Does your front yard landscaping beckon in — or turn off — potential homebuyers?

Whether you’re getting ready to sell your house or not — if that’s even a remote possibility — this should be a consideration in how you plan landscaping.

Remember, most house purchasers are either sold — or not sold — on a house at first glance. So what you do “out front” is really important, and the backyard will probably cement that initial gut reaction.

Elaborate, complex landscaping might impress visitors, but will potential buyers see instead a very high maintenance situation?

It’s something to consider.  Ditto for shrubs and trees carefully pruned into exacting shapes.

Of course, if you’re in the price bracket where the new homeowner will most likely have yard crews to take care of all this, that’s another story.

But if it looks as if the homeowner will have to do it himself or herself, well . . .

That’s not to say the yard has to be a messy collection of free-growers.  Or that you’ll want to spend a lot of money on spiffing up the yard of a house you’re going to be leaving anyway.

Some tips:

1. Have some good friends come over and be honest with you about what they do and don’t like about your landscaping. Sometimes we get so used to certain things, or they have a special meaning to us but not to others, that we won’t see these as detractors.

Drive up and see where your eye goes first . . . or where you want it to go first.  Isolate the most attractive “vignette” in your front and back yard.  That’s where you should concentrate the color.

You can emphasize the positive and minimize the negatives.

2. Mulch can be one of your best friends.  It’s amazing how a layer of mulch over the soil will give a whole fresh new look to a landscape.  Mulch makes it look like you care.

3. You will, of course, want to remove all weeds. Putting 4-5 layers of newspapers right over the lower-growing weeds, and then putting a thick layer of mulch on top of these, is a great lazy gardener way to kill them. All plants require light to survive.

Besides, this is really good for your plants.

4. Use container plants to spiff up dull areas — even setting them right in the garden.  If you already have containers, make sure they’re cleaned. Fill them with colorful annuals.

5. In fact, colorful annuals, available year-round in area nurseries, are a great way to make the yard pop.  Don’t try to cover everything with color. Use pops of color to draw the eye to attributes (like a special window) or away from less attractive elements (like an ugly off-property sight).

6. In darker areas, anything white (caladiums, coleus, white-variegated ivies and other plants) will help brighten and lighten.  Tip: the houseplant sections of box stores and nurseries often care very low cost variegated plants. Many if not most of these do well in our areas as  perennial plantings as well!

7. Take background colors into consideration when selecting these annuals. Too often we forget to think our house bricks as a “color.”

8. Just as tricky pruning into exotic shapes may be a turn-off, so might plants that obviously need pruning but haven’t gotten any in a long time.  Remove those scraggly branches that contribute to a neglected look.  Especially look for tree limbs touching the house.

9. Before you start showing the house, remember to dig up and pot any plants you intend to take.  Set them out of view.  Not fair to let potential buyers assume they’re getting certain plants when they won’t.

10. If you have the time, try to get the lawn as green as possible. Mow regularly.  Mowed weeds look like mowed lawn.  Unmowed weeds look like, well, weeds.  If you have large dead areas, considering adding sod.

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UPDATE: Patty Allen of Bayou City Heirloom Bulbs is organizing a Houston Bulb Society. Interested? Email Patty at prallen2@peoplepc.com or sign up at her upcoming sale Fri. Sat, Oct. 20-21, 2012. Details on website: bayoucityheirloombulbs.com

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There are many reasons to create landscapes in our yards – to add softness to the harsh angles of a home, to make the transition from the natural environment to the built environment appear more seamless, to abide by deed restrictions for foundation planting or simply to foster a passion for gardening. What if these same landscapes could serve important functions and go beyond aesthetics? What if they could help protect water quality, recharge groundwater and provide habitat for wildlife? If this seems like a tall order, that is exactly what rain gardens can do. And a rain garden can fit into almost any landscape.

First, a little background. In undeveloped areas, rainwater (also called storm water) soaks into the soil, provides water for plants and moves the remaining water far below the surface, also known as groundwater recharge. It is filtered by the plants and soil before it enters rivers, streams, bayous or lakes. As we develop the land, however, we create lots of impervious surfaces (places where water cannot penetrate), like parking lots, roadways, roofs and sidewalks. These cause water to run off more quickly – not allowing for much absorption – and to arrive at the nearest body of water in greater volume, contributing to flooding. The runoff often carries with it things that pollute our waterways such as synthetic fertilizers and pesticides, soil from erosion, oil and grease from cars, and pet waste. We created the problem but landscaping an area as a rain garden just might be a beautiful solution to effectively managing storm water where it falls.

A rain garden is a shallow excavated area in the soil (think bowl-shaped), planted as a garden and designed to capture rainfall from impervious surfaces. The storm water pools for a period of time, slowing the flow and allowing some of it to soak into the soil. The rest of the storm water is filtered through the plant material, soil and mulch. This allows us to keep more of the rain that falls on our yards while the storm water that finally enters the storm drain is cleaner. Planted with native plants, specifically those indigenous plants that can tolerate wet and dry conditions, a rain garden also can function as a habitat for wildlife such as birds and butterflies. When designed properly, water in the rain garden should stand for no more than 24 to 48 hours, too short a period for mosquitoes to breed.

Location of a rain garden can be anywhere; however, careful evaluation is necessary to make sure it slopes gently away and is at least ten feet from the foundation of any structure and is free of utility lines. Also notice how and where rainfall moves across the property during a rain event since the rain garden can capture storm water from many sources such as a roof, sidewalks and streets, or a yard.

For more detailed information regarding size, depth and soil mixture, refer to the Texas AM AgriLife Extension Service publication on rain gardens, https://agrilifebookstore.org/ and search for rainwater harvesting. Click on the rain garden publication L-5482. The download is free.

Ways to direct the flow to the rain garden can be a downspout, a downspout with a corrugated pipe extension, a swale, which is a shallow ditch, or simply the slope of the yard.

Rain gardens have planting zones. Remember the bowl shape. For the center where water pools the longest, use native plants that can stand wet feet. The sides, the median zone, need those plants that like it wet for a short time. The top edges are the third zone so plants here like it dry most of the time. The plant list is quite long and varied.

Like any other planted area, a rain garden will need regular watering during the critical establishment period, usually one to two years and, thereafter, supplemental watering during extended dry periods. As with any garden, proper maintenance is necessary.

Above all, a rain garden is a landscape amenity, blending beauty and function – a beautiful, WaterSmart solution to water pollution.

Chris LaChance is WaterSmart Coordinator for the Texas AM AgriLife Extension Service and Texas Sea Grant, part of the Texas AM University System. WaterSmart is funded by a grant from Houston Endowment, Inc. Contact Chris at c-lachance@tamu.edu. This column is sponsored by Urban Harvest. To find out more about community gardens, school gardens, farmers markets and gardening classes, visit www.urbanharvest.org.