No matter how beautiful your landscaping is, there’s always room for improvement. Creating a beautiful and healthy yard is a year-round task, so here’s how to ensure your landscaping is a winter wonderland this holiday season.
Ways to Transforming Your Outdoor Space into a Winter Wonderland
Fall and Winter Maintenance
The best way to guarantee your lawn looks like a winter wonderland this holiday season is to keep it clean. It’s impossible to overstate the importance of a well-manicured yard, from an aesthetic standpoint and in terms of your lawn’s overall health. Fall and winter are the messiest times of year for lawns, with fallen sticks and leaves creating ugly, grass-smothering conditions. It’s important to note that leaves aren’t just a fall inconvenience — they can damage your lawn and other plants in your landscaping.
So, if you want your front yard to be a winter wonderland, fall and winter cleanup is critical. Staying on top of the rapidly falling leaves can be a challenge on your own, but performing regular raking or leaf blowing can help keep the leaf piles to a minimum. If you’re having trouble managing your fall and winter cleanup, landscaping companies like The Parke Company offer winter landscape maintenance services that include leaf and stick removal. Nobody loves spending their fall weekends raking, so why not get help from the experts? Besides having specialized tools that enable much more efficient leaf removal, The Parke Company landscapers can also perform other maintenance on your property.
Your landscaping depends on each component being healthy within the ecosystem, and your trees are especially important. It’s not easy to get your lawn looking like a winter wonderland, but one important aspect is tree pruning. Pruning trees and shrubs is critical to keeping your lawn looking its best, and your tree health can be greatly impacted by whether pruning is done, and how it’s done.
The best time of year to prune trees is the winter, for a few important reasons. Arborists, or tree surgeons, want to look at the tree in its full glory in order to assess for damaged limbs. Without leaves, a tree is laid bare and can be easily visually inspected. There is a wrong way to remove a branch or branches from a tree, and doing it incorrectly can actually harm a tree much more than help it. In the winter, trees are dormant, not expending their limited resources and energy on anything but surviving. Since pruning a tree is traumatic for trees, they need to have enough energy to devote to healing. Unlike in spring and summer, your trees are not using energy to grow new leaves and buds, so winter is the perfect time for them to focus on healing.
Well-manicured trees are more than just aesthetically pleasing — they’re also more prepared for winter weather. The weight from snow can cause fallen limbs and branches to clutter your yard or even damage vehicles and property. By removing these limbs before the winter weather can happen, you eliminate that concern.
If you have an irrigation system for your lawn, how you care for it can greatly impact its longevity. Each fall, as the weather cools, it’s important to perform several maintenance steps to winterize your irrigation system. Freezing temperatures can cause water in improperly drained sprinkler systems to freeze and expand, destroying sprinklers and pipes. Avoid costly repairs this spring to your irrigation system by ensuring it’s properly winterized.
Winter Hardscapes
Installing Christmas winter wonderland yard decorations can be a hassle without proper equipment and experience. From holiday lighting to lawn decor and a yard’s overall decoration design, things can get pretty complicated. Landscaping companies like The Parke Company can help more than you think, from planning to installing holiday lighting fixtures and decor.
But it’s not just lighting and holiday decor that create a wintry landscaping dream. Other hardscapes in your garden can be great for practical purposes as well. Why not install a fire pit for cozy gatherings by the fireside, or a pergola or gazebo for covered outdoor meeting places. Nashville winters are often mild, and spending some time outdoors in a warm and well-themed environment can be a great way to socialize or entertain. Wreaths, garlands, and other decor can also be provided and installed by a landscaping company, so don’t assume your landscaper is limited to more general-use decor and hardscapes. It’s always worth asking what they provide, or whether they can help to install the yard decorations for holidays you’ve purchased on your own. It’s much easier to put lights on a tree using a boom lift than a ladder — trust us.
Holiday Softscapes
Nothing says winter wonderland quite like evergreen trees. The pine tree has been a staple of Christmas decor for centuries, and its aesthetic value can be great year-round. The late fall is the perfect time to plant new trees in your landscaping, and evergreens are popular options for enhancing those holiday aesthetics. When every other tree and plant is bare, evergreens provide a pop of green that your lawn desperately needs.
Evergreens are an excellent choice for winter regardless of whether or not you celebrate Christmas, and their benefits don’t stop at aesthetics. Pine trees provide eco-friendly mulch in the form of their dropped needles. Pine needles can be used to mulch garden beds and around trees, making your lawn more self-sustaining. Evergreen shrubs are just as festive in their appearance as evergreen trees, and they can be pruned and shaped into festive designs by skilled topiarists.
Get in the Holiday Spirit With The Parke Company
No matter what you need to do this winter with your landscaping, The Parke Company has you covered. If you’re ready to begin your yard’s transformation into a winter wonderland, give us a call today for a free consultation and estimate for whatever winter services you need.