If you are willing to wait, then younger, well spaced plants can dramatically reduce your landscaping costs. Get multiple written bids on all hardscaping projects.

What’s it going to cost to Landscape?
On average, plants make up about 25 percent of the average cost of landscaping. The remaining costs are taken up by hardscaping, which includes brick or stone walls, paths, ponds, etc.

How much you spend on landscaping depends on the following:

1. Are doing it to sell or rent a house or just to enjoy it yourself?
2. The scope of work- does it include both hardscape and plants or just plants or hardscape?
3. How large is the area?,
4. How long you are willing to wait for results? and
5. How much you are willing to do yourself

For example $100 worth of top soil, mulch and some colorful flowers can perk up a tiny city house’s front yard. You can easily do this yourself. However, the backyard is much more important, so that’s where to put your money and efforts. A well landscaped backyard sells houses and is a source of relaxation for city dwellers.

If you are in the suburbs, add some shrubs and a lot more mulch and, for $2,000 to $3,000, a ranch, split level or colonial is ready for sale. You should be able to able to recoup that easily. If you have the garden center deliver the mulch and plants and do it yourself, you can probably cut the cost in half.

Someone who has settled into a multimillion-dollar executive estate and hopes to enjoy it for years can spend another $1 million on trees, decks, patios, paths, maybe a pool--and whole lot more mulch.

Landscaping Costs vary widely
In the Washington DC area, residential landscaping projects average between $30,000 to $50,000. That usually includes a plan, a patio, deck and outdoor lighting as well as the plants and trees on a 10,000 to 20,000 square foot lot with a house worth more than $800,000.

How long you are willing to wait for results will affect the plant and tree budget. If you need results right away, you will need larger plants and trees. That translates into higher prices. When you add the cost to actually plant a tree (minimally an additional 60 percent of the cost of the tree), things get expensive fast.

Landscaping reality check
Okay, so there are $50,000 landscaping jobs, and then there's your landscaping job. In Washington DC, we spent $31,000 on:

• new concrete double car driveway,
• a flagstone entrance path on concrete
• pointing and capping a flagstone wall
• a backyard path
• brick retainer wall, and
• new chimney.

We didn't go overboard either. In fact, we were willing to wait and bought smaller plants and trees. See for yourself.

When you add plantings, you’re in the neighbor of an additional $9,000. That includes reseeding the front lawn, plants, trees, etc. We supervised and did most of the work and had our own crew.

Estimating Costs before you start
Modest plantings along the front of a house can range from $7 per square foot to the upper teens. The lower price reflects young, spaced-out plants while the higher range means multiple layers of plants. Our house had multiple layers of plants and was about 6-7 feet wide.

To give yourself a preliminary idea of plant costs, measure the length of the house front and multiply that number by how deep a planting bed (how many layers) you want. Multiply that square footage by a dollar amount; $10 a square foot is about average. So if your bed is 25 feet long and you want a 4 foot wide bed that's 100 square feet x $10 or a $1,000. Any specimen trees will be priced separately. Use $7 per square foot if you are going to do it yourself and a lower figure if you are going to buy younger plants. See our tips on how to select flowers, shrubs and trees.

Always get several bids
Years ago a University of Maryland student asked six contracting firms for price estimates on three garden plans. He got wildly varying estimates--from $6,522 to $11,180 for one plan. Industry-wide, landscapers say they use 10 percent of the value of a house as a rule of thumb for the cost of doing an entire yard.

Consider just contracting out the hardscaping part of the project and anything that involves larger trees. Don't be afraid to get your hands dirty. Do the planting yourself and reap the landscaping health and emotional benefits.

How to get it done cheaper
Smaller, younger plant material, compared with more mature plants will drive costs down. So will substituting a stone retaining wall with a less-expensive timber retainer or with a brick one.

Two books that address the budget issues and provide the detail necessary to complete a project all for less than the cost of two lattes at your favorite coffee house are:

• The Budget Gardener: Twice the Garden for Half the Price and
• Makeovers from the Budget Gardener: Transforming Your Garden in Just One Season

Maureen "Mo" Gilmer authored both books. Maureen is the host of Weekend Gardening on the DIY Network now in its fourth season. Her website MoPlants contains some terrific resources that are free. Closeup Photographs of flowers are courtesy of Maureen MO Gilmer, MoPlants.com.