How To Use Plants For Edging In Great Tulsa Landscape Design

In landscape design we often find nature combined with artistic expression. Using a variety of plant colors and textures makes a landscape look like a living piece of art and generates the peaceful ambiance where friends and family can have fun and relax.

One aspect of Tulsa landscape design is creating definition to a space with edging. Many different plants and materials can be used to edge a landscape or separate one space from another. Sometimes hardscapes such as brick, stones, or pavers are used as edging around a flower bed or along a pathway. But there are a number of plants that work great for landscape edging.

Better Homes and Gardens highlighted a good amount of flowers and plants that are perfect for edging. Here are a few of their picks for best garden borders:

Known as “nearly the perfect plants” by Better Homes and Gardens, sedums look great from the day they sprout with different varieties hosting pink, red, orange, and white flowers. Varieties such as Matrona, they noted, create a cool edge with taller plants behind them. These plants are also very drought-tolerant and need little care.

Japanese forestgrass is a terrific fit for the shade, it thrives in it and creates “compact mounds of gracefully arching foliage” that makes a nice accent along borders. Lady’s Mantle is great for “softening the edge of a shaded path or creating a groundcover” with its groups of chartreuse flowers and scalloped leaves.

Alyssum, they revealed, is a nice annual edging plant. With its compact design and dense spray of tiny pink, white, or lavender flowers, the alyssum makes quite a colorful bouquet of edging for your flower bed.

The thrift plant, “Covering itself with adorable bobbing pink flowers,”  makes a delightful edging plant or groundcover. This perennial has grassy foliage combined with little clusters of colorful flowers.

Some herbs like English lavender, sage, and thyme also make great edging plants. Other edible plants for edges and borders include strawberries and rhubarb.

 The Tulsa landscape design professionals at Oklahoma Landscape can help you design the perfect garden for your home. We can help you choose the edging plants that are right for your pathway or border to create a crisp, polished look for your Tulsa landscape.

Water Feature Ideas for Soothing Tulsa Outdoor Living

Don't you just love the calming sounds of water flowing through your garden? It's always a soothing feature of an outdoor living space in Tulsa. Many people are opting to build stunning and sometimes distinctive water features in their outdoor environments. Not only adding a relaxing character to the outdoor living area, water features also can become the focal point of the space and can entice colorful birds that help to invigorate the space even more. 

Especially if your Tulsa landscape has a slope or changes in its topography, a flowing stream and waterfall are perfect embellishments to your garden. Line the stream with vibrant native plants to provide more eye-catching interest, and you can create a beautiful path through your outdoor living space. As Better Homes and Gardens (BHG) noted, “Run your stream over different materials and at varying depths to create a variety of delightful gurgles.”

Water features and gardens with an Asian theme are becoming more prevalent as homeowners want a more tranquil tone in their outdoor space. Whether simply for pondering by the water or a space for entertaining, Asian-style water gardens offer an exclusive, Zen-like atmosphere. Using bamboo, arbors, wooden teahouses and bridges, and reflecting pools, you can bring your Japanese garden to life.

Adding Tulsa hardscapes around your water feature can really enrich your outdoor living experience. Building a pergola and seating area can help afford a place to relax and contemplate life while watching your water garden, which may be teaming with fish or surrounded by birds that flock to the colorful foliage nearby the water feature. An artful bridge offers an additional focal point across a stream or pond. A deck adjacent to a pond or other water feature provides a great place to unwind or entertain. Using various pavers and hardscapes in a variety of textures and shapes can create more appeal and charm in your water garden.

If you would like to start small, BHG recommended placing a water feature in a planting bed or even using a bowl filled with a miniature water lily to serve as an outdoor dining centerpiece.

Whether you would like a more formal water garden or something with a more relaxed, even country feel, the Tulsa landscape designers at Oklahoma Landscape can create the perfect outdoor living area for your lifestyle and home.

Fire Pits in Tulsa - Creating Relaxing Outdoor Entertaining Areas

A fire pit is just what Tulsa homeowners need to create an inviting and cozy spot for entertaining in your outdoor environment.

Tulsa fire pits can become a charming focal point for an outdoor area – bringing the whole area to life, so to speak, with their warm glow. You will need to check with your neighborhood and city officials for any codes or rules regarding building a fire pit or outdoor fireplace in your backyard.

These hardscapes can be custom-made using a wide selection of materials to add a distinctive character to the outdoor space while complementing the architecture and finish of the home and surrounding landscape.

What material you use, may be contingent on a variety of factors such as if you want a permanent or mobile fire pit, or if you want to use it for outdoor cooking. If you want a permanent fire pit for your Tulsa home, you’ll need to use a more durable material like stone, brick, or concrete.

Often, you can use a variety of materials to add more personality and create a more vibrant fire pit. Some types of fire pits, such as some gas ones, HGTVGardens noted, are not designated for cooking or will not support a grill. Sometimes an attached table or extra space that can be used as a table can be built with the fire pit allowing a place for easy dining. Many brick, stone, or cinder block fire pits, HGTVGardens said, are great for using with grills or rotisseries.

While the customary round fire pit design may come to mind, really fire pits can be formed into a variety of shapes like rectangular, square, and even L-shaped. Often built-in seating around the fire pit or a lounge area with chic outdoor sofas near the fire pit offers a peaceful place for friends to talk. Other times, homeowners may want a simpler look like Adirondack chairs to complement their classic fire pit look.

Fire pits built near the pool or spa area really enhance the feel of the outdoor environment and make the space great for entertaining any time of the year.

Spring is a great time to enjoy the warm glow of a fire pit amid the cool night air. Oklahoma Landscape’s hardscape experts can design and build the perfect fire pit for your Tulsa home.

Landscape Lighting in Tulsa - Bring New Light to Your Outdoor Environment

There are many reasons to add Tulsa landscape lighting to your outdoor environment. From the practical to the aesthetic, outdoor lighting offers a surplus of benefits. What are just a few ways that landscape lighting can help brighten and renew your Tulsa landscape?

Actually, when adding Tulsa outdoor lighting, most, if not all, of the practical advantages can also provide aesthetic benefits as well – if the landscape lighting is created in the right way. Thoughtful and carefully-planned landscape lighting is one key to great lighting. Careful lighting design is balanced and takes into account the effect and tone you want for your entire night outdoor landscape. To be balanced, you’ll want not only to light the exterior of your home, but also extend the visual depth with landscape lighting in trees and shrubs stretching out for a distance in front of your home.

On the other hand, less is sometimes more with outdoor lighting in Tulsa. While pathway lighting can offer both aesthetic and practical benefits, this lighting needs to softly guide visitors along a path and not look like a kind of runway. These gentle pathway lights can also be placed to brighten attention-grabbing and colorful plants along the path, thus adding a little more interest and color to your landscape that otherwise would be lost at night. Using environmentally-friendly and safe low voltage lighting is a great way to light these paths.

With the days getting warmer and longer, many Tulsa homeowners will be spending more time outside enjoying their outdoor environment on the weekends. However, what about during the week? Even though you may not get home until close to dark, there’s no reason you still can’t enjoy your outdoor space. Landscape lighting, including deck, patio, and hardscape lighting, can transform your outdoor environment, creating a brand new nighttime world. Accent and moon lighting can provide soft glow you need to comfortably enjoy your outdoor space.

With accent lighting, you can also illuminate interesting features in your landscape such as a statue or water feature, creating a focal point for your outdoor space.

There’s so many different things that can be done with Tulsa landscape lighting. While creating more function in your outdoor space, lighting can be done in such an artistic way that neighbors have to look twice as they pass by your home and landscape.

Our Tulsa landscape lighting design experts can create a lighting design that will be as functional as it is beautiful so that you can ‘find yourself outside’ any time of the day or night.

Tulsa Hardscapes - Creating Elegant Outdoor Environments

Often we hear the words “hardscape” and “hardscaping” used by Tulsa landscaping companies, but what are hardscapes and how can they be used in your outdoor environment?

Hardscape materials become the basis of a great Tulsa landscape. They are the inanimate, permanent features in your landscape – those made with pavers, stone, stone, wood, or brick. Used to build permanent structures, they help to stabilize your landscape and frequently provide the foundation for an outdoor environment like an outdoor kitchen or fireplace. In a small outdoor living space, hardscaping can provide the extra seating, dining, and cooking prep space you need to stylishly entertain guests.

With an almost infinite variety of shapes, textures, and colors, Tulsa hardscape materials can really set the tone for your Tulsa outdoor environment – from romantically elegant to modern urban designs. These materials can enhance and change the look of you property.

Tulsa Hardscapes such as pavers can easily expand your outdoor space creating a paver patio. These patios can become an addition of the home itself. That’s why it’s vital to consider the architecture and feel of your home when installing hardscapes so that the feel and tone of the hardscape complements that of the home and the rest of the landscape.

Hardscape materials help you visually divide a landscape. A pergola or other outdoor structure can aid in separating an outdoor kitchen or dining area from the rest of the outdoor living space while providing some much-needed shade. Permanent outdoor seating can be built to encircle an outdoor fireplace. Retaining walls can divide various sections of a property, even creating different levels for a landscape. Stone walls add charm and character while providing privacy.


Water features help to create a beautiful focal point for your landscape. Built using a variety of textured hardscape materials, water features bring color and interest to your Tulsa outdoor environment.

And, of course, a walkway or path of hardscape materials like stone or concrete pads kindly welcomes guests to your home or guides them to your backyard.

The Tulsa hardscape experts at Oklahoma Landscape are adept at designing and building the right hardscapes for your landscape to perfectly complement your home, the topography of your land, and how you want to use your outdoor environment.

Summer Staycations - Made Custom By the Premier Tulsa Landscaping Company

Even before spring gets here, Tulsa homeowners are now planning for summer – planning their summer vacations, home improvement projects, and even “staycations.” Why take a staycation? And what can Tulsa’s Oklahoma Landscape do to give you the ideal summer staycation spot?

Staycations became widespread when the economy took a downturn, but even with the country’s economy on the rise, many have seen the benefits of a staycation. Not only is there the reprieve from packing and traveling through busy airports, but there are also the obvious economic advantages. Many have decided to invest the money they would have spent on a luxury vacation into creating an indulgent retreat right at their home. As an investment, these home-based retreats add significant property value and curb appeal to the Tulsa home. 

But what kind of retreat is possible? Just about anything you could want. That’s where the Tulsa landscaping company Oklahoma Landscape comes in. We can create the one-of-a-kind vacation retreat you’ve always dreamed of, and all in your own backyard. We also provide numerous other hardscaping, landscaping, irrigation, drainage, lawn care, drainage, and landscape lighting services.

With Tulsa outdoor environment staycations, we can design and build an outdoor kitchen complete with state-of-the-art outdoor appliances like refrigerators, grills, pizza ovens, burners, sinks, and more. You can have bar seating attached, creating the perfect entertaining spot, along with extra cabinet and storage areas so you have all your prep and cooking utensils right at hand. Many have a stylish dining area nearby to bring the whole outdoor living space together. 

Custom outdoor fireplaces and fire pits offer an excellent way to stay warm during the chilly spring or fall nights while providing a cozy spot for chatting with friends. Combined with all-weather outdoor sofas, coffee tables, and chairs, these outdoor living areas give Tulsa homeowners all the comforts of the home outside. 

Relaxing swimming pools and in-ground spas customized to your home and family needs add the finishing touch to any outdoor environment. Paver patios create the ideal foundation for these stylish outdoor living spaces. 

We also offer custom Tulsa hardscaping to build retaining walls, decks, walkways, bridges, and patios that are not only practical but add the design details that make your outdoor living space come together. 

Landscaping is at the center of what we do. We strive to bring out all the beauty that nature provides and create living works of art that Tulsa homeowners can enjoy for years to come. The basis of great landscaping includes keeping your lawn healthy, vibrant, and lush. That’s why Oklahoma Landscape offers a custom 6-step lawn fertilization and weed control program to make sure your lawn has the nutrients it needs to be ready for summer. These Tulsa fertilization and weed control programs are beginning now as the grass prepares for spring growth. Overseeding and aeration are also important aspects of turf care. 

Oklahoma Landscape also offers commercial and residential Tulsa lawn maintenance to relieve business and homeowners of the worry and hassle of regular lawn care. 

From designing luxury outdoor living spaces to creating custom irrigation and drainage solutions and everything in between, we can deliver all the Tulsa landscape design and build services you need to create the perfect home and the perfect summer staycation spot.