Is anybody noticing your signage?
Or are they driving right by?
The best way to boost your signage visibility is with great landscaping that attracts attention.
How can landscaping around a business sign boost its visibility and make passers-by want to see more?
So many ways. Colorful flowers automatically grab attention. Adding shrubs to signs expands your signage footprint, making it seem bigger. Skilled lighting design ensures everybody sees your signs — day and night. Intriguing, well-maintained landscape design makes a great first impression for your commercial property.
Mostly, great landscaping design around signs makes sure you get as many eyes on your signage as possible. That’s a win.
Get ready to learn more about:
The impact of color
Why you should consider all four seasons
How to add interest with shrubs
How to refresh dated signage landscaping with a more modern look
Why lighting matters
Budget-conscious and sustainable signage landscaping
The importance of keeping it tidy
1. The Impact of Color
Color is a great go-to strategy for signage landscaping at the entrance of an apartment complex, HOA, office building or shopping center. Color attracts attention, whether with annual flowers, colorful perennials or blooming shrubs.
When people pause, impressed by the hot pink Sunpatiens or vivid red begonias, they’ll see your signage, too.
Tried and true colorful summer annuals include petunias, begonia, vinca, and lantana, all attention-getters for business signage landscaping.
Not all colorful plants are flowers. ‘FlameThrower’ coleus offers striking, exotic colorful foliage perfect for landscape design around signs.
But business signage landscaping plants need to multi-task, offering more than just color. They also need to be tough, and often drought tolerant. So when the pros choose plants for color, we’re looking for other qualities, too.
These plants add attention-attracting color to your signage, but can also stand up to tough conditions:
Nepeta
This landscaping signage star offers beautiful and fragrant deep lavender blooms all summer long, but is also low maintenance, attracts butterflies, tolerates drought and is deer resistant.
Variegated Liriope
Variegated liriope ground cover adds bright yellow stripes to the landscape, but also offers year-round interest as an evergreen, blooms in the summer and is low maintenance.
Sedum ‘Angelina’
This powerhouse groundcover adds dazzle with colors from chartreuse to golden yellow. It spreads quickly as a drought-tolerant groundcover, offering bright yellow star-like flowers in summer and orange foliage in autumn, adding huge appeal to landscaping around signage.
2. Consider All Four Seasons
Sure, bright red tulips and yellow daffodils planted in huge masses look great in the spring, and purple and pink petunias pop in the summer, but you want your signage to stand out all year long.
That’s why it’s important to include plants that attract attention to your business signage landscaping in fall and winter, too.
- Pansies, violas, and panolas (a cross between the two) are a fall color staple available in a rainbow of colors.
Ornamental cabbage and kale add interest with their ruffly texture. - Dwarf Nandina ‘Gulf Stream’ is a hardy evergreen that offers year-round interest, bright red new growth and red foliage in the fall.
- Mums are the fluffy showstoppers of fall, exploding in vibrant color and keeping your business signage landscaping captivating through autumn’s chill.
- Evergreens, frilly ornamental grasses and evergreen shrubs with unique form offer winter interest.
Plan for new flowers in March, May, and September to keep your business signage landscaping color show going.
3. Add Interest With Shrubs
Adding shrubs to each side of a sign makes the sign itself seem bigger, giving it more impact.
Shrubs ground signage, giving it a sense of place.
A few shrubs that can stand up to the often tough conditions of business signage landscaping:
- Boxwood offers impressive dark green foliage and can be pruned tight for a formal look or left unpruned for a more natural look.
- American holly boasts spiny dark green leaves and bright red berries and its a native evergreen, which automatically makes it a sturdy standout in landscape design around signs.
- Devilwood has pretty clusters of tiny creamy white flowers. Then, its dense foliage and glossy leaves provide nice fall and winter interest — perfect for business signage landscaping.
4. Refresh Dated Signage Landscaping with a More Modern Look
If your signage still sports decade-old junipers, nobody’s noticing them anymore. That’s not good.
Modern landscape design uses a much more captivating combination of flowering shrubs and trees, perennials and ornamental grasses.
Level Green landscape architect Richard Sweeney designs business signage landscaping with interesting layered looks, with shorter plants like ground covers or low perennials near the foreground, slightly taller plants in the middle, and taller shrubs, graceful ornamental grasses or trees for the back.
Are you overdue for an update?
5. Don’t Forget Lighting
Even if your sign has lighted lettering, don’t forget to light the landscaping around a business sign, too. Lighting plants adds drama and impact.
Level Green crews take care to choose plants that won’t block existing lighting, or, if necessary, we move lighting so it isn’t impaired by the larger plants we install.
6. Budget-Conscious and Sustainable Business Signage Landscaping
If all this sounds pretty expensive, it doesn’t have to be.
Level Green account manager Tyler Kreft brought a smart signage solution to a HOA customer frustrated with the expense of maintaining high-maintenance colorful annual flowers at multiple signs throughout the development.
Annuals offer a fantastic color show, Kreft says, but they also need lots of water, weeding, fertilizing, and they need to be replaced at least twice a year.
He suggested replacing the fussier flowers with lower maintenance perennials and ornamental grasses, and implementing some easy care xeriscaping with river rock and accent boulders.
Pretty perennial flowers and graceful grasses still attract attention to the HOA’s significant signage, with less maintenance and expense.
This smart solution does double duty: it saves money and it gets an A for sustainability, using less water and fertilizer.
The interest in native plants for commercial landscape design — another environmentally friendly choice — has exploded over the past few years and work great for signage.
Native plants are hardy and less susceptible to pests and diseases. Once they’re established, they typically need less water than non-natives.
7. Keep It Tidy
Once you install your attention-getting signage landscaping, don’t forget about it. Proper maintenance is as important as installation.
Mulch will help keep the weeds under control, retain moisture and create a neat look.
Regular professional maintenance will ensure your landscaping plants stay healthy, weed-free and don’t grow so tall they block your signage or the lighting fixtures that illuminate it.
Trust Your Property’s Signage To Level Green
At Level Green Landscaping, we’re experts in commercial landscaping. That’s what we do. We know how important it is to attract customers, visitors, tenants and clients, and your signage has to make a great first impression.
Our pros know all the best tips and tricks for landscaping around signage. Let us show you.
We provide commercial landscaping design services in DC, Maryland and Virginia. Level Green Landscaping services commercial properties like office buildings, homeowner associations (HOAs), mixed use, condominiums, retail, institutions and government entities.
Contact us today at 202-544-0968 or by filling out our form online. We’d love to hear from you.
