Before on the left, After on the Right 
This is a very quick conceptual rendering I did for a client years ago to help them understand what I was going for. This garden was a mess before we shifted it from being clutter, tight and overdone to spacious, open, inviting, simple and green. They are an older couple without the need of a space to entertain children or for that matter, many friends. They wanted something clean, pleasant, easy to maintain yet interesting and unique. Inside their home the enjoyed very spacious, simple and repetitive formations. I wanted the outside to resonate with the inside in terms of it’s essence. This is what I came up with.
The idea of the design successfully communicated into the actual installation. It is vital that your garden designer is hands on in the actual construction process. Furthermore, most designers I know are designing with 3 seasons forward in their mind which means to truly reach the apex of the vision you need 3 seasons of management and development from that designer/builder. It’s a hell of a good sales pitch for 3 years worth of certain work and it also happens to be true.
This is a very small backyard in downtown birmingham. For an area that high end, my first suggestion was to make the space an indoor/outdoor room. Truly speaking, these are the only landscape investments that might have an impact on the sale of your home (and edible landscaping) – if your home is a very high ticket item – AND even if it is not, there are very cheap ways to create an indoor/outdoor living space and I am more than happy to help you design a DIY plan. Simple point – indoor/outdoor living spaces are intelligent and they resonate with something deep in our minds. They positively impact resale in my opinion.
Instead of the said living space this client opted for the far less expensive design. Not wanting the troubles of managing endless perennials or finicky specialty shrubs like rodo’s, this client went with the simplicity of evergreen hedges, stone, moss, climbing hydrangea and a special rose that you do not see yet in this photo because it came in season 2. These are season 1 photos. We installed the brick, limestone, cedar fencing, plantings, sod, stone and irrigation as well as provided complete design services.
The sitting area is the cement pad. Something about this garden draws your eyes into it as if there is something standing or present in the center of the lawn – a spacious and inviting figure.
In season one the Irish Moss still looks like simply little green dots. The mature garden vision is when these have formed into one soft green mass with tiny spring white flowers and an occasional stone popping through. A paper barked climbing hydrangea meanders up the cedar and the brick. The aim was to use formality to create a strong structure and definition and then soften that with the climbing hydrangea and also boston ivy. I will take recent pictures of this garden this year sometime. I am learning to take better photo documentation of our work. Catching up on the net scene.
This very same landscape could have been done with edible plants. The low yew hedge could have been black currant. The Cedar fence could have ran the length of both sides where the arb’s are and in front of the fence had pears/plums/peaches pruned into a heart opening uniformity. Where the roses are (between the yews and the arbs – again you don’t see them in this set of pics) you could have had goji berry, blueberry, wild black rasperry, you name it. You could have tomatoe, a mix of rocking veggies. Where we used irish moss, I would have planted strawberry. Instead of climbing hydrangea a yummy grape variety. The look during the winter would be different, but in the warm seasons it would be very green and clean. If a yard like this was all edible WE WOULD MAINTAIN IT FOR YOU FOR FREE – in exchange for production minus a hefty harvest delivery to you.
Here is a before photo-
Here you will see the original designer tried to build in multiple sitting spaces in the little lot – a big no no – trying to turn a small yard into something it is not – it ends up looking and feeling cluttered and busy leaving you not sure where to sit, or what to do.
This fence should have been replaced because it is so rotten but the home owner loved it and wanted to keep it – so we planted Boston Ivy and Climbing Hydrangea on it. 2 seasons later what was an old ugly wood fence is now a living, low to no maintenance fence that is electric with color in the fall.
Here the original designer had 3 varieties of shrubs! I removed 2 of them and put in what you see now – the Korean Lilac, or the Meyer Lilac. Small yards need simplicity and repitition in order to make sense visually.
This was installed by the original designer. Again, this is a small backyard that the designer just made smaller by this layout. We removed this, made use of the plants and introduced the climbing hydrangea to hug the home, giving the warmth of living plants while leaving the home owner lots of space for the yard.
