If you own your own house, you want your home to be like a jewel in a beautiful setting - that beautiful setting being your front and back lawns. The front lawn will be visible by everyone driving past and you'll want it to look nice for the casual viewer as well as for yourself, whereas your back yard is yours and yours alone and you can do anything with it.

Many people enjoy puttering in their gardens, and they know the names of all the plants and flowers, not to mention the birds and the bees, that they may encounter. Others don't care that much about their gardens - they just want what looks nice. It is for these people that professional landscapers and lawn care businesses exist.

There's nothing to be ashamed of if you can't tell a robin from a sparrow, a forsythia from a chrysanthemum, a poplar from a beech tree. But when it comes to maintaining a healthy lawn, let alone a pretty one, these are things that whoever works on your lawn has to know about.

The professional landscaper. Exactly how does one become a professional landscaper?

Your local botanical garden will offer courses in landscaping, but these are just designed for the average homeowner.

You can take classes on landscaping online. PennFoster is one of the largest online schools...PCDI is another such school.

PennFoster

"Penn Foster offers classes in plant health, soil, and fertilizers. They give instruction on servicing garden tractors and other tools used in landscaping. They teach you how to create landscaping designs using shrubs and ground covers. They also cover specialty landscaping, and starting and operating your own landscaping business."

But go into these online courses carefully. Will taking these courses enable you to pass the Landscape Architect Registration Examination (L.A.R.E.), which is sponsored by the Council of Landscape Architectural Registration Boards. (And if you're looking to hire a landscaper, make sure they have such a license!)

As of 2004, 59 colleges and universities offered 77 undergraduate and graduate programs in landscape architecture. The courses are quite comprehensive, covering such subjects as surveying, landscape design and construction, site design, ecology, and urban and regional planning. The history of landscape architecture is not neglected, and then of course there's such thing as plant and soil science and geology. Not to mention learning how to actually run a landscaping business.

Your home is your most important investment, and your lawn is the first thing anyone will notice about your home. So make sure that if you hire a professional landscaper, they know how to do the job.