While most homeowners focus only on aesthetics and perhaps maintenance when planning their landscaping, an important but often overlooked detail is how your landscaping affects your home security. Incorporating home security into your landscaping design means you not only end up with a beautiful yard and outdoor space, but also a safer and more secure home. By including these security-minded ideas in your landscape plans, you will gain a great deal of peace of mind:
Choose Smaller Bushes and Shrubs
Opting for a variety of smaller bushes, shrubs, and plants instead of large bushes or hedges adds a lot of visual interest to your landscaping while also keeping your home more secure. Smaller bushes and shrubs do not provide cover and potential hiding places like larger bushes do. This makes your home less appealing to would-be criminals than a nearby home with a large privacy hedge or bushes to hide behind. It's especially important not to have large shrubbery near windows and doors, as they may disguise or hide a criminal who is busy picking a lock.
Keep Trees Nicely Trimmed
Having your trees trimmed on a regular basis helps keep your trees healthy, but it's also good for home security. Neatly trimmed trees don't provide long, close branches that burglars can use to climb into second story windows, or as a hiding place for spying on your family or scoping out valuables. New trees should be planted far enough away from your home that they won't be tempting as an access point for criminals.
Try Adding Thorny Bushes
Thorny bushes like rosebushes, holly bushes, and bougainvillea that are covered in sharp thorns can be effective deterrents to burglars who would rather not deal with painful scratches to their faces, hands, and arms when trying to break into a home. These bushes are also quite beautiful and many varieties are small and low to the ground, so they won't detract from your other security measures.
Outdoor Lighting
The more lighting, the better, as added outdoor lighting not only makes your yard more beautiful and functional at night, but also discourages criminal activity. Path lighting, motion activated flood lights, and spotlights are all practical options. Using energy-efficient LED bulbs will ensure your new lighting doesn't have much impact on your utility bills.
These landscaping ideas will add both beauty and an added layer of security to your landscape design, while complementing other security measures such as an alarm system.
Share14 July 2017
Hello, I’m Donna. Welcome. I am excited to share my passion for landscaping with you all. I regularly change the layout of my garden, depending on the plants I want to grow each year. I keep my garden beds full of flowers and edible plants to have a variety of vegetation to enjoy. I would like to use this site to cover all of those varieties and talk about the growing techniques and supplies that work best for each option. I invite you to visit daily to learn the information you need to help your garden grow. Thanks for visiting my site.