Home Landscaping
Home landscaping, means modifying or arranging the features of the grounds around a home to improve the property from the standpoint of aesthetic ideas and/or practical usage. Landscaping enhances your home, not only by improving its appearance and creating useful outdoor spaces, but also by helping to maintain easy and comfortable indoor living spaces. Careful selection, planting, placement, and care of trees, shrubs, and vines can help you reduce your energy costs: In winter, by maximizing solar heating while deflecting winds away from your home; and
In summer by maximizing shading while funneling breezes towards your home.
In a sufficiently insulated home, more than half of the heat gain can be attributed to sunlight streaming through windows. In summer, sunlight absorbed through the roof may be liable for most of the remaining heat gain. Open-branched deciduous trees can effectively block sunlight in the summer, but not in the winter when solar heat is most desirable. Even bare branches of trees can block some sunlight so it is best not to shade solar panels. Evergreen trees or shrubs to the north, west, and east of your home will provide some summer shade and be effective cold-weather windbreaks to reduce winter heat loss, without interrupting warm from the low, winter sun in the southern sky. Shrubs and small trees near your home's basement provide shade, windbreak, and additional insulation. Basement plantings can trap a layer of air next to your home to store the effect of outside air temperatures on indoor temperatures. Allow at least one-foot clearance between the exterior wall and mature plants for maintenance and to avoid damp, stagnant conditions that can be damaging.
In summer, the shade from shrubs, trees, and vines block heating sunlight from reaching your home. To plan an effective energy-saving landscape, you should know how the shadows cast by trees and shrubs can change in shape, size, and location relative to your home as the sun moves throughout the day and seasons. Additional shading of walls can be achieved with climbing vines, mainly deciduous vines on south-facing walls and evergreen vines elsewhere.
Plants can cool the surrounding air through "evapotranspiration," This process, which is similar to the cooling process of sweating, removes direct heat from the air by absorbing water from the ground and releasing it as vapor from the leaves. You can use plants to shade bare ground for additional cooling through evapotranspiration. Plant to shade paved areas, such as patios, driveways, and sidewalks. These large surfaces absorb large amounts of solar energy during the day and then heat the air by reradiating it during the day and night.
It may seem desirable to plant the fastest-growing trees for shade, however, these tend to be short-lived, have weak or brittle wood simply damaged in storms, and is susceptible to disease and attack by insects. You need to select trees with moderate growth rates instead, as they are generally sturdier and more pest resistant.
With the common goal of energy conservation, your community can work together to create and maintain landscapes that provide major shared benefits.