Why Landscape?

If you own or rent a piece of property, why would you spend more money on its landscaping? What benefits are there to landscaping your property?

• Recreation & Entertainment space. Provide a usable outdoor living area for yourself and your family. Provide entertainment for yourself, family, and friends. These requirements change with time, you may need a lawn for your children to play on, but as they grow up the lawn area is no longer a priority and you can replace the lawn with a pool or entertainment area. To increase the aesthetic appeal of your home.

• Individuality. Your garden is an extension of your personality. In most developments the villas look identical, you are not allowed to make physical changes to the structure or even change the color of the walls. One method of differentiating and individualizing your property is to landscape it and create a clear distinction between yourself and your neighbors. This is MY house and my home!

• Privacy. In some developments the houses are literally crowded on top of each other; it is not uncommon to be surrounded on three sides by your neighbors. Adding trees and tall growing shrubs can create an effective canopy or screen between your property and that of your neighbors. In addition, trees provide vertical scale to your house and shade to the garden.

• Value added to the property. If you invest a sum of money in a property you expect to get it back, and if you are lucky, turn a profit on the original investment. The landscaping average return on investment in the rest of the developed world is between 125% and 150%; that is to say for every 100,000 you invest in your garden you should see a return (on the original investment) of between 25,000 and 50,000 when you sell.

I have found that most people who rent properties are hesitant to spend money on the property and gardens as there is no direct benefit to improving a property they do not own; additionally, they are sometimes penalized for improving the property as their rentals are increased due to the added value they have just added to the landlord's property.

Considerations

So you have decided to install a new garden or even renovate an old one, what items should be considered? Different sites and situations will determine the priorities.

• Have a plan. Don’t run into the exercise, take a little time in planning and prioritize what you intend to do. Your plan does not have to be perfect or even reflect a permanent situation. Be realistic about what you expect! Cherry trees and Daffodils don’t grow in the UAE. You are not going to have an English Country Garden in the UAE. Most of the gardening publications distributed in the UAE are Australian, European, or American in origin; 99% of the plant material featured will not grow in the UAE. Use the concepts or ideas from these, but do not expect to find the same materials (plants or hardware) in the local market. Adapt the ideas to fit local conditions and locally available products.

• Privacy. This may be a major concern; plants grow very quickly in the UAE, but get the basic infrastructural plants and trees in as soon as possible to make the most of the weather.

• Stabilization. Some properties when handed over are just a patch of sand. Try to stabilize the soil as soon as possible. In some cases, properties are handed over “as is” and you might have to remove builder's waste before adding sweet soil.

• Long-term infrastructure, with this I mean irrigation system, additional electrical connections (outdoor), conduit pipes, supplemental light fittings, and drainage. These are services that you may not need to use now, but provision should be made for them prior to any hard landscaping or building. As an example, it is cheap and simple to lay a conduit pipe for a light fitting (even if you do not intend to use it immediately) before you install paving, rather than realizing you have to dig up your paving to lay electrical cables.

• Irrigation system. This is one of the first things that need to be installed. Ensure that the system is flexible enough so that it can be expanded or adapted without major excavation work.

• Hard elements and structures. Do all the dirty work first! Large earth-moving equipment may be required; it is cheaper and more cost-effective to have it all done at the same time than to do it over a long period of time. Logistically (cost of materials excluded) it will cost you as much money to install five large palm trees as it will to install one.