The Ultimate Guide to Commercial Landscape Enhancements in D.C., Maryland & Virginia

When you want to boost your commercial property landscaping, making it safer, more appealing and ready to wow, it’s time for landscape enhancements. 

What are enhancements?

Anything above and beyond your regular landscape maintenance visits that add curb appeal, function, safety  and value to your property.

Some enhancements are all about safety, like trimming dangerously dangling tree branches or repairing crumbling hardscape. 

Others are all about appeal — adding fun amenities that encourage people to gather at your place, from flickering fire pits to multi-use outdoor stages with festive lighting. 

Bright and beautiful flowers are a landscape enhancement. So is an appealing outdoor employee break area. Or a nature-inspired walking trail. So is improved drainage. (Less fun, maybe, but definitely a crucial improvement.) 

You get the idea. When you add enhancements, your property becomes safer, more intriguing, more fun, more attractive. More valuable. 

There are lots of enhancements to explore, so let’s get right to it. 

Get ready to jot some notes. You’ll want some of these.

TABLE OF CONTENTS 
Add Instant Impact with Colorful Flowers
Safety: Prioritizing Commercial Landscape Enhancements
Hardscape Repair
Fixing Drainage Issues
Repairing High Traffic Areas
Fun Amenities People Love
Perennial Plantings
Rejuvenation Pruning
Tree Care
Turf Renovation
Holiday Décor
Sustainability Solutions
Budget Worksheets Help You Plan
Why Your Landscaping Company Should Also Install Your Enhancements

Add Instant Impact with Colorful Flowers 

Bright and beautiful flowers top our list for good reason — nothing makes an impact in your commercial property landscaping like bountiful begonias, a multitude of mums and the exotic intrigue of tropical plants.  

Eye-catching flowers gracing your signage, lining your walkways, and flanking your entrances are a cheerful welcome to everybody who steps foot on your property. They impress.

And they bring big rewards for you as they attract attention and bring tenants to your property. Everybody notices flowers. You’ll get your money’s worth. 

Seasonal flowers offer automatic curb appeal that make you stand out from your competitors. Do it right, and you might even end up on Instagram. 

How to do it right?

Hit All the Seasons

Change your flowers throughout the year, as the seasons change.

Daffodils and tulips are stunning in your spring landscape, especially when planted in huge masses for big impact. You can spend a couple hundred dollars and have a hundred or 200 tulips at your entrance.

When those spring flowers fade, no worries. Summer flowers really shine, from petunias and begonia to vinca and lantana. 

Go Tropical

Stunning exotic tropical plants automatically attract attention — after all, you don’t see them every day around here.
 
Think of tropicals as upscale annuals, adding exotic drama and a vacation vibe to your Washington DC commercial property landscaping.
 
Palm trees? Absolutely. Banana trees boast huge, impressive leaves that make people look twice. 

Nobody can ignore the exotic bird of paradise, with its distinctive orange crane-like flowers and big glossy blue-green leaves.
Then, wait for the wows. 

Make Way for Mums

Fall and winter bring new flower possibilities for Maryland commercial landscape enhancements. 

Mums are the fluffy showstoppers of fall, exploding in vibrant color and keeping your commercial property captivating right through autumn’s chill. Add some ruffly ornamental kale and your high-impact landscaping continues to impress. 

Be Different 

Try something new. Exciting new plants make your property stand out from your
competitors. 

When everybody else is using the same pink petunias from six years ago, you can go bold with palms, colorful coleus, bright begonias, and stunning new varieties of salvia. 

Add Flower Impact Where It Counts

Think about the places people see first, and that starts with colorful masses of flowers people can admire from the street.
  
Add impact at your signage, your doorways, your walkways, your HOA common areas.

Not sure where flowers will make the most impact? We’re happy to help. (That’s one reason you partner with expert commercial landscaping services.)

Use the Power of Pots 

Don’t ignore the big impact of container gardens for commercial landscapes. 

Think big. The larger the pot, the more plants you can fit in. That means more opportunity for drama, like tall, graceful ornamental grasses or a spectacular flowering cherry tree. 

Remember the importance of changing flowers with the seasons? Same for planters. Keep the creativity going. 

Show Off Your Brand or a Custom Message 

Flowers can make your personal brand shine — take advantage of it with innovative commercial landscaping design ideas that are uniquely you. 

Be creative. Use flowers in custom colors to match your university, your city flag or your company logo. They won’t look like anybody else’s.

Celebrating a special anniversary? Spell out the number in flowers at your entrance. Who wouldn’t notice a giant 25 in bright red begonias?

You get the idea. Flowers matter. 

Safety: Prioritizing Commercial Landscape Enhancements 

Flowers are fantastic, but it’s smart to prioritize landscape enhancement services that keep your commercial property safe.

Safety is a top priority for Level Green account managers, who keep a proactive eye on your property, noticing potential safety concerns and suggesting the commercial landscape enhancements to fix them before they create real hazards on your site. 

 
What kind of services? Check out a few:

Tend to Tree Branches

Weak or damaged tree branches can crash to the ground, injuring people or damaging cars. You don’t need that liability worry.

It’s important to proactively prune and thin tree branches so they stay sturdy and healthy.

If you have trees that pose a risk factor, we let you know throughout the year, so we can stay on top of these overhead safety concerns. 

Low Spots in Turf

A low spot in your property’s turf can cause pedestrians to trip and fall or twist their ankle. Turf repair involves filling in low areas with soil to level the ground, then seeding or installing sod.

Hardscape Repair

Nature is trying really hard to mess up your hardscape. Don’t let it get out of hand. 

Over time, tree roots can crack concrete walkways. Moss and weeds sneak in between pavers. Poor water drainage causes pavers to sink. Freezing and thawing make small cracks bigger. 

And these problems won’t go away if you ignore them. 

If you don't fix cracks or sunken hardscape, not only does it look terrible, but you also have a dangerous tripping hazard and liability worries.

Fixing hardscape problems is among the most important safety-related commercial landscape enhancements, so that cracks don’t spread, chips don’t get bigger and sunken areas don’t sink even further. 

Fixing Drainage Issues 

It doesn’t take a huge amount of water to cause serious damage to your commercial property. 

If water isn’t draining properly, the build-up can cause damaging mold and mildew and cracks in your building, driveways and sidewalks. Even pests like rodents and bugs can show up, attracted by the moisture. 

Excess water causes serious damage to your landscaping, too, leading to weakened plants and ugly decay. Saturated soil can suffocate plant roots and promote fungus.

It’s just water. But when it pools up and doesn’t drain, it’s bad news. 

Luckily, there are plenty of commercial drainage solutions, including regrading, French drains, rain gardens and retention and detention ponds. 

Catch excess water problems on your property early, and you’ll avoid major repair costs, insurance headaches and stress. Even better, plan ahead with your commercial landscaping services by ensuring that your property can handle excess water. 

Repairing High Traffic Areas 

Despite your best efforts, sometimes people walk where they really shouldn’t. 

Commercial properties often have areas where lots of people walk through, from  entrances and exits to outdoor gathering places. 

Do you have trampled landscaping? Dead grass where people keep cutting through?

What to do about it? Try these commercial landscaping design ideas: 

• Install sturdy groundcover you can walk on, like creeping thyme and sidewalk moss.
• Use prickly plants like thorny barberry to direct foot traffic away from landscaped beds, encouraging people to use an existing path, please. Hedges or rows of shrubs can do the trick, too.
• Pavers provide an obvious path, easily directing people where you’d like them to go.
• Big landscaping boulders can direct foot traffic and serve as a design element at the same time. 

Fun Amenities People Love

Everybody loves fun. 

When you’re brainstorming commercial landscaping design ideas, think about amenities that create a fun, vibrant atmosphere that make people want to show up — then stay a while. 

High-end, mixed-use developments where people live, work, shop and dine are pros at this concept, creating a sense of community with open-air stages, bocce ball courts, dog parks and full calendars of appealing events. 

Families and friends gather at these happy hubs for everything from painting sessions to live music and comedy to girls’ nights out as people cluster around flickering fire pits for movies, wine, and s’mores. 

Washington DC commercial landscaping services can set you up with fun enhancements like putting greens, corn hole boards and fire pits. Add twinkling white lights overhead for extra festive appeal after dark. 

Suddenly, you have an irresistible gathering place where everybody wants to hang out. Then, as they linger, they’ll shop and dine.

Appealing amenities are just as important in the workplace these days. More and more employers are encouraging workers to duck outdoors for quick rejuvenating walks, lunch breaks in the breeze and sunny brainstorming sessions surrounded by begonias and butterflies. Add a fire pit, an outdoor ping pong table, maybe a scenic walking trail and you’ve added an outdoor break space that not only boosts workplace morale — it makes workers want to stick around.

These fun amenities are also great additions to HOAs and condos, increasing property value and attracting new homeowners.

Perennial Plantings 

Annuals often get all the glory in commercial property landscaping, but perennials are the hard-working backbone of your flower beds. 

While annuals live for just one growing season, perennial plants live for multiple years, typically returning each spring. 

Choose low-maintenance perennials to anchor your planting beds and you get lots of benefits: reduced water usage, less pruning, fewer fertilizers, and less time-consuming maintenance.

Maybe you’re frustrated with the expense of maintaining colorful annual flowers at your HOA, your office building landscaping, or at multiple signs throughout your commercial property. Or you like the cost savings of plants that come back reliably every year. 

Replace fussier annual flowers with lower maintenance pretty perennials like day lilies, hosta, sedum and graceful ornamental grasses. They’ll still 
attract attention to your property, with less maintenance and expense. 

Perennials also require less maintenance and resources compared to annuals, which need to be replanted every year. 

Rejuvenation Pruning

While you weren’t looking, your shrubs kept growing. 

Trees and shrubs that get too overgrown and gangly detract from your curb appeal but they’re a safety issue, too, blocking your signage or lighting.

Time for rejuvenation pruning, an expert commercial landscape enhancement that removes old, overgrown limbs so that your shrubs can grow new, vigorous branches.
 
Winter is a great time for this skilled pruning, when your trees and shrubs are dormant. When commercial landscaping services crews head out with the pruning shears to shape and thin, it’s better for plant health to prune during dormancy than during prime growing months.

Tree Care 

The more trees you have in your commercial property landscaping, the more you should plan ahead — and budget — for their care.

As your trees age, their canopies get denser and branches get thicker. Dead or dying branches can tumble, causing significant damage and liability concerns. Routine tree pruning takes those dangerous branches out before they fall.

Are you adding up the cost in your head? If you have 50 or 100 trees on your property, pruning them all at once can really bust your budget.

There’s smarter solution: Level Green account managers work with customers to create a manageable commercial tree pruning plan and budget.

How does that work? Crews can tend to 20 trees a year over the next five years. That makes the cost much more manageable for your budget than pruning 100 trees at once.

Many trees also benefit from raising their canopies — thinning branches to let more sunlight through so the turf or plants below can get the light they need to thrive. 

Set aside money in your landscaping budget to manage tree needs. It’s one of the smartest commercial landscape enhancements. Then work with your account manager to create a plan over time to spread out the cost.

Turf Renovation

How does your lawn look? Full and thriving, or thin and patchy?

If you feel like you’re doing everything right out there, but your lawn is still struggling, your soil might be dense and compacted. That means the water, air, and nutrients your lawn needs can’t make their way through, so your grass struggles.

Turf renovation to the rescue.

A turf renovation is a commercial landscape enhancement that includes aeration, overseeding and fresh, nutritious topsoil to help bring your lackluster lawn back to life. 

Aeration uses a machine to pull out tiny cores of soil from your lawn, loosening that compacted soil and allowing water and oxygen to get to the roots. Suddenly, your struggling lawn can breathe again. 

Next up: two more important steps. 

After aeration, Level Green crews will add compost to the soil, called topdressing. This rich mixture will boost the soil, adding nutrients and improving its structure. 

And all those little holes created by aeration are the perfect environment for growing grass seed — the seed can snuggle down into the holes for the seed to soil contact it needs for quick germination.

This turf care combo is one of the smartest landscape upgrades for commercial properties — it gets you on your way to a thicker, greener, healthier lawn. 

Another step in lawn renovation, if your lawn needs it, is adding lime to bring your soil pH into balance.

Important nutrients for grass are available in soil when the pH is at the right level. If your pH is off, your grass won’t get the nutrients it needs, even if you fertilize regularly.

When your soil pH is too low, it’s time for lime, a soil amendment made from ground limestone rock, which contains calcium carbonate and magnesium carbonate.

Add lime to your soil, and these compounds increase the soil's pH, making soil less acidic and more alkaline. Then your soil can use the nutrients in your fertilizer, and flourish.

Holiday Decor That Sparkles

How to make your commercial property landscaping shine for the holidays?

So many ways: 

• Wrapping your property’s trees with lights transforms them into something special and magical.
• Add lights to your roof line, doorways, lamp posts, and on huge wreaths. No such thing as too much sparkle.
• Make your courtyard or lobby a festive feast for the eyes with huge holiday trees. Choose a tree with its root ball intact and wrapped, instead of a cut tree, and commercial landscaping services crews will plant it on your property after the holidays.
• Treat your decorative pots, planters and window boxes to a festive facelift for the holidays. Add wintry twigs and berries, then deck them out with twinkling lights.
• Indoors, pile on the pretty poinsettias in varying heights and colors for your lobby and entrances. 

Sustainability Solutions 

Sustainability is a popular buzzword these days, but it’s more than that. It’s a smart strategy. 

Maybe your goal is LEED certification. Or maybe you just want to use less water and fewer chemicals and know that you’re using native plants and supporting local wildlife. 

Look to a variety of sustainable commercial landscape enhancements that will make you feel good about your commercial property landscaping: 

Native Plants 

Native plants are more popular than ever, for their low maintenance, their water-saving qualities and the tasty buffet they offer to struggling pollinators who could use a helping hand.  

Rain Gardens

A rain garden is a shallow depression that’s planted with deep-rooted native plants and grasses. It encourages stormwater to soak slowly into the ground — not rush into the nearest storm drain.

A rain garden’s soil filters oil, grease, and other pollutants before slowly releasing the cleaner water into the water table.

These hardworking features are also among the prettiest Maryland commercial landscaping design ideas. Bonus: Many local municipalities will provide tax credits when you install rain gardens, so it can literally be free to do.

Green Roofs

A green roof is covered or partially covered with growing plants and can be a great landscape upgrade for commercial properties.

They absorb a lot of the heat in the summer, so you use less air conditioning, and less energy, inside. Green roofs also help absorb water, so you have less polluting runoff for more eco-friendly landscaping.
 
Your commercial landscaping services company can create a garden on your roof that saves energy, minimizes stormwater runoff, helps cool the city, and offers a bit of beautiful green calm. That’s a win, times four.

Permeable Pavers

These smart pavers allow rainwater to seep through your hardscape, rather than pool and flood your property. 

Pollutants build up on solid surfaces like concrete and asphalt. Petroleum products, chemicals, fertilizers, and other contaminants accumulate on the surface. 
Then, when it rains, these pollutants wash off and enter the stormwater system and the environment.

Permeable pavers reduce the overall run-off of storm water on your Virginia commercial property landscaping. 

Smart Irrigation

That healthy green turf that lends such a boost to your business curb appeal takes water to thrive. Make sure you’re not wasting any. 

A smart irrigation controller takes charge of efficient, weather-based watering that makes sure your turf gets exactly the water it needs, with no waste. It’s one of the smartest landscape upgrades for commercial properties when it comes to sustainability. 

You save water because your smart controller is monitoring weather conditions all the time. If it’s raining, it won’t turn on. If it’s too cold, and the water might freeze, it won’t turn on. 

Another benefit to smart irrigation: it senses if there’s a problem with your irrigation system, and alerts you. If there’s an electrical issue, a leak, or if anything isn’t quite right, you and your landscaping company find out about it, and can initiate repairs, before your grass has a chance to dry up and die, or you waste valuable water. 

It’s called smart for a reason. 

Meanwhile, you don’t have to continually monitor your properties’ irrigation schedules. Cross that off your list. 

Budget Worksheets Help You Plan

That’s a lot of potential commercial landscape enhancements.

How much will they cost? How should you prioritize? How do you plan for them in your landscaping budget?

Budget worksheets are a huge help. 
 
Level Green Landscaping account managers prepare annual budget worksheets for clients to help plan their commercial landscaping budgets, including landscape enhancement services. 

The worksheets help property managers prioritize services: Safety concerns first. Utility needs second. Beauty third. Landscape enhancements fall under all three of those categories, from tree pruning for safety to seasonal color flowers for beauty.

The worksheets are a helpful starting point, as you build a road map to improving your property. Then, budgets can be adjusted based on current needs. 

The worksheets guide you in how much you’ll need to spend each year in addition to your regular maintenance contract. Line items are listed for each month throughout the year so you can plan.

Landscape upgrades for commercial properties might include tree pruning and elevation for sites that have a lot of mature trees, or an outdoor break area for a business interested in attracting and retaining quality employees.

Level Green account managers present the handy budget worksheets in plenty of time for customers’ budget planning for the next fiscal year, in late June for clients working on their budgets in August. 

Why Your Landscaping Company Should Also Install Your Enhancements 

When your landscape maintenance team is out on your property week after week, they really get to know the place.
 
So, when it’s time to add commercial landscape enhancements to make your prime property even better, they’re the perfect team for the job. 

Why?

We Know You and Your Property

If we’ve already been working with you for a while, we already know your expectations, your hopes for your landscaping, your goals for the coming months and years.

We’ve walked your hardscape, pruned your plants, noticed how water drains and what spots get heavy foot traffic, observed how tenants, homeowners, customers and visitors use your property. 

We have a good sense of what’s working great out there, and what areas need improvement. 

Your plants are in good hands with Level Green. We warranty all plants that we install. We can also better ensure their growth and health because we’re on your property often and are monitoring their health and progress.

It makes sense for your peace of mind, too. Wouldn’t it be easier to trust one company to handle all your landscape’s needs, start to finish? 

You know us. We know you. There’s one place to call when you have questions or concerns about your property, no matter the time of year, or the type of need. 

At Level Green, we love maintaining your commercial property’s landscaping, keeping things looking crisp and tidy through the seasons  

It just makes sense to trust your property’s important enhancements to us, too.

Boost your Commercial Property with Landscape Enhancements from Level Green

It’s not enough to just keep a property maintained. You want to keep making it better, safer, more appealing. 

That means adding enhancements that keep the people on your commercial property safe, engaged and excited to come back.

Level Green account managers are your long-term partners with an eye on improving your property year to year — for the long haul. 

They visit your property frequently, walking your site and inspecting everything from turf health to seasonal color to your hardscaping to your irrigation system.

We get to know you and your business, so we can help you choose landscape enhancements that will really make a difference for you and your bottom line. 

We’ve got you covered, with commercial landscaping in DC, Maryland, and Virginia that stands out from the rest. 

If you’re not already a Level Green Landscaping client, we’d love to add you to our growing list of happy customers. Our focus is on commercial properties like offices, mixed-use sites, HOAs, municipalities and institutions in Maryland, Washington DC and parts of Virginia.

Contact us at 202-544-0968. You can also request a free consultation online to meet with us one-on-one.

We’d love to hear from you.