Smart Buying

Go For the Green

Fine landscaping is pleasing to the eye, and to your property value.

By Elizabeth Razzi

From Kiplinger's Personal Finance magazine, September 2003

Is that precious piece of earth upon which your home sits the yard? That's so Wonder Years (or state penitentiary). The lot? That's what the tax collector would call it. The garden sounds so much better. But is your landscape more gridiron than garden?

Transforming turf into a garden is the mission of Washington, D.C., landscape architect James van Sweden. He and his partner, Wolfgang Oehme, are credited with popularizing a naturalistic style of landscaping. Van Sweden has authored a series of how-to picture books for amateurs, the latest titled Architecture in the Garden (Random House, $40), in which he makes a compelling case that our homesteads could stand a green thumb's touch.

"The normal suburban yard in America has no garden," says van Sweden. "It has lawn and a couple of silly bushes. It's totally wasted space."

It's not that we don't lay out enough money. Homeowners paid an average of $466 for do-it-yourself gardening last year, according to the National Gardening Association. Much of that cash went to buy fertilizer to green up the grass that we then paid someone else to mow -- an average of $550 a year.

The grow-and-mow cycle may produce a nice fairway, but it doesn't necessarily translate into a garden that beckons.

High eye-appeal

Aside from the potential boost to the value of your property, improving the landscape around your house affords you greater privacy, enhanced views, and a comfortable place to dine alfresco and entertain guests.

And high eye-appeal doesn't always mean high maintenance. Van Sweden favors low-maintenance gardens, overflowing with a variety of greens and flowering perennials. "Perennials change with the seasons. And after they're established, they always come back." To avoid visual cacophony, he says, draw up a comprehensive plan that you can implement over time. "Decide you're going to exploit the land you have, whether it's a quarter-acre or 50 acres," he says. "Do an overall design so you know where you're going, then build in stages as your budget permits."

You can take several paths to a landscape makeover. You can hire a landscape architect for a design, which may include grading the land, designing walls and stairways, proposing fixes for drainage problems, selecting plants and even suggesting works of art. You would then submit the plan for bids from contractors who would do the work under the landscape architect's supervision. Look for a designer who uses the professional designation FASLA after his or her name, signifying membership in the American Society of Landscape Architects. Members of the society generally charge by the project, not by the hour. (Van Sweden's firm, Oehme van Sweden, is decidedly high-end. Its starting price is typically $100,000.)

A second option is to hire a single firm that will both design a plan and execute it. For example, Wayside Landscape Serv-ices, in Asheville, N.C., charges $75 per hour (plus the cost of drawings, photos and similar paperwork), with a minimum of $200 for the design fee. But the firm rebates up to 5% of the price you pay for materials it installs.

While it's common for owners of high-end homes to plow $10,000 or more into a new landscape, gardeners looking for professional advice on a smaller scale -- or budget -- can find help as close as the local garden center. Many garden retail stores offer design help as well. Merrifield Garden Center, with branches in the Virginia suburbs of Washington, D.C., will design and install anything from ponds with waterfalls to flower beds. But you can also pay $50 per hour for a quick consultation on gardening that you plan to do on your own. And a $50 shot of advice could be enough for some good ideas (without plans) about what to plant around a patio. Merrifield will rebate the fee against your plant and supply purchases once you've spent $500.

Whether you hire a pro or go it alone, give plenty of thought to how you want your garden to unfold. Before you grab a pencil and graph paper (and certainly before you grab a spade), consider van Sweden's advice on how to design a first-rate garden.

Build some privacy. "Start by enclosing the space," van Sweden says. This doesn't mean building a forbidding green fortress around your property -- you want to leave yourself open to nearby views. The general idea is to give your garden some privacy by creating walls. They can be literal walls of brick, stone or wooden fencing, or they can be screens formed by evergreens. But, he says, don't plant one row of a single type of flora. Rather, install waves, or clusters, of different plants so you can "create privacy by layering the screening."

Plan your space. Decide how much room you'll need for outdoor dining and entertaining, and landscape accordingly. Judging scale correctly is a challenge, even for professionals. "Will you have six people, ten, or 30 for dinner?" he asks. "If you think you're going to need 20 feet of terrace, measure 20 feet and lay it out with garden hoses. Take your indoor furniture outside and see if there's enough room," he says. "That's a good way to get a handle on size and proportion." Think big. "The sign of an amateur is designing everything too small," van Sweden says. "Nothing makes a small garden look smaller than small features." His advice extends to the number of plants you put in and the size of their leaves. A favorite plant is the Japanese butterbur, whose giant leaves make it look like a dinosaur-age relic (figure about $20 for a plant that fits in a one-gallon pot).

No matter the garden size, van Sweden suggests buying plants by the dozen to achieve a look of abundance, and use grass as a garnish. "Plant in great masses," he says. If you go small on anything, make it the lawn. "Size the lawn to what you really need, and plant the rest."

Wind a path. "Even with a small, quarter-acre garden, you want to have a way to walk through and maintain it -- and to enjoy the plants close up," says van Sweden. A garden path also helps the view unfold gradually. "Layer the space as you go back, so you feel you want to look further," he says. "You shouldn't be able to see to the back of the garden directly." You could use stepping stones as pavers, or even gravel or mulch.

Set a floor. Choose paving materials carefully when designing your sidewalk, driveway or patio (see the box to the right). Van Sweden recommends using materials that are indigenous or common to your region, such as Pennsylvania bluestone in the Mid Atlantic, and terra-cotta tile in the South and Southwest. Often, says van Sweden, what works in one region won't translate well to another. For example, tiles not only look out of place in a northern location, but also probably won't survive many winters, either.

Focus. If nature didn't give you a feature around which to wrap your landscape, create your own. This focal point could draw your eye from indoors, or it could be the reward at the end of a winding path. It could be a pool or fountain costing thousands of dollars, or it could be a sculpture, a well-built trellis or pergola, or even a specimen tree, such as a Japanese maple ($325 for a four-foot Moonfire variety) or a late-blooming Kousa dogwood ($195 for one that's seven- to eight-feet tall).

Just don't choose all the above -- or your garden will lose its focus. "Three is the maximum number of focal points," says van Sweden. "Even one may be enough. If you put your eggs in one basket, like a pool or fountain, then you really don't need anything else. Give them a whammy with that one, beautiful element."

Makeover | Dramatic Changes Bring the Best Returns

A pleasant bonus to any hobby, and one gardeners enjoy, is a monetary payback -- in this case, increased property value. But although good landscaping will increase the sale price, you can't count on a dollar-for-dollar return.

John Bredemeyer, a residential appraiser in Omaha, Neb., with 23 years' experience, points out that different levels of landscaping are expected, depending on the price of a house. Starter homes, for example, aren't expected to have much more than a lawn and some shrubs. If you splurge on landscaping, odds are slim that you'll recover much of the investment; buyers shopping in that range just won't pay a premium.

If you live in a fancier neighborhood, however, having blah landscaping could actually detract from your home's value, says Bredemeyer. Appraisers can't assign an exact value to fine landscaping -- or even to expensive water features, such as a swimming pool or pond. But they say a house with well-landscaped grounds is likely to sell at the top end of homes in the neighborhood. "Plus, it might sell more quickly than others," says Bredemeyer. (However, some buyers will reject any property that has a pond or pool, seeing it as a hazard or maintenance burden.)

A study at the University of Florida attempted to quantify how much a landscaping makeover would improve property value. Professional landscapers made over four houses in upper-middle-income neighborhoods near Orlando, and mixed the before-and-after photos among dozens of other house pictures. They then asked more than a hundred real estate agents to give off-the-cuff sales-price estimates for the houses.

In each instance, landscaping boosted the estimated sales price. In two cases -- the two costliest makeovers -- the landscaping increased the estimated price higher than the cost of the improvements. The greatest hike was $8,350 for a $4,720 investment. The makeover added a decorative retaining wall, plants and a curved walkway to the front door.

Says Robert Degner, director of the Florida Agricultural Market Research Center, which did the study: "That was a knock-your-eyes-out transformation." But for the more modest makeovers, the increase wasn't enough to cover costs.

Dramatic change appears to be the key difference among the makeovers that paid for themselves. "In those where the increase in value was only close to the investment, the plant material was not as showy," says Degner.

--Reporter: Katie J. Howell

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