For some, Dayton, Ohio is best known for aerospace, but folks that live here know it's the ideal home town for raising a family. With older neighborhoods featuring prairie and American foursquare architecture, there are great opportunities to finish these restored homes with a landscape rich in beautiful plants and the latest in outdoor living amenities.

To discover the truly lovely plants that can make your landscape a visual feast, the best local resource is Wegerzyn Gardens, which is part of the Metro Park links. Here you'll find a fabulous display of shrubs and trees that make the structural elements of all quality landscaping. It's the best place to learn which fruit trees and perennial food crops thrive in the Dayton area as well as providing lots of great ideas for using native species for more sustainable planting design.

Dayton is actually the heart of a much larger sprawl of towns and post war developments that replaced vast old farms with orderly neighborhoods of affordable homes. In Kettering and Beaver Creek, two cities just south of Dayton, an ordinary backyard can be fitted with the latest in outdoor living accessories for the entire family. Dad will love a high power grill that lets him cook for two or a party of twenty in the same time frame. Or for those who demand more, an abbreviated outdoor kitchen with a refrigerator under an all weather shelter keeps Mom in the mix rather than stuck indoors preparing food.

Trotwood is in the hill country just west of Dayton where nature lovers enjoy open spaces and irregular topography as well as the beautiful Wolf River. Homes built mid century are geared for expansion as the outdoor living craze so popular in the west is luring Midwesterners to spread out over more of their comfortably large lots.

The lovely older neighborhoods of Springfield, Troy, Fairborn and Lima were once small farming towns that began to spread out after World War II to become suburbs of Dayton for commuters seeking a small town feel. Homes in the heart of these communities will provide great bones for creating landscapes that are as lovely to look at as they are to live in. With dining such a popular pastime today, these landscapes will enjoy the benefits of both a world class organic garden and an equally well designed outdoor living spaces sheltered from wind and rain for as long a season as possible. With large shade trees and sprawling lawns, these homes become picture perfect and equally as fun for the entire family.