Woodscaping Makes Maintaining Your Yard Easier—Here’s How to Try It

Cut back on mowing and pulling weeds this year by incorporating more wooden hardscapes into your yard.

If you’re looking for ways to cut down on mowing and lawn maintenance, woodscaping might be the perfect trend for you. While No Mow May might give you a reason to cut back on yard maintenance for part of the summer, incorporating woodscaping can help you permanently scale back how much work your yard requires year-round.

Plus, woodscaping can make your yard more functional and easier to enjoy by adding shade or convenient walking paths. Take a look at what your landscape might be missing and use these woodscaping ideas as inspiration to solve your yard maintenance problems.

What Is Woodscaping?

Woodscaping is a form of hardscaping, or building features into your yard like walkways, walls, decks, patios, and more. But as the name suggests, instead of stone or other materials, woodscaping uses wood for any extra built-ins. Wood tends to give your yard a more natural appearance and helps blend with other aspects of your landscape like trees and shrubs.

Depending on what you choose to add, woodscaping might also help you cut down on yard maintenance. Adding a wood-plank pathway, small gazebo, or deck can help decrease the amount of mowing you’ll need to do (and reduce the number of opportunities for weeds to sprout up). Woodscaping can also be as simple as creating a few framed garden beds to start your own veggie garden or plant pollinator-friendly flowers in the middle of an otherwise traditional lawn.

What to Consider Before Trying Woodscaping

Keep in mind that any wood elements you incorporate into your yard will need their own maintenance. In order to stay in good condition, you’ll need to stain features like decks every two or three years to prevent rot. Still, the trade-off of maintenance every few years compared to slashing your mowing time every week in the summer can add up to a significant amount of time saved—time you can spend enjoying your yard instead of working on it.

How to Bring Woodscaping to Your Yard

One of the quickest and simplest ways to start woodscaping is adding in a garden path or walkway. Try using connected wood planks for a boardwalk-style feature, or simplify woodscaping even further and simply add a wood mulch path. Using mulch is a lower-maintenance, sustainable option, and you can simply refresh it when needed with fresh mulch.

Another weekend project is building and installing a few raised garden beds framed with wood. At first glance, these might seem to add to your yard maintenance, but the benefits of garden beds more than make up for a little extra weeding. Not only can you grow veggies, herbs, and fruits in your yard in place of grass, but you can also make your landscape more attractive and natural by planting native flowers or other low-maintenance perennials.

For a more permanent woodscape feature, add more seating to your yard with a deck, or extra shade with a pergola or covered gazebo. These projects are bigger undertakings, but they have the advantage of adding more function to your landscape (and increasing the value of your home). And if one of your goals is to ultimately cut down on maintenance, adding a larger feature like a deck can drastically decrease the amount of yard work you’ll need to do to keep your landscape looking manicured.

Still, you don’t have to dive straight into a huge project to try out woodscaping. Starting small, with something as simple as adding a wooden bench or two to your yard, allows you to experiment with woodscaping without committing to an extensive project.

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