Swimming Pool Planting Tips

Safety, privacy, placement, access, maintenance. There's a lot to consider when installing a swimming pool in your yard. And of course, landscaping and planting around your swimming pool will demand some thought as well. The planting ideas you choose can serve different roles around pools but need to be chosen wisely.

From a maintenance point of view, evergreen or semi-evergreen plant varieties should be your first choice when choosing garden plants for around swimming areas. The fewer leaves dropped means the less you'll have to clean out of your skimmer or off the bottom of your pool. Not to mention the daily clean up if you're creating any deck plans or or patio areas.

Choose trees of a broad leaf evergreen nature over diciduous, fruit, or even conifer needle leaf evergreens. Needle leaf varieties still make quite a mess at different times of the year. Try not to include fruit trees in your design ideas. They are messy as well as being insect and bee magnets. And diciduous trees, even though they're great for shade in some designs and plans, simply drop too many leaves to be good ideas for plants around swimming pools.

Another major consideration about trees is their root systems at maturity. They can cause serious damage to structural and mechanical features of the pool. To be sure on this one you may want to call your County Extension Agent, a landscape contractor or designer, and even look at long time established swimming spots in your area.

NOTE: Also see the original gallery of pictures at Swimming Pools. In a way, the old gallery is better than this one as it has more residential applications and much more detail.

For more pictures and design ideas on a wide variety of design styles see The Pictures Gallery. For complete plan ideas from some of my own designs see Free plans and ideas. And for a list of over 120 design plans see Garden