The Landscape Design Process

Our goal is to make the design process as clear, coherent, and relevant to your needs as possible.

Inform

We spend as much time necessary with you and your landscape to assist us in making well-informed design decisions.

This a great time for you to share your ideas, photos, and mood boards, because we love talking about design just as much as anyone. This is also a good time to discuss budget and material costs.

Survey

In order to create the first phase of the design we will need to survey your yard to make an accurate site map.

This is also an opportunity to capture photos of the site, assess soil and light conditions and glean any information we deem important to the plan.

Sketch

In this phase we begin to put together the main ideas of the yard and the over-arching theme of the space. Before we fill in all the details it's important to set down a good foundation.

From here we create more concrete plans that we can accurately estimate pricing and get a better understanding of the overall plan. Specific plans are detailed below.

Develop Landscape Plans

Conceptual Plans

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The conceptual plan, or "master plan" is typically the first phase of the design process. This plan lays down all the essentials, and its purpose is to organize the space in a clean and easily readable format. This plan is often used as the hardscape plan, and is useful for contractors for bidding.

Planting Plans

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Planting plans allows there to be a phase of the design where the plants take center stage. The Planting Plan is ostensibly the first phase of the plan with plant selection overlayed. Without a planting plan, the finished product will probably look like a lot of new landscapes: bark mulch, boulders and a couple weeping conifers. We are not fans of this cookie-cutter approach to design, so we put a lot of time into our planting plans, and we feel the results speak for themselves. Plants should be the main focus of our work, not an afterthought.

Plan Details

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If you want to have a part of the plan shown from a section or viewing perspective we are happy to provide that for you. This may be a good way to demonstrate different heights and elevations, but either way it's not an essential element just another tool to help visualize the final product.