A New Year is Here! New Beginnings and How About a Better Garden Design?
Why is now a great time? The bones of the garden are exposed in winter, allowing you to easily see what's out of balance and where you might want to add in structure or visual texture, whether in the form of plants or hardscaping.
It’s the perfect time to do some garden reflection as well as plan for next season. Once January hits, gardeners like to get out the books, open up the journal and scour for online resources for new Spring planting ideas. But before you get ahead of yourself, take this time to look back at the last gardening season and take note of the successes and failures.
Writer Barbara Dodge Borland once said, “A gardener learns more in their mistakes than in their successes.” This cannot be truer! A gardener fails; it’s the nature of our hobby. But it’s in those failures that we learn what will and won’t grow in our garden, which varieties we can’t live without, as well as what we don’t have the time – or the patience – for. So although we call them “failures,” they really are little lessons that are an inherent part of the experience of gardening.
This is a great time to get your landscape and garden beds right by redesigning them. Not sure what to do or what to plant? We want to help you!
This month we are offering free landscape designs with our professional computer software! This is a service that everyone else will charge you for, but not us. We want to help our loyal gardening customers--we appreciate all of you!
We are offering these designs free for Our Rewards Members Only. Again, we appreciate your business and always want to help you have the Best Landscape possible while also creating wildlife friendly gardens for all beings to enjoy.
Be careful when making this decision and who you work with to redesign your landscaping. Sometimes completely redoing landscaping is an excellent decision but often, it’s not necessary to redo everything. In fact, it can be a huge mistake that can cost a lot of money and also several years time to get the property back to its base-level versus simply building on what’s already in place. If you work with someone that does not know the value of your existing plants and what is worth keeping and also what would be better to replace, you could also make this costly mistake.
It is a BIG mistake to tear out ANY plants in your landscape without creating a plan first! Our approach is different because we try to keep a lot of the existing landscaping on the property and work with it. This allows the homeowner to focus their budget on NEW plants that would add more layers, seasonal interest, color and function to the property. Sometimes the money saved by leaving the healthy existing plants helps the customer splurge on a nicer walkway, adding a firepit area, extending a planting bed, or just adding more plants!
Now that people are becoming more interested in native plants and wildlife gardens that attract bees, butterflies, birds and more, it is important to have a knowledgeable landscape professional assisting if you don’t have the know-how yourself. Hopefully we will all design AND MANAGE our spaces with intention, knowing the plants and tending the space as a new kind of gardener--not one who applies herbicides or lawn fertilizers that pollute waterways, but a gardener who learns plants in depth and maintains a sensible balance of design and ecological sustainability for a healthier future.
We can help you create a full-cycle edible and sustainable landscape with an organic, pesticide-free focus. Every outdoor space we create contributes to protecting biodiversity; growing food, medicine, and pollinator habitat; improving soil health and restoring the water cycle.
Your landscape could be building natural soil fertility, managing water as a resource, filled with useful and native plant communities. We design around the specific needs and patterns of your land and provide creative solutions to common problems like drainage, poor soil quality, and high-input plantings. Our sensitively designed landscapes mean your land can flourish in resilience.
Native plant enthusiasts need to be careful–designing a garden or landscape with a wild look takes quite a bit of effort and planning. There’s a difference between a carefully crafted natural look and a sloppy planting design. Too often, sustainable landscapes emphasize plant selection but overlook visual composition. Plants are not massed, so they’re less impactful, and small wildflowers are placed next to towering prairie plants, creating a chaotic scene.
Lines, form, and order are banished so all sense of relationship to existing structures is lost. Herbaceous plants are often placed too far apart. In our effort to imitate nature, we’ve turned our back on the forms and meaning of 4,000 years of gardening history. These design mistakes could stop your neighbors from joining you in the native plant/ wildlife garden mission.
This has been a problem with the wild look that has been turning the public away from using native plants. When native plants are associated with a wild, chaotic landscape, we narrow their potential adoption in built landscapes. Yes, I do think the American public needs to adopt an aesthetic that permits a bit of wildness, spontaneity, and heck—even a bit of sloppiness. But the way to do that is not to replace our front lawns with a tall grass prairie. We do that by creating native gardens that retain some traditional or contemporary garden forms.
Don’t miss out on this opportunity to have your landscape PROFESSIONALLY DESIGNED for FREE!!
Click here to fill out your Landscape Design Inquiry form! And act fast–first come, first served!! We can’t wait to hear from you and bring your property to life!
Want to see our design process in action? Check out the video below to have Dan and Joe guide you through each step!
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