When you’re looking at a beautiful yard landscape, odds are it’s a combination of softscape and hardscape materials. By combining these elements, you combine living, soft landscaping aspects like grass and plants with accenting from gravels, rock, mulch, or other harder materials. These materials combine to create a balanced and eye-catching environment that both frames and showcases your home while providing a dimensional, inviting and pleasing-to-the-eye environment.
When you just have a garden without any hardscaping, it looks incomplete, or even a little sloppy. Hardscaping frames gardens in such a way to make them look polished and like more of a focal point than those without. But what really counts as hardscaping, and how do you know which type of hardscaping is best for you and your yard?
Hardscaping constitutes the solid (often man-made) elements in your landscaping or yard that help to showcase your garden or softscape materials. Hardscaping materials include:
These elements help to add dimension to your yard, and make your gardens and soft spaces more defined and easier to manage. These materials are usually used to make up patios, pool borders/surrounds, paths, garden accents or structures, walls, and landscape edging.
What can you do with each of these hardscape materials to bring your yard to the next level? We’re glad you asked!
First of all, there are a ton of uses for rock throughout your yard or landscaping, but there are also many types of rock to choose from. Here, we’re going to talk about the potential of river rock and cobblestone, but Pillar Aggregates also offers many other types of rock for your landscaping needs.
River rock and cobblestones are amazing, versatile materials that can be used in garden beds, surrounding water or pools, and even makes a great driveway material.
Because river rock and cobblestone work so well with water, they can also make a great substitute for mulch in gardens. They prevent evaporation from soil, and are a lot heavier than mulch, so it’s less likely to move around. Rover rock is also perfect for use in walkways, rock gardens, driveways, or just for accenting different areas of your yard because of its appealing look.
When you first think of concrete or the potential uses for it, you’re probably just going to think of it as a base for something, or just as a boring gray slab of material. However, concrete goes much further than that. Concrete can be stained, texturized, combined with other materials, and decorative!
When you’re building your next concrete patio or pathway, keep this in mind – concrete is affordable, versatile, and looks great!
Whether using crushed or in large chunks, granite holds a curb appeal like no other. It’s amazing look and appeal make it an amazing choice for pathways, lining garden beds, or for patios.
In addition to granite’s curb appeal, regular and granite boulders alike make amazing additions to your hardscaping for use in lining your driveway, pathways, or to accent your garden beds.
One of the most versatile hardscaping materials, gravel can be used for pretty much anything. Think driveways, pathways, bordering pools and garden beds, and even for use under decks or elevated surfaces.
If you’re looking for the highest quality, quarry-direct hardscape materials, look no further than Pillar Aggregates for all of your residential and commercial landscaping needs. Check out our selection of materials today!
