FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

Proper Plant Selection Key To Creating Effective Outdoor Living Spaces
Next Generation Online Plant Search Makes It Easier Than Ever For Homeowners

July 24, 2006  --  Having trouble making the most of your home landscape? If so, you’re not alone. In this era of postage stamp-sized properties, 8-to-6 jobs, lengthy commutes and overlapping evening commitments, it has become a challenge for today’s homeowners to even maintain their yards and gardens, much less fully utilize them. There was a time when opulent landscapes with lush green lawns were symbols of status and prestige, but suburbanites are finding they can no longer live up to these ideals of times gone by.

That’s why you’ll find today’s top designers like Martha Stewart and Linda Reeves promoting “Outdoor Living Spaces”, a concept which better reflects the new expectations that modern suburban homeowners have of their yards and gardens. Landscapes are now developed literally as an extension of the home, and are further subdivided into “rooms” according to their intended function, with these spaces optimized for entertaining, for privacy and meditation, for pursuit of hobbies, or for spending quality time with the family. And smaller properties are better utilized through strategically placed containers, integration of vegetables and herbs into flower gardens, or fruit trees doing double-duty as accents in the front yard. 

Plants are the building blocks of these outdoor living spaces, and are selected to perform specific functions, for example separating outdoor rooms, shading a summer dining space, screening out noise and offending views, or stabilizing slopes. Trees and shrubs are chosen for resistance to diseases and minimal mess as well as for their ornamental attributes, and low-maintenance perennials are used in place of needy bedding plants in gardens. Where they are not necessary, water-thirsty lawns are replaced by low consumption groundcovers, and curbside beauty is created utilizing the enduring qualities of foliage colors and the dynamic interplay of textures and forms along with flower color.

When developing effective outdoor living spaces, it is critical that the home landscaper selects the right plants for the right location and function. That means considering up front each plant’s landscape attributes, functional uses, cultural preferences and negative characteristics in order to achieve the ultimate objective of a lasting landscape that requires minimal intervention down the road. For homeowners living in cold climates, the challenge is twofold, as they have a limited palette of plants from which to choose and must take factors such as hardiness into consideration. An improperly selected plant will not only defeat the purpose of an effective outdoor living space, but may become a liability in time.

And yet today’s homeowners have less time than ever before to become knowledgeable gardeners just for the sake of creating and maintaining their outdoor living spaces. That’s why they are turning to resources such as Northscaping’s newly expanded Landscape Plant Search for help. This free internet-based tool enables them to identify hardy plants for their outdoor living spaces from the comfort of their own homes. By entering up to 36 different search parameters such as landscape application, flower color and period, growing conditions, or simple keywords, they can choose from a list of plants which not only match their search criteria, but are appropriate for their particular growing conditions. The relatively simple search is actually built on top of a massive database of over 3,300 different trees, shrubs, perennials, vines, ferns and ornamental grasses which are hardy in the north, with landscape photos of each plant.

The plant search is just one of the features of Northscaping (www.northscaping.com), a leading resource and community website for northern homeowners living in hardiness zones 1-5. “Since it was introduced just over a year ago, the plant search has been used more than a quarter of a million times,” says Jim Kohut, President and one of the founders of Northscaping. “Now we’ve rolled out the next generation of this resource to the Northscaping community, with such features as an advanced color selector tool which lets users select plants against 63 different colors of flowers, fruit, foliage, variegation and bark. They’ll find an additional 1,200 varieties of hardy perennials, ferns and ornamental grasses to cover the full range of landscape and garden plants, and there’s even a ‘Hot Button’ to help them refine their searches.”

The Northscaping plant search is surprisingly easy to use, says Kohut. “Let’s say someone is looking for a low-maintenance groundcover for a sunny dry site. They would simply enter their hardiness zone, select ‘Groundcover’ as the application with the ‘Hot Button’ checked to flag this as a priority, click ‘Low Maintenance’, set soil moisture to ‘Dry’ and sunlight to ‘Full Sun’, then do a search. Up comes a list of suitable plants which meet their criteria. And to further refine their search, let’s say to look for evergreen shrubs as groundcovers, two clicks of the button later and they’re looking at a revised list of options!”

Besides the plant search, the website features other tools which homeowners living in northern climates will find useful. The “Info Zone” resource allows users to search through a pool of over 400 home landscaping and gardening articles to help them design and maintain their outdoor living spaces. An interactive map provides them with important climatic data for their region such as spring and fall frost dates, length of growing season and annual precipitation with the click of a mouse, and they can post landscaping, gardening and yard care questions on the popular Garden Cafe discussion forum. The site even features a detailed on-line “How-To” landscaping guide for do-it-yourselfers.

Northscaping (www.northscaping.com) is the leading internet resource and community for landscapers and gardeners living in northern North America (hardiness zones 1-5). Its mission is to empower homeowners living with the challenges of a cold northern climate to transform their yards and gardens to make them more beautiful and functional. The website features a powerful set of gardening and landscaping tools, a searchable information database, community discussion forums and links to other on-line resources of value to northern landscapers and gardeners. Users can access the Landscape Plant Search on the internet at www.northscaping.com/Tools/LandscapePlantSearch.asp. All tools on the site are offered free to users, and no subscription or membership is required.

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