Getting Started

Creating a new garden starts by meeting you on site and listening to your needs and wishes. This is a working meeting in which we get to know who will use the garden and how, the conditions of the existing site and how new ideas might fit together into an overall concept.  We like to discuss budget early in the process, educating you about costs so that you can make informed decisions along the way. A long term view of garden maintenance is considered the overall budget and the design.

Following the initiation, we think of the landscape design process as consisting of four phases - Concepts and Base Plan, Master Plan, Construction, and Post Construction. For smaller projects, some of the phases are skipped or abbreviated (see consulting).

Concepts and Base Plan

We create an accurate, to scale base plan from field measurements of your home and garden. This does not have the accuracy of a survey, but is adequate to develop a landscape plan. With your expressed wishes and budget considerations in mind, we prepare preliminary design sketches of the areas you are interest in developing. After we go over the plan together to determine whether all of your concerns have been addressed in a pleasing way, we modify the conceptual ideas to produce a master plan.

Master Plan

The Master Plan incorporates the ideas from the design sketches and their revisions and graphically describes the various new design elements of the garden such as patio areas, walkways, fences, gates, planted areas and lawns. It includes the planting plan, which calls out specific plant names, their location, size and quantity and can be used to secure bids from landscape contractors. We will recommend contractors and assist you in gathering bids if desired.

Construction

During construction, we work alongside the general contractor to help ensure installation as designed and to participate in design decisions associated with construction. The most common times for us to be involved are to approve forms in preparation to installing hardscape, bender board, or other space defining materials, to place plants prior to planting, and to answer design questions.

Post Construction

We like to schedule follow-up visits with you at three-months and one-year post installation. The purpose of these visits is to monitor how your new garden is growing in, see whether the maintenance is being performed successfully, and do some fine-tuning wherever needed.