Design and Installation
French Country Style
I love this garden – this photo says it all. You will see more photo’s of this garden soon.
Theresa Lilac
We designed and built this walkway. It is a purplish variety of blue stone we call “Theresa Lilac’
The stone is an average of 3″ thick and each one weighed from 50 – 150 lbs. This stone is free set, meaning it is not mortared onto cement or any other substance. It is freely sitting on road base and slag sand. When building a free set base you have to be sure to pack the materials properly – using not only a machine, but water and time. This walk way has not lifted, budged or moved in 3 seasons.
Notice the interior mural we built that is perfectly centered to the middle of the two doors.The step up to the door is mortared on cement. The walk way also goes off to the right giving the client access to and from the driveway.
We did plant the ground cover and bushed but I am not responsible for whatever is going on in those annual pots on the patio. I would have gone with big green lush ferns in pots with a few purple petunias hanging out and draping down.
Stone and Roses
This client had a very tight budget for this window garden after her remodelers had their way with her budget. So the solution was these awesome tea hybrid roses that we use bamboo sticks to guide up the window, framed by the simple boxwood and a natural blue stone that we free set on soil – pure soil. This is by far the least expensive way to install stone and a useful and effective way given there is not much traffic or use on that stone nor concern for movement of the stone from the changing seasons.
This garden, with extensive soil amendments for the roses, was under 1,100 not including the irrigation.
IMAGINE EDIBLE: This same layout could have been done with edible plants. For example, I would have used a Black Currant as the hedge instead of the boxwood – this would mean in the winter I would not have an evergreen presence but I can accept that with a little Xmas lighting. Instead of the roses I would go with a specialty grape and roses. Imagine one deep red knock out rose climbing amongst clusters of deep purple plump grapes winding around a cedar trellis painted the same color as the home so that it is as if invisible. What other climbing vines are edible? Hops. Cucumber. Sugar Snap Peas – the list goes one – truly, even tomatoes would be stunning instead of the roses. Whatever can be done with ornamental plants in terms of visual pleasure can be done better by edible plants.
Old World Stone Work
I built these patio’s at a home in Lake Angelus around 5 years ago. It is a mixed stone media set on road base and sand.
This was the area for the firepit. After the work was completed a friend of mine pointed out to me how much this stone work reminded her of the stone paths and walkways in syria. My fathers mother’s family is from Damascus so I took a great liking to the idea there was some syrian influence coming through me during the building of these patios.
If you are building a patio for your enjoyment take your time selecting the materials. Before you go with a cheesy overdone brick paver get some prices on natural stone – nothing beats the look of natural stone and if it can fit into the budget then all the better.
Layering
This garden was nothing but flat light brown clay when we got to it. We added some elevation, the stone, the boxwood, yews, bradford pear, thuja nigra and oakleaf hydrangea layers. Layers upon layers, complimentary textures and colors – I love this particular garden and it’s look. Had our budget allowed it, I would have built these walls a little more significant and most certainly more of them throughout the yard. The oaklead and the bradford pear both offer white flowers in the growing season and both have stunning fall color which is framed by the evergreen boxwood and yews. Complexity of layers and stone media with simple lines and repetition – combining formality and informality for a truly unique look.
Remember, by clicking on the picture you can see it close up (at least on my computer I can)
IMAGINE EDIBLE: Imagine this same layering, this same layout with edible plants. It can be done. Strawberry instead of the vinca ground cover, currants instead of boxwood, blueberry/goji instead of the oaklead, Real Pear trees instead of the Bradford Pear Tree – we must leave the thuja nigra because those evergreen hedges for visual protection from the nieghbors are very helpful and useful indeed! Especially for those of us who enjoy naked garden time! 
Yamabuki – The Japanese Yellow Rose
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| By Ryokan (1758-1831) quoted in “Ryokan: Selected Tanka Haiku,” translated by Sanford Goldstein, Shigeo Mizuguchi and Fujisato Kitajima (Kokodo) |
We have used Japanese Kerria (Yamabuki, or Japanese Yellow Rose herein ‘JK’) in this clients yard as a deep shade flowering shrub that we prune into a more geometric form. 
We are departing from the geometric form to go back to a more naturalized bush look. Notice at the foot of the hedge in this photo the new growth shoots popping out of the ground. As this plant takes into an area it will send out and up new growth shoots. This year, I harvested those new shoots to build the client 3 new JK gardens. I harvested approximately 100 rooted new growth shoots, planted and watered for less than $150. 100 1 gallon JK would have cost over $1,000.00 – Another way to look at this is if the client paid 500 for the initial installation of the JK with this new harvesting and transplantation that investment just paid for itself in savings, so to speak. Garden Smart.
Here are the new growth shoots coming up from the soil.
With a simple shovel under the new growth shoot and a gentle lift back toward the plant, the root system and new plant easily come out of the super loamy organic soil we have developed over the past 7 years on this site.
I have the roots sitting in water while I am pulling them out before they go back into the soil. Keep the roots wet during the transition (less than 2-3 hrs)
This is how I plant the new shoot back into the soil - basically the same way they came out. A shallow long trench made with a few strokes of the perennial shovel. Notice how rich and dark that soil is. You are looking at 40+ years of fir needle decomposition.
I place them in, cover them up and soak them.
Below are photo’s of the new JK gardens. In a matter of 2 seasons these gardens will be booming and ready for more transplants into other parts of the yard or even for resale into other clients properties. No chemicals, no insect control – none of that crap – Easy. Garden Smart. The Japanese Yellow Rose.
JK is a solid plant for deeper shade flowering. It is hardy, it is easy to trasplant and it is pretty. A good consideration for mass plantings in woodland areas or as backdrops, formal or not, in shade gardens.
I searched for medicinal uses of this plant and found nothing, though I only looked for around 15 minutes. If you know of more uses for this plant, please do share.
More photo’s of JK here
Simplicity
This is a natural stone walkway I built 7 years ago. We used a mixed stone that was present on site – mainly canadian flagstone. You can quickly expand moss through several different methods – one being blending moss into buttermilk and painting onto surfaces. This moss grew naturally, but as mentioned there are ways to spread moss quickly. Depending on your base (the supporting structure under a walkway/patio), total sqft and style of stone layout a walkway/patio like this would cost around $17 a sqft
A Birmingham Back Yard
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.
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