Garden Vision

 

Residential, regenerative landscape designs and hardscaping solutions. You provide the photo and style cues and I’ll provide a visual design with a planting map and accompanying hardscaping suggestions. You can use these visual renderings as an exact plan or as a solid design base to jumpstart your own garden vision. Two half hour follow-up FaceTime sessions are included to review progress, discuss any new ideas and answer additional questions

An empty expanse of mulch. The homeowners wanted a native, front yard pollinator garden with more privacy and a park like feel.

I designed a native, forageable garden with winding pebble paths, privacy screening and a shady flagstone patio.

With million dollar ocean views and big house remodeling plans, these homeowners needed a design for a modern feeling outdoor space in keeping with the modern lines of their home - that would look and feel great without stretching their budget for the house remodel too thin.

I designed this simple patio of poured concrete slabs and pebbles - for permeability and a more organic feel - surrounded with low growing ground cover and a few native shrubs and grasses.

This lovely little desert home in Morongo Valley needed a freshen up. The homeowners wanted an easily accessible soaking pool off their patio and more flow to the cactus and succulents planted about. The big double doors, prime for inside/outside living, beckoned for an inviting patio space to extend the living area. The floors inside are a beautiful vintage blue/green, and I knew the soaking pool would pull those colors together and create a subtle harmony between indoor and outdoor.

The homeowners wanted to play with a new color scheme so I went ahead and gave the actual house a matte cream plaster finish and added a small soaking pool, in keeping with the scale of the house. I kept the desert vegetation, just rearranging it and nestling big boulders near the soaking pool to create a wild and grounding feel. Height through tall cactus adds some stately drama and pops of yellow brighten things up.

This side strip at the same house as above, had become a sort of outdoor closet, but had the potential to be extra useable space right off the house. In these arid climates, the outdoors are a legitimate way to expand your living space.

In this design, I removed the stuff and small dry stacked rock wall to make one solid space. I added a small retaining wall and railroad tie steps on the other side to take them to the upper level of the property. A permeable pebble patio with low growing native shrubs and a few solar garden lights set the ambiance. A small (hot) soaking tub and a lounge chair complete the space.

These homeowners wanted to see more green and life out their front door and still keep it hardy and dog friendly for their two extremely sweet and playful dogs that run about the property.

My design solution here was to work off the existing stone path, adding additional flagstone and lots of drought tolerant, low growing ground cover. No pebble for this landscape as their big dogs would have been kicking them all about non-stop! Design is personal and needs to fit your lifestyle. I added some mid size to small native flowering shrubs and some great smelling vines along the fence line.

This is the side walkway/seating area adjacent to the modern patio of the home with the great ocean views. We couldn’t add that patio and then leave this adjacent space looking like this! Additionally, the steep hillside needed to be addressed as this area is prone to landslides.

I extended the same pebbles and ground covers to this space, adding big square concrete pavers for structure. The hillside below is planted out with native trees and shrubs whose root systems will hold the hillside together better than any retaining wall ever could. The research is in on this - natives are the best solution for slope control and a million times prettier! Not to mention native plants support the local ecology.

Pathways that wound all through this steep hillside backyard needed a freshen.

I added to the existing vegetation with more native plants to brighten the palette and create a lush, natural feeling.

A front facing view of the house whose front yard would become a thriving pollinator garden.

Here you can see how the design approaches the front of the house and native grapes growing over the arbor.