Driveway landscaping can consist of both hardscape and softscape. Hardscape options include walls and fences, while your softscape driveway landscaping can consist of flower beds, ground covers, trees or shrubs.
Driveway landscaping possibilities are greatly enhanced if you plan on including walls. Walls (for instance, stone walls) can either parallel the driveway along its whole length, or meet it perpendicularly, at the entrance. The latter scenario, in particular, opens up a number of possibilities for driveway landscaping. For example, some people attach driveway gates to the wall, while others span the opening in the wall with an arch.
Meanwhile, variations on the softscape side of driveway landscaping are practically endless. Again, it often comes down to whether you want your driveway landscaping to accent the entrance of the driveway or run the length of the driveway (of course, some people choose both). Accenting the entrance can certainly be cheaper, if your budget is small and your driveway large!
If budget isn't the primary consideration in your driveway landscaping choices, then what you need to think about is where you want the viewer's gaze to be drawn, and what features of your property you wish to emphasize. This rationale applies equally to hardscape and softscape.
Planting beds of colorful annuals along the sides of your driveway, for instance, will draw the viewer's gaze into your property, to the final destination of your driveway. If that destination is a rather ordinary-looking garage that is in plain view from the street, then you may not wish to draw attention to it. Likewise, if you find your property is already dominated by straight lines (straight house walls, straight driveway, straight decking, etc.), then you may not wish to emphasize the straightness of the driveway by planting its edges with straight flower beds.
By contrast, if your driveway curves around a focal point, such as a water feature, and gracefully disappears out in back of your house, then flower beds paralleling the driveway will draw the viewer's gaze conveniently to the water feature.
From an aesthetic standpoint, there's little reason not to draw the viewer's gaze to the driveway's entrance either with hardscape, softscape or both. However, practical considerations may dissuade you from employing softscape in the way that you'd like to, ideally. Theft and vandalism are two liabilities for driveway landscaping that is close to the street. Depending on your neighborhood, children passing by may traipse carelessly through a roadside flower bed in which you take a lot of pride, a bed built with your labor and your dollars. Worse yet, shrubs planted too close to the side of the road have been known to disappear overnight, a gaping hole left behind in their absence.
In the North, the challenge presented by the severity of the winters is also a consideration. Not all shrubs and perennial flowers stand up well to the menace of road salt. Shrubs can also be damaged by plow drivers who stray just a bit either to the left or right when entering your driveway. Consequently, softscape driveway landscaping meant to accent the entrance is best left to annual flowers. Annuals are inexpensive, a fact that offers some solace, should they be damaged or stolen; and they have to be replanted every spring, anyhow, so winter damage is not an issue.
