Start Smart on Your Landscape
Why start with a Master Plan?
Whether it is your home, your business, a residential complex, or a campus, the landscape can work for you or against you.
- Your landscape can fit your lifestyle and the things you want to do outside. Or not.
- Your landscape can look good, give curb appeal, and draw people in. Or not.
- Your landscape can bring the beauty of birds and butterflies to your backyard. Or not.
- Your landscape can be a part of the local ecology, providing food, water, and habitat for the local fauna. Or not.
- Or worse, your landscape can do real damage to the local ecology. Or not.
- Your landscape can reflect your values and your worldview. Or not.
It's your landscape and your choice.
"If you don't know where you're going, you'll end up someplace else." (Yogi Berra)
Your landscape all starts with a Vision and a Plan.
Discovering what you want.
Uncovering what your site offers.
Marrying the two to imagine a better future.
Planning how to make it happen.
In just a few days, I can help you imagine what your landscape can become.
We will talk, and I will ask questions and listen.
I will observe and analyze, measure and sketch.
Then I will draw up your Master Plan.
When the plan is finished, I will remain available to answer your questions.
What can a Master Plan do?
A Master Plan can do more than show where to put growies against the foundation.
A Master Plan can create spaces where you can live, play, rest, grow, escape ...
A Master Plan can form an enclave tailored to your lifestyle.
A Master Plan can bring beauty to your doorstep and all around you.
A Master Plan can welcome birds, butterflies, and bunnies into a vibrant, wholesome habitat.
A Master Plan can help your home and landscape express yourself and your values.
A Master Plan can fit all the pieces into a harmonious, coherent whole.
And finally, a Master Plan gives you confidence that whatever you do will work together in the long run.
There's another saying: "It's easier to change it in cardboard than it is in concrete." In other words, you're better off having an overall plan that shows everything all together, so that you build things in the right place from the start, rather than sticking something in and having to demolish it later to build what really belongs there.
What's in a Master Plan?
A Master Plan presents your Vision in a way that can lead to specific projects to develop your landscape, but it does not get down to nuts and bolts. A Master Plan usually includes
- Suggested solutions for specific problems
- Locations of hardscape features, such as patios, walkways, driveways, and decks, often with thumbnail descriptions
- Locations of special features, such as artwork, fountains, and lighting.
- Locations of plants and plant clusters with labels identifying the type of plants, but not the exact plants. For example, the plan will show "SDT" for a Small Deciduous Tree, but it will not specify a dogwood versus a redbud or a serviceberry.
- A list of suggested plants in each of those types
- Sometimes, a general grading scheme, which might also include locations of retaining walls
- Sometimes, a sequence of projects. What's first? What's next?
What comes after the Master Plan?
A Master Plan can be enough to get started, but there are still decisions to make.
- If you want to go DIY, you can start picking out and buying plants, and you will know where they belong. You will have to use the suggested lists to decide which plants to get.
- If you want help installing it, especially if it's complex or heavy work, I can help you find a landscape contractor who can serve you well.
You might want to nail down some details before anybody grabs a shovel. Naturally, I can help you with that.
- Develop a more thorough planting design with specific plants
- Develop more precise geometry for the hardscape features
- Develop a grading plan, perhaps with stairs or specifying a type of retaining wall and/or some drainage devices. I can recommend an engineer if a retaining wall is more than 4' tall.
- And so on.
Why not let the local landscape contractor do the design?
After all, they hardly charge anything for the design work, or they fold the design costs invisibly into the overall contract. And my neighbor seems OK with what they did. The easy answer is in the old saying: "You get what you pay for."
But maybe you want more than most.
- Most landscape contractors do competent work, as far as they go. But on the design side, sometimes that's not very far.
- Most landscape contractors will not give you the same insight or vision as a professional landscape architect will. Their work is usually to sell plants, pavers, and ponds, plus the process of putting it all in.
- Most landscape contractors and nurseries will try to sell you whatever they have and are familiar with, whether it fits your site or your master plan or not.
- Many landscape contractors use the same dozen or so plants on every project. You can recognize their work from a mile away.
- Most landscape contractors do not have the training and will not take the time or effort to understand the whole range of what you want or need to fit the whole landscape to your whole lifestyle.
- Most landscape contractors take little interest in the ecology of your landscape or how it fits into the larger ecosystem.
- Some landscape contractors are perfectly willing to install a high-maintenance landscape and then add a contract for the ongoing maintenance. That's a win-win for their bottom line, but not for yours.
It's usually best to let landscape contractors do what they do best: contracting.
So what's next? How do we get started?
That's easy, too:
Call or text: 540.589.1625.
Email: Halcyon.Planning@gmail.com
We will talk, and I will give you a quote for the specific help that you need.
And THAT is when the fun begins!