Garden Design Inc

The completed landscape ready to enjoy!

When you look out  your windows, do you see a place that invites you to come out and relax or do you look at your property line with a shrub or two, perhaps a tree.  We took this border and made it a destination, a place to view all season.  Some place to enjoy without leaving your property.

We took this ordinary border of the property and made it a place to unwind, relax, and enjoy one’s own property. The irregular flagstone path leads you to a special spot with nature wrapped around you. Ornamental grass, perennials, shrubs are all a part of this landscape when completed.

A lush outdoor living room with shrubs, trees, and perennials and grasses to relax and enjoy the beauty of nature.

This ordinary back yard was on a bank so it was not very usable.  We cut the soil 4′ from the foundation of the house to give a sitting wall and a planter.  This gave us more level space to create the patio.  A landing was created with stairs to get to the concrete paver patio.  Perennials, shrubs, and a tree was planted to give privacy for the outdoor living room and to be able to observe continuous bloom throughout the season as you relaxed on the patio.  Notice that this is not an expensive house but the outdoor living room makes the house!!!  See the before below!

Notice this rather ordinary, inexpensive house. A well designed landscape can transform a property, it did this one!

There are so many subtle elements that make a landscape beautiful.  Two of the ones that I pay particular attention to is texture and shape.  What do I mean by that?  Some leaves are fuzzy, some are shiny, some are dull, some are delicate looking, some are evergreen and very thick and look like they could withstand the winter.  There are many elements of design that create a beautiful landscape but if you pay attention to how you put the textures and shapes together, it will make the difference between a landscape that doesn’t quite measure up to your critique eye but yet you can’t quite put your finger on why.  It could very well be that!  When I am designing, I am thinking of the texture of the leaf as well as its shape.  You also need to pay attention to the shape and the texture of the flower.  If you put different varieties of plants with shiny leaves together, it doesn’t look right.  You want to put something delicate next to something heavy, something shiny like a holly next to something dull like a taxus.  A round leaf next to a grasses leaf or a needle, an evergreen next to a deciduous shrub or perennial.  If the leaves are large, they need to be balanced with needles, grasses, or smaller

Two very important elements of design are texture and form. Landscapes that are beautiful were designed by someone who paid attention to texture and form.

different shaped leaves around them.

Those are some of the subtle differences in designing that create beautiful spaces.  Go out into your landscape and look at it with a critical eye and see if the suggestions I made could help you landscape be all that it can be.

What kind of mulch should I use?  Facts about dyed mulch.

Did you know that all dyed mulches and many other mulches are made out of grinding up wood pallets that may have had chemical spills or harmful products on them. Tree stumps are also common in mulches. Only bark mulch is the highest quality and will prevent you from getting artillery fungus all over your mulch. Spores from the fungus will fly to shiny objects like cars, siding, or anything close by. It is very difficult to remove from objects even though they are tiny dots, there are hundreds of them. Artillery fungus does not adhere to bark. Typically bark mulches are not as evenly ground as mulches that use other wood products but they are much better for your plants and our environment. Think about all of the dye that is washing off every time it rains into the soil and then the water table where we all get our water to drink! Think about all the people using dyed mulch because it does keep its color longer. That is a lot of pollution.

Hot Tub with Privacy in the City

This city garden already had the privacy of an existing custom fence but the owner wanted to add a hot tub that was not just sitting on top of the ground.  On the upper level, you walk onto the deck to get in the hot tub.  If you want to sit out for awhile, you go down the bouldersteps to the lower level where there is a counter and bar stools to talk with the people in the hot tub.

Before we started with the hot tub in the City