We accomplished a lot this past year at Salisbury Landscaping, servicing our clients and all of their landscaping needs. Moving into 2023, we’d like to share some of our favourite trends from 2022 to help take your landscape to the next level in the new year. We hope you’ve been planning something exciting for your garden already, but if you’d like a bit of help and inspiration from our top-notch landscape designers, read on!
Our Favourite Topics of 2022
This past year, we spent a lot of time getting people excited about creating meaningful outdoor spaces. Here are a few of our favourite ideas from 2022 for creating the perfect outdoor sanctuary:
- Design with Earth-based Materials: Biophilic design is such an important design concept, and so we fully encourage its exploration in both indoor and outdoor spaces. Biophilia is about connecting with the natural world by incorporating natural elements instead of synthetic materials. For the garden, this means that we like to see clients choosing earth-based products and anything old, repurposed, and eco-friendly.
- Xeriscaping: Take water-wise gardening to the next level with a yard that requires no water with xeriscaping! Use gravel to create a walkway, entryway, firepit area, or garden bed to develop a truly amazing landscape design that is eco-friendly and has a refreshing alpine aesthetic.
- Slope Management: Retaining walls make for some of the most prominent features in many garden landscapes. Installing a retaining wall is a great way to add depth, height, and visual interest to your outdoor space and manage steep slopes. Look for inspiration in and around your neighbourhood, and pay attention to grading, foundation, and—of course—the permits and zoning bylaws when doing any landscaping that involves a retaining wall. If you work with Salisbury Landscaping, we’ll take care of these for you.
Inspiration for a New Landscape
Get your new year going in the right direction by incorporating some of these elements into your new garden landscape. You might already have some of these ideas in place, but if not, be sure to consider them for 2023 based on what is trending for landscaping:
- Water Features: Whether you’re interested in developing an eco-friendly landscape or just hoping to attract some new wildlife to your space, a water feature is a great creative challenge and peaceful addition to any garden. A water bubbler in your garden or patio also provides calming sights and sounds, promoting relaxation and stress reduction.
- Eco-Friendly Elements: Look for ways to add some more eco-friendly features to your new landscape design. Choose drought-friendly trees, shrubs and other plants to decrease water usage, and collect rainwater as much as possible. Using natural materials in your garden landscape is another wonderful way to keep things clean, and adds charm to any garden design.
- Retaining Walls: Yes, again! We know we’ve already talked about retaining walls, but there is no better way to elevate a plain old yard into a perfect paradise. Retaining walls can add so much texture, layering, and dimension to a garden that it’s still one of our best design elements, so level up this new year with a wall or two! You can even have retaining walls without a slope by using wall blocks to make raised planters.
- Pocket Forest Gardening: The pocket forest is a concept first dreamed up by Japanese botanist Dr. Akira Miyawaki in the 1970s and is exactly what it sounds like—a mini forest! Great for small urban areas, a pocket forest contains all the elements you would find in a real forest, and is thus its own ecosystem right in your backyard. It’s very similar to native planting, or naturalization!
- Permaculture: We are all well aware of the rising costs of food and the current unpredictability of resources, so this is a great time to think about growing your own food and incorporating some garden beds into your overall landscape design.
We hope you already have some great ideas for your new garden and landscape design in the new year, but if not, we would love to help you with some new landscape inspiration and planning. It’s been a great year for the garden, but 2023 is the year to make your dream garden come true, so stop by Salisbury Landscaping in Sherwood Park, AB, for more ideas, inspiration, and advice!
