10 ways to brighten up your garden

Want to create beautiful surroundings without spending a fortune? Here are some ways to make a grand impression with just a few hours of work and without busting your budget.

It takes only one large-leaved or big flowering plant to create a striking focal point. Opt for sizable plants like Sum & Substance hosta, elephant's ears, Annabelle hydrangea and shrub roses to fill up a lot of ground without a lot of backbreaking hole-digging.

Tuck evergreens — such as glossy-leaved boxwood and holly, pyramidal pines, threadleaf false cypress, globular arborvitae and spreading junipers — into your landscape design. They'll look great from spring to fall, and will, most importantly, supply verdant colour and notable structure to winter landscapes.

Set up trellises, obelisks, lattice panels and bamboo or twig tepees to draw the eye skyward — and as portends of clambering vines to come.

Show people where to enter by installing an arbour at the end of your front walkway. Or frame the walkway with a pair of urns planted with statuesque topiaries.

Beef up interest by adding a weeping cherry tree, pencil-thin dwarf junipers, a Japanese maple with brilliant foliage, and shrubs that boast variegated, chartreuse or purple leaves.

Freshen up tired landscapes by spreading shredded bark, wood nuggets or shredded leaves around the plants in your borders. Use decorative-stone or recycled-glass mulches over weed-barrier fabrics to anchor birdbaths or other freestanding garden ornaments or to edge small ponds and rock gardens.

Break up sweeps of boring lawn by adding an island bed planted with a stately dwarf evergreen or flowering shrub. Surround the centrepiece plant with perennials for every season and vivacious annuals. Ring the bed with bricks or paving stones to set it apart.

Create scintillating swaths of colour by massing annuals, such as hot-pink petunias, scarlet impatiens, bright-yellow marigolds or periwinkle lobelia, through the garden or along the edges of borders and walkways.

Assemble container-grown gardens on benches or vintage wire plant stands for eye-catching groupings; dress up a front or back stairway by setting a pot of flowers on each step.

Bring your indoor plants outside, and arrange them around the patio or deck or nestle them in perennial borders. Add an exotic air with potted cannas, banana plants, cold-tender hibiscus, sago palms, rangy bamboo or leafy dracana plants.