out a space to relax in the backyard. After all, it's your own personal nature retreat. Hang a hammock between two trees or find a shady nook for a lounge chair, and then grab a glass of iced tea and breathe it all in.

Add a Water Feature

One of the simplest ways to make a space more inviting is with a soft trickle of water. And the best thing about water is the birds it attracts to the garden.

If you're looking for landscape ideas for a backyard with a slope or hill, consider a cascading water feature tumbling downhill.To incorporate a water feature onto a patio or back deck, try self-contained units that don't require any digging.

Build a Fire Pit

There is something about fire that brings people together to share stories and friendships. A wood-burning fire pit, especially, can recreate the campfire experience and add ambiance. While you can invest in an expensive fire feature, a simple ring of rocks also does the trick. Some communities require an elevated fire pit, but they don't need to be complicated either.

Remember to check local regulations regarding outdoor fires, and pay attention to the weather conditions and related burn warnings for your area. Once you've taken all the right safety precautions, you're ready to gather around, roast marshmallows, and make cozy memories. S'more, please.

Take Advantage of Containers

Make the most of a small backyard by adding containers to empty spaces. If you live in a desert climate, or an area with heavy clay or rocky terrain, container gardening can help you overcome challenging soil conditions and bring more plant life to your space.

Use container plants to soften hardscapes, brighten a dark corner, or make an open area more private. Think about lining a stairway with potted trees or hanging baskets from a porch overhang, whatever way you can to turn lemons into lemonade.

Build a Rock Garden

Another way to overcome challenging planting sites is to build a rock garden. It provides a way to stabilize a slope or hillside while creating a unique planting environment. In places with poor soil, rock gardens lift plants out of the native soil, improving drainage. In desert climates, well-placed rocks add interest to minimally planted slopes.

Keep Things Simple

When you think about good landscape design, you might imagine a vibrant mix of plants in different colors, sizes, shapes, and silhouettes, but it doesn't have to be that complicated. Single-species plantings can be just as attractive and interesting as more dramatic combinations. This sedum planting, for example, brings plenty of visual intrigue to a hot desert garden or a Midwest backyard, and it's a breeze to maintain.

Use the keep-it-simple mantra for landscaping on slopes or hillsides, too. Rather than a design with a wide variety of plants, opt for mass plantings of soil-stabilizing plants that provide a fuss-free option to manage erosion.

Create a Shady Oasis

If you live where there's year-round sun, create a shady oasis where you can escape the heat while still enjoying the outdoors. In this Arizona backyard, courtesy of AZ Plant Lady, a palo verde tree provides much-needed shade in the day, and overhangs a simple fire pit for evening gatherings.

If you live where trees are scarce or your plantings are still young, consider building an arbor or hanging windsails for shade. When possible, make use of built structures to provide shade by placing seating areas on the north or east side of your home, walls, and fences.

Include Space to Play

Avoid the "all work and no play" mentality by purposefully creating room for fun in your backyard, and it doesn't need to be excessive. Take the classic DIY route and attach a tire swing to a sturdy tree, invest in a jungle gym or trampoline to keep kids entertained, or transform a gravel path along the side yard as a bocce ball court. Imagination is key here and fun is the goal.

Add Color with Hardscape

In many climates, flowers don't bloom year-round, but you can still create design interest in the backyard by incorporating colorful containers, fountains, chairs, and other bright elements. In this desert garden, painted hardscape adds vibrant color and provides a backdrop to a diverse palette of plant material.

Break Up the Space

Designers love to use the concept of "hide and reveal" in the landscape. The basic idea is to break up views so that you can't see the entire landscape from a single vantage point. It's like the opposite of an open-concept floor plan, but for outdoors, where garden visitors experience different elements as they walk through.

You can implement this idea by using large shrubs, tall grasses, and even hardscape materials to break up the view along a curving path. This strategy also calls for dividing your yard into different "rooms," creating a distinct area for grilling or eating, another for playing, and perhaps another for relaxing or sitting around the fire.

Light Up the Night

The addition of outdoor lighting to your backyard extends its use into the night and considerably ups its cozy factor. In the heat of summer, evening is often the best time to relax outside.

Outdoor lighting options abound—from footpath lights to hanging lanterns to soft-white, Christmas-style strings—and can be installed as temporary or permanent fixtures. Look for solar-powered lighting for the quickest, easiest solutions, and don't overlook spotlights that target your yard's best features so you can enjoy them after dark.

Focus on the Floor

Just like they do indoors, rugs help define a space, add color, and up the cozy factor to any outdoor area. Speciallydesigned to stand up to weather and wear, outdoor rugs are ideal for exposed or high-traffic areas and are oh-so-easy to clean.

Use an outdoor rug to freshen up a tired-looking or cracked cement floor, bring attention to an overlooked space or garden feature, or add a pop of color near an all-too-green hedge.

Build-in Privacy

It's hard to relax among noisy neighbors, gawking walkers, and uninvited onlookers. To create a private space to unwind, you might assume that fencing off yourentire backyard is the only answer, but think small.

Designate a secluded area within your backyard as your sanctuary, and then isolate it using outdoor curtains, screens, plants, or even...a fence. Consider a vertical gardenof fragrant herbs, easily accessible salad greens, or attractive flowers that offers privacy, color, and vertical interest.

Embrace Curves

Yes, a straight line is the most direct route from here to there, but a curved line evokes an intriguing journey. In your landscape, a straight path conveys a sense of order and formal crispness, while a curved path adds unexpected interest and implies informality.

Paths aren't the only feature that can be softened by curves. Think about giving curves to backyard edging, decking, cement patios, and the tops of fencing. For example, instead of trimming hedges with a flattop, consider soft undulating waves.

Tame a Slope With Terracing

Just because you have a sloped backyard, it doesn't mean it can't be useful. Terracing can tame an unyielding slope, turning it from terrifying to beautiful and relaxing. Having extra height and different levels creates intrigue in your landscape, and helps to differentiate various "rooms" in your backyard.

The use of natural materials for terraced walls—stone, rocks, or timber—makes terracing look like it's meant to be there. Embrace the slope by incorporating a waterfall, sliding board, or stone staircase that's practical and provides vertical interest.

Build Raised Beds

Whether your backyard is big or small, building raised beds is a great way to delineate vegetable or flower beds from the rest of your space. They can serve as borders for adjacent outdoor spaces and add geometric interest with rectangular, triangular, and even circular shapes.

Raised beds come with many advantages:

• They prevent most weeds, and the ones that do pop up are easier to remove.
• Plants are closer to eye level and provide easy access for harvesting and pruning. (No more squatting or bending over!)
• You can fill them with nutrient-rich soil, regardless of whatever problem soil your backyard may offer.
• They prevent invasive plants (like mint or bamboo) from conquering their neighbors, and likewise, keep lawns from overtaking the beds.

Create a No-Mow Area

Have a corner or slope that's hard to access with a lawn mover? Make it a no-mow area by planting it with a low-growing ground cover. Clover and creeping thyme are just two examples of grass alternatives that require no mowing.

You can transplant seedlings from the garden center for a small area, or plant seeds for a larger one, similar to the way you'd plant grass seed for a new lawn. Just make sure the ground cover you choose is appropriate for the area's condition in terms of sunlight, soil type, and drainage.

Designate a Wildflower Meadow

If you love birds, bees, and butterflies, but love low maintenance even more, a wildflower garden is for you. The trick is to plant it with varieties that are native to your area, where they'll naturally thrive and re-seed year after year without you lifting a finger. Most wildflowers need full sun, so the sunnier the spot, the better.

The hardest part of a wildflower garden is starting one. The area should be completely clear of grass and weeds, or they'll overrun the wildflowers and you'll end up with a wild weed-and-grass garden. Once established, a wildflower meadow brings color, pollinators, and year-round interest to your backyard with very little effort on your part.

Create a Backyard Color Palette

Just like you select a color palette as a basis for a room design, consider the same for your backyard. Here are a few strategies for selecting a color palette for your backyard:

• Play off your interior color palette. A color scheme that's the same inside and out makes for a seamless transition between indoor and outdoor spaces. They don't have to be identical, but at least aim for color harmony.
• Mimic your environment. For example: For a Spanish-style home, you may want to evoke hot Mexi-colors, but if you're near the beach, you may choose more subtle aqua and sand colors. Accentuate the natural hues of your area—whether you're in the Southwestern desert, Midwestern plains, or the tropics.
• Factor in the effects of sunlight and shade. In areas of intense UV exposure, colors will inevitably get washed out, so start out bright and bold. In shady areas, colors appear more subdued than they do in bright sunlight.
• Allow color to enhance the size of a space. Just like indoors, light colors make an outdoor space seem larger, while dark colors make it feel smaller. In your backyard, choose light shades to visually enlarge small spaces, and dark shades to make a large space feel cozier.
• Consider how colors affect temperature. Lighter colors reduce the amount of heat absorbed into materials throughout the day, while dark colors absorb heat from the sun and radiate it back after dusk. Keep this in mind for backyard areas you use mostly during the day or at night, and use color to help cool down or warm up a space.

Go Native With Plant Selection

You shouldn't have to work longer to maintain your backyard than you play or relax in it. and plant selection has a lot to do with how much effort it takes to care for your backyard. The smart way is to align your landscape with its environment.

For example, a grass lawn in a desert climate requires a lot of time and expense (if your HOA even allows it anymore). Instead, plant cacti and succulents that are happy in 100-plus-degree weather without rain for weeks at a time. If you must have a lawn, carve out an area to lay artificial turf, which has come a long way since Astroturf.

Consider Xeriscaping

Xeriscaping is a low-maintenance gardener's dream. Its main focus is the conservation of water, but its side effect is a landscape that's easier and less expensive to maintain. While popular in the desert, xeriscape principles can benefit backyards nationwide.

Xeriscaping can take many forms, from a simple idea like grouping plants with similar watering needs, to a more drastic measure like eliminating lawns altogether in favor of a landscape featuring drought-tolerant plants surrounded by rock mulch.

Create a Rain Garden

Does your backyard have a depressed area that gets soaked with runoff after a rainstorm? Make that area work for you by turning it into a rain garden. Certain native flowering perennials and grasses thrive in such conditions and, besides turning an occasional muddy bog on your property into a thing of beauty, a rain garden offers other benefits.

A rain garden reduces runoff from your property by capturing rainwater and allowing it to slowly permeate into the soil, where you want it. It also helps filter out pollutants in runoff while providing food and shelter for butterflies, songbirds, and other wildlife.

Mulch Vociferously

Mulch is a landscaper's best friend: It's inexpensive, visually attractive, good for plants, good for soil, and—most importantly—weeds despise it. Mulch comes in many different forms—wood chips, compost, rocks or pebbles, plastic sheets, recycled tires, and even shredded paper and cardboard—and there's a place for each type.

The best reason to use mulch in your backyard is to smother weeds, and the thicker the mulch layer, the more lethal it is to them. Fewer weeds mean less competition and more nutrients for your landscape plants and less work for you to pull the weeds out. Natural forms of mulch, like bark or compost, also nourish the soil as they break down, feeding your plants with essential nutrients.