Staging a garden for a party (or home sale)
From quick fixes to longer-term improvements

by Kathy Ormiston, APLD / photos by Veronica Weber

How do you stage your home's landscape so that it looks its best for a party or home sale? Below are a number of ideas for sprucing up your garden. Some of these options are quick fixes -- adding pots of colorful flowers where people will be spending time -- and other options border on the obsessive -- digging out the weeds in your driveway.

Doing any or all of these will likely add value to your home and help it to sell faster. While I can't promise spiffing up your garden for a big party won't stop your out-of-state relatives from bragging about cheap home prices back in Indiana, it will make them envy your small piece of the Bay Area's year-around natural beauty.

Six weeks before the event:
This is when a lot of the hard work of whipping a landscape into shape takes place. Remember plants are living, growing things. When you make major changes, they need a couple of weeks to look their best again.

The first thing to do is walk around your garden and take a look at what is doing well and what is not. This is the time to remove plants that are dead or haven't performed well and replace them with new plants.

Remember the rule "right plant, right plant" is the secret to a low-maintenance landscape. Try to understand why a plant did not succeed in a particular spot: Was there too much shade or too little water? Select replacement plants that will do well in your garden's existing conditions.

For a flush of new flowers, prune repeat bloomers such as Santa Barbara daisy and catmint hard -- that means removing all existing blooms. Rose bushes will also appreciate a heavy pruning and reshaping now. Follow up by spreading an organic rose fertilizer on all your flowering plants. Be sure to water the soil well before and after applying the fertilizer.

For a beautiful lawn, you should first check your irrigation. Replace or repair any broken sprinkler heads. You can't go wrong by applying an organic fertilizer to the grass. It will green up your lawn gradually without causing a rapid flush of growth that requires (yuck) bi-weekly trimming.

You may also want to attack the weeds in your turf either by hand removing or applying a broadleaf herbicide.

If you are selling a home, consider pruning any shrubs to a height below your windows. If you have small trees, such as Japanese maples, you may want to selectively take out up to a third of the branches. This will brighten the rooms inside your house. Just be careful to prune bushes and trees in a natural style and generally avoid pruning plants into hard geometric shapes, like squares or balls.

Weeks five, four, three, two:
To encourage new blooms, remove dead flowers from your perennials and annuals and weed, weed, weed. Yes, these are tedious backbreaking chores, but they are the secret to luscious flowerbeds.

To give your planting beds a clean look, redo the edges with a sharp spade.

The weekend before the event:
Add at least a 1-inch layer of bark mulch. Mulching will cover up a host of problems ranging from weeds to bare, cracked soil. Until the party is over, tell your mow and blow guys to keep their blowers out of your beds or all your mulch will be gone in a flash.

If you have drip irrigation, run a sprinkler on your plants for 20 minutes to wash the dust off the plants. I learned this trick from a Master Gardener with a lovely native plant garden.

One of the most important things you can do to make your garden pop is to add large pots of colorful flowers near high-traffic areas. If you want picture-perfect pots, take a look at Fine Gardening magazine's special issue on containers for inspiration. You can't go wrong with their filler, spiller and thriller formula. And if you are looking for great plants for containers, don't skip the houseplants section of your nursery for striking foliage plants and tropicals.

Fill in any bare spots in the front of your beds with colorful annuals. Pansies and impatiens do well in shady spots. Zinnias and marigolds will be happy in the sun. Just check out what looks good at the nursery and try sticking to one or two colors that complement your existing plants.

Annuals are little water hogs. Water them frequently, as often as every day in hot weather, to help them look their best.

The day of the event:
Sweep your patio and sidewalk and dust off your patio furniture. Find a comfortable chair and fix yourself a large cool beverage. Sit down and take a moment to enjoy how great your garden looks.

Congratulations, your hard work paid off. Enjoy your party and make a lot of money off your house!

Garden designer Kathy Ormiston is a member of the Association of Professional Landscape Designers (APLD) and an active Santa Clara County Master Gardener. Her website is www.ginkgogarden.net.