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Discover the Right Style for Your Garden

Your home is a reflection of your taste. You may also be thinking about the style of your garden landscape when you want to create a specific look. For example, do you favor a minimalist, modern style, or do you prefer bold colors and patterns? The same personal choices may be extended from the inside of your home to the style of your landscape. If you are the romantic type, you can choose pale roses and other graceful perennials that feel old-fashioned and nostalgic. Or, if your home includes a formal dining room, you may be more traditional and want to have a formal garden that is manicured, controlled, and looks good throughout the year. Other styles to consider include:

Natural Gardens: A combination of perennials with ornamental grasses that can be used in large or small gardens, this breezy look is defined by movement, light, and color.

Mediterranean Gardens: Choose plants that evoke warm, dry climates, such as lavender and other gray-leaved drought-loving plants for a dryer kind of garden. When you add some gravel, stone, and terracotta pots, you can achieve a Mediterranean look.

Tropical Gardens: Create a tropical look with garden landscaping in Sarasota from the team at Troy’s Tropics. You can choose from a number of sustainable garden ferns, banana plants, cannas, and big-leaf tropical plants. Large leaves and bold textures give this garden a lush tropical look.

What to Consider Before You Install an Irrigation System

Irrigation systems are a cost-effective way to beautify your home, increase its value, and save time and money. It is easier to maintain an attractive landscape that thrives when you have an automatic sprinkler system installed. However, there are a few items to consider when you are planning to put in a new irrigation system. When it’s time to decide the layout of your sprinkler system you want to pay attention to the areas of your landscape that are elevated, sunny, and in the shade. It will also help to consider the following details before you purchase an irrigation system.

Sprinkler Head Placement
Kind of Sprinkler Heads
Watering Schedules
Length of Watering Times
Controller Placement
Location of Remote Control Valves

You also want to take into consideration your local weather patterns and seasonal changes. As well, you need to become familiar with the water regulations in your community, as different cities may have different requirements for sprinkler irrigation systems.

Find out everything you need to know about installing an automatic irrigation system when you work with the team at Troy’s Tropics. We provide irrigation services in Sarasota that are affordable, effective, and efficient. Call (941) 923-3756 to find out how we can design and install an irrigation system that benefits your landscape for many years to come.

The Benefits of Installing a Sprinkler System

Installing a sprinkler system helps you save time and energy. Enjoy the convenience of a lawn sprinkler that is automatically activated. With a new irrigation system, you can improve your lawn and conserve resources. Homeowners can customize their watering strategies by setting sprinklers to water overnight on a daily or weekly basis; timing them for specific hours during the day or night. When the irrigation process is complete, the system automatically shuts the water off.

With irrigation services in Sarasota from Troy’s Tropics, you can adjust your sprinklers to water specific plants, flowers, trees, and shrubs. You can also choose your sprinkler system from a variety of shapes, sizes, and types, including:

Oscillating
Revolving
Stationary
Traveling

Sprinkler systems help you save resources by watering more efficiently and directly rather than sprinkling your entire lawn. With directed watering, you water the roots of the plants you love and less of the weeds that are invading your garden. Additional benefits to installing a sprinkler system include:

Greener Lawn
Elimination of Patches
Fewer Weeds
Thicker Grass
Curb Appeal
Upgraded Home Value
Water Conservation

Steps to a Successful Landscape Design, Part 2

To continue our information about creating a successful landscape, we suggest you consider how you want people to move from one area to another on your property. Do you want to add walkways or hardscapes? If different paths are needed throughout your property, that factors into the kind of plantings you should choose. Other items to consider are your maintenance capability, style, and budget. Have you thought about how much time you want to spend on your landscape? Maybe you have the budget to hire a crew to maintain your new landscape. If not, it makes sense to plan carefully to get and keep the landscape you want for many years to come. Additional tips to consider as you set about planning to upgrade your property’s curb appeal include:

The Initial Consultation

Spend time with your landscape designer in Sarasota by walking through your property. Make sure you say what plantings you like and point out those that are not your favorites. Be sure to give him or her your “wish list.”

Create Concepts

After you’ve surveyed the property together, the landscape designer comes back with several different ideas for your review. Choose the one that fits best with your budget, appearance, and overall goals.

Choose Troy’s Tropics when you need an experienced and knowledgeable landscape designer in Sarasota. We help you get the most out of your yard by thinking of it as another space in your home. Rely on our team to upgrade your home’s curb appeal with care, beauty, and attention to detail.

Steps to a Successful Landscape Design, Part 1

If your home can benefit from extra curb appeal, there is a way to create a successful landscape design in Sarasota, which is much more than simply adding some plant materials and hoping for the best. Professionals in the landscape business often use specific guidelines and processes for making sure that a landscaping design appears just as they and their clients want and expect. Some of the concepts and steps that lead to a successful landscape design include all of the following:

Know Your Yard

The specific conditions of your yard are the amount and length of sun and shade exposure the area receives. Areas of your property are one or a combination of the following: full sun, partial shade, shade, or deep shade. The position of the sun and how long your yard is exposed to it are important factors to consider when selecting plants for your landscape. It also helps to consider how water drains in your landscape.

Use of Your Yard

If your yard is used as a place for children or pets to play and romp, that may require a certain area of space to be set aside. Also, if you want to use your yard for outdoor entertaining, you can create a different space to accommodate that.

Work with Troy’s Tropics when you are ready to increase your home’s curb appeal in Sarasota. Visit TroysTropics.com to find out about the plants we have available at our nursery on five acres.

Planning a Low-Maintenance Garden

It is not uncommon, especially in a sun-drenched, hot-climate state like Florida for many homeowners to want to have a low-maintenance garden to tend throughout the year. There is no real garden—as opposed to artificial—that is no maintenance at all, but there are ways to plan to have gardening chores take up less time in your daily life. You can also work with the experienced landscape designer in Sarasota at Troy’s Tropics when you have little time to invest in hoeing, raking, weeding, and amending the soil. Following are some tips on how to have a low-maintenance garden that still adds value and curb appeal to your home:

Plant Perennials & Shrubs

Choosing hardy perennials (those that come back year after year) that can withstand summer heat and even a bit of drought means you have fewer weeds and not as much watering to do. Also, while shrubs like azaleas bloom profusely in the spring, they don’t require much pruning. You can also use certain kinds of ornamental grasses the only need cutting back once a year.

Native Plantings

Florida’s native plants are drought-tolerant and hearty. A native plant is one that has flourished in the weather and soil of an area. For example, some of the most used native plants, shrubs, and trees in Florida include the beautyberry shrub, muhly grass, coontie, and Southern magnolia.

What Is a Cottage Garden?

If you want a colorful, but strictly informal, garden style, a cottage garden may be just right for your landscape. It is the opposite of a structured, more formal type of garden yet it can be designed with all manner of plants. Whatever plantings you choose, keep in mind they are not planted in a straight line if you want to achieve the look of a cottage garden. Cottage gardens flowers may overlap each other or even flow together with no boundaries to keep them apart. More freewheeling than formal, cottage gardens can seem a bit wild, with vines crawling up posts, roses entwined over arbors, and undefined flower beds. A cottage garden can add charm to any style of home or property. Some of the more traditional cottage plants include:

Hollyhocks
Irises
Hydrangeas
Pinks
Delphiniums

While cottage gardens don’t look as if they’ve been designed, it does take the services of a team that excels at garden landscaping in Sarasota like the ones at Troy’s Tropics. Professional landscapers know how to ensure a cottage garden looks exuberant, free-flowering, and much less restrained than other garden designs. Quite simply, a cottage garden looks simple, charming, and appears to be a natural landscape design that is sure to enhance the appearance of any home.

Add Curb Appeal to a Home for Sale

First impressions matter a great deal particularly when it’s time to sell your home. Adding curb appeal to your home is essential to determining whether or not a potential buyer wants to come inside for a real showing. Because sellers now list their homes online, curb appeal must grab that favorable first impression. Instead of driving by your home, a potential buyer scrolls through images of the outside of your property before he or she has even stepped inside. So, you risk the chance that buyers will never even drive by if they don’t like what they see online.

The fact is that most potential homebuyers want to tour the inside of a home if it looks inviting on the outside. Unless you are selling your home as a fixer-upper, you want to catch the eye of every homebuyer who see the pictures of your home. While it’s certainly wise to clean the gutters and power wash the exterior, you want to ensure the landscape adds the curb appeal you need to get the buyer to the next level of interest in your home. When you have replaced overgrown or unsightly bushes with colorful shrubs, added mulch, and planted brightly colored flowers, you stand a much better chance of getting your home’s selling price.

Contact Troy’s Tropics, a leading landscape designer in Sarasota, when you are thinking about selling your home and aren’t sure where to start on improving the curb appeal of your property.

Native Trees That Can Withstand Florida Storms

Not many trees are strong enough to sustain hurricane-force winds, but there are some trees that may last through the summer storms in Florida. A recent study showed that the strongest trees to withstand storms are Florida natives. The natives held up best under high winds and were not as likely to break apart or fall. Also, they tended to be salt-tolerant, drought-tolerant and required little maintenance. The following native trees and palms had the least accounts of losing branches or falling over during the peak storm season in Florida:

Live Oak: The live oak shade tree grows up to 60 feet high with a canopy of up to about 40 feet. It provides a lot of shade and grows at a medium rate.
Gumbo Limbo: This adaptable shade tree is known for its twisting branches and is also called “the tourist tree” because its peeling red bark resembles a sunburn. It is a fast grower that can reach a height up to 40 feet.
Geiger Tree: This small tree provides orange-red flowers to the landscape and blooms all year. It takes its name from a wreck salvager in Key West. It grows up to 25 feet at a slow-to-medium growth rate.
Sabal Palm: The sabal palm is the state tree of Florida, and it’s also called the cabbage palm. It grows up to 40 feet high at a slow rate. Mature
Silver Palm: This palm tree has silver fronds and produces fruit that attracts It grows up to 10 feet at a slow rate.

Find native trees at Troy’s Tropics, a leading native plant nursery in Sarasota

Florida Native Plant Gardens Are Sustainable

There are a number of positive reasons to creative a native Florida plant garden. You have countless beautiful plants from which to choose. With so many attractive native plants, you get a wide variety of colors, shapes, and sizes to design your garden. You will find many Florida plants at Troy’s Tropics, a leading native plant nursery in Sarasota, located on five acres of land. Native plans are easy to maintain because they quickly adapt to Florida soil and often need less fertilization. Many of them are also excellent at tolerating drought.

After your initial design and planting you can enjoy a native plant garden for years to come. They attract butterflies, bees, and other beneficial insects. They can also serve as good sources of wildlife food. You can find native plants in the form of shrubs, trees, vines, and groundcovers when you are ready to plan your native garden. Just a small number of the most popular Florida native plants, not including trees, include the following:

Yarrow
Leather Fern
Milkweed
Buttonwood
Heliotrope
Lupine
Royal Palm
Swamp Rose
Coneflower
Goldenrod
Sea Oats

Visit TroysTropics.com to find out about the natives they have that best suit the conditions in your landscape. Call (941) 923-3756 to find out more about our nursery and landscaping services.