Landscaping can mean different things to different people. I think it falls somewhere between flower gardens and retaining walls.

I suppose if you keep your lawn mowed and watered then you can be considered a landscaper. To keep it simple, landscaping does play a very important part in the up-keep of our properties. It can add value to your property and in the same sense it can take away from your curb appeal if it’s not kept up.

Sometimes I feel like I’m a slave to my back yard when it comes to mowing the grass and pulling the weeds. It never ends, and it is the one true secure job in life. However, if I had never planned out some sort of landscaping plan over the years I would have strawberries growing in the middle of the lawn and grass growing tall in the rose garden.

So in my case the landscaping that we have serves an important role. It keeps the roses where they belong and the berries where they belong. Other simple landscape details can be pathways around the gardens and lawn. These provide for a clear dry walkway where you can pass without damaging and flowers or get your feet dirty.

They also provide a nice staging area for deer to stand while they are eating the buds off my new roses. This is another issue at our house. We planned and planted a nice expensive rose garden only to be covered up with special netting to keep the deer away from the flowers. Whenever I look at it I’m angered at the fact that we even need to do anything at all.

The deer are here to stay, I’m afraid, so I guess I’ll put up with the stupid netting. High fences are another way to keep the deer out but you sure need a tall fence for that to work. The city building code says that a fence can only be six feet high in the back yard and three feet high in the front. Never mind the fact that a high ugly fence only takes away from your curb appeal.

Fencing is an important part on any landscape plan. It does what many other landscape efforts do; it directs people away from one area and leads them to another. Like off your property and back onto the sidewalk. It also defines or outlines your property boundaries. This is my side and that is your side.

I think that for the most part any landscape plan will enhance your property in many ways even if the idea is only to create a more defined section of lawn, patio, flowers and garbage cans. Let’s face it, we all want a back yard that is pleasant to look at but it also needs to be functional for us, the caretakers, too. A property that has lots of landscaping details can be a lot more time consuming as far as weekly maintenance goes. So plan carefully.

Most of us like lawn, but too much of a good thing is just that — too much — so breaking it up with a flower bed or two changes it all, and with some good planning hopefully enhances the yard at the same time. We all need to work out just how much weekly yard work we really want.

We stopped planting a vegetable garden a few years ago because it was getting to be too much work. Weeding almost every day and preparing it in the spring was a lot of work that we would rather spend that time doing something else. Even if we did enjoy some success with our veggies the deer never did thank us for our efforts.