PROPERTY NEWS - Stimulating your sense of sight with vibrant colours and interesting shapes in your garden is important, but introducing pleasing sounds to it will also go a long way to make it come alive.

Sounds like the rustling of leaves in the wind can bring harmony into the garden, but there is nothing like the happy sounds of bird life to introduce a special magic.

Introducing the right plants to your garden will attract a variety of bird life, not only by providing food like berries, but also making available nesting space and a safe haven against predators. 

Birds will always be attracted to shallow bird baths and a bird feeder will attract many different bird species that will normally not frequent the garden. However, it is no use to attract the birds if they are then harmed by the use of toxic insecticides.

By themselves, birds can play a big role in ridding the garden of unwanted pests, but you must consider other natural ways of taking care of the problem.

Unfortunately, harmonious garden sounds will often be countered by noise pollution from traffic or other disturbing sounds from the neighbourhood.

Creating sound barriers with very dense perimeter plantings can help, but are not very effective, because the disturbing sounds will penetrate any openings in the vegetation.

A solid high wall will work better, but will at best block out less than half of the disturbing noise. Rather than only focusing on noise reduction, you could consider obscuring disturbing noise by introducing a water feature in a garden area near the house where you will normally sit and relax.

A feature such as a waterfall will obscure the disturbing noises and attract your attention away from it. 

To have maximum impact, such a water feature must be as close as possible to the listener, and if it can be against or near a solid wall, the sounds thereof will be deflected directly towards you.

These sounds can be boosted by raising the height of the falling water and letting it cascade over and splash onto pebbles. Apart from the obscuring effect created by the white noise of the moving water, the visual attraction of the water feature and plants around it will tend to focus your attention and diminish the disturbing effect of the harmful noises around you.

You can e-mail Ben at benroos7@gmail.com.

'We bring you the latest Garden Route, Hessequa, Karoo news'