Dos and Don'ts for a Successful Hardscape

By Rose Kennedy, special to HGTV.com
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A great hardscaping project leads you through the landscape and provides a sense of timeless beauty. — image courtesy of Salsbury-Schweyer
Falling in love with hardscaping is the easy part, with so many appealing options — from a rustic stacked wall to a trickling fountain and meditation bench to a fully developed outdoor living room and kitchen. Or maybe you just need a couple of interesting elements in that patch where grass refuses to flourish.

Once you've decided to act on the attraction, though, you must plan carefully to meet your hardscaping goals.

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Before beginning any hardscaping project, try to anticipate how it will fit into your long-range plans for the rest of your landscape. — image courtesy of Salsbury-Schweyer

"Research really pays off, especially when you consider that a fixed object in the landscape is not going to move easily — and you don't want to put in a lot of effort and then have your materials or design fail within a couple of years," says Samuel Salsbury, a member of the Association of Professional Landscape Designers and partner with Sabrena Schweyer, APLD, in Salsbury-Schweyer, an Akron, Ohio-based landscape design group.

By taking these steps and avoiding some common mistakes, you can create hardscaping you'll love for years to come:

  • Look at the whole landscape before you start. As much as you can, consider the entire area available to you for hardscaping before you design an element, even if you're just tackling one space for now.

    "At the bare minimum you should plan a design for the whole area, or consult a professional to create a design for you," says Salsbury. "If you don't consider the site comprehensively, it's like building one room of a house, and then a year or so later, a second room. You may decide to plop down a patio, and then decide you want a barbecue, pond or walkway and the patio blocks your plan. I can't tell you how many times we've been hired by clients to tear out work they'd had done just two or three years earlier."

  • Delve into draining issues. Salsbury says he's seen more hardscapes messed up by people ignoring drainage requirements than by all the other errors combined.

    "People, even professionals, think they have good drainage so they go ahead and add some hardscaping," he says, "But you must plan how the drainage will be affected when you place, say, a wall or a patio. If the new object is now blocking the previous path of drainage, you can't just say, 'But it was draining great before!'"

    There's also an environmental consideration, says Weston, Wisc. landscaper Susan Murphy. "You should plan runoff so you can capture the water and use it on site, instead of letting it hit that concrete and go down the drainage pipe."

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    Where possible, allow a good balance of plants vs. hardscaping. — image courtesy of Salsbury-Schweyer
  • Develop a focal point and a path you want the eye to travel. "For a hardscape that will enhance and enfold your natural landscape, you should create a focal point or seating area within the design," says Murphy. "You want the eye to travel towards a destination, and one or two visual elements that make you pause, either visually or literally, like a weeping evergreen with an Oriental lantern."

  • Don't plop elements down and expect them to fit in. Murphy's pet peeve? "Boulders that are supposed to be helping to naturalize an area, but instead have been dropped right on top of the ground and are sitting there like dinosaur eggs," she says. "To successfully use boulders in hardscape, you need to make sure they're large enough to fit with the scale of the landscape, and bury them deep enough so they look like a naturally-occuring element."

    Too-linear elements can create the same unnatural feel, says certified landscape designer Schweyer. "I see way too many people plop in a straight or L-shaped sidewalk, or stick a linear or rectangular patio or deck on the back of the house without giving further thought to the natural lines of the space," she says. "You should try to include curves and shapes in a way that the hardscape elements transition gracefully into the rest of the landscape."

  • Don't eliminate all your lawn. Sure, you see all-stone or concrete areas in the Southwest, says Murphy, but there the focus on hardscapes can be a matter of necessity, not a trend to follow. "Southwesterners sometimes have to have a hardscape without greenery due to the strong sun and too little water," she says. Everyone else, she says, should definitely include ample vegetation in relationship to hard surfaces.

    Barbara Pleasant, author of Garden Stone: Creative Landscaping with Plants and Stone takes the idea even further. "You can have a beautiful backyard comprised of a hardscape framed by shrub and flowerbeds, but keeping a small swath of lawn is a good idea," she says. "Grass is a safer playing surface for children, and a patch of turf will help cool down the landscape on hot, sunny days."