Ready, Set, Go! Creating A First-class Landscape Design.

Smart Money Magazine (March, 2003) shows how to add fifteen percent to your home's value by using current landscaping trends. Trees, patios, decks, fountains and paths emerge as features that offer the biggest payoff. One-of-a-kind landscape designs, those that raise home values or are simply prized and loved by their owners, begin with a landscape plan. And this plan should start with you and what you hope to achieve.

Which sort of homeowner are you?

1. A brand-new homeowner?
2. A novice?
3. An experienced homeowner?

Which kind of task is in front of you?

1. An untested piece of land where the project starts from scratch?
2. A landscape you've inherited along with a newly purchased house?
3. A yard or garden that needs to be renovated and smartened-up a bit?
4. A promising empty space in an established design that calls out for a creative composition?

Regardless of how you've answered the questions above, a working plan to help you through the design process is just what you need. A plan, you reason. UGH!, how boring! In reality, a well-thought out plan for your property or a smaller project within it can be an exciting and stimulating road map. Landscape designs are valuable because they are a record of what your property has been and where it is headed.

Space for a photo of our home in 1979.

Our Home in June, 2002

Designs of any kind, but especially landscape designs are processes which begin as linear, or a series of steps, which follow along in strict order. Item one is completed before item 2 is attempted, and item 2 is finished before item 3, with each step successfully building upon the previous one until the imagined goal is arrived at straight away.

As soon as the sequence of steps is consistently checked and rechecked, and changes made to some selected steps, the process changes from a linear to a circular one. This is for the most part true of landscape designs where the essential pieces or building blocks of environmental features, living materials and needs of the end user change with time.

A landscape design should be more than just beautiful drawings and diagrams on paper. A design needs to be constructed so that it can change. A design that does not change but remains static gives rise to a museum piece, albeit a living one! These are the gardens we love to look at and perhaps dream in but not the intimate ones we want to surround our families and selves with or live within on a daily basis.