Houston Professional Landscaper

What tips can Exterior Worlds give us on choosing a professional landscaper?
Begin the process by distinguishing between a professional designer who can capture your vision for your landscape and an off-the-shelf landscaping design service. Your goal here is to hire a professional who can design a landscape that reflects your lifestyle and works well with your home’s architecture.

During the preliminary research, visit company websites and review the different portfolios to determine which design firm has a stylistic sensibility that complements your own. In the early discussions, be specific about what you want in the end product. Maybe you would enjoy hardscapes, like eye-catching gates, interesting pathways, or a well-thought-out patio design or pool design. Perhaps you like to entertain and so would like an outdoor kitchen. Understanding these landscape elements, their relationships to each other and the open space, and interpreting them well is the mark of a true landscape professional.

What steps should we expect in working with a professional landscaper?
After selecting a landscaping professional and having the initial exploratory discussions, the next steps involve site analysis, the program of uses, and application of the design professional’s expertise. During the conceptual phase, your landscape professional will develop an overall design and commit it to paper. The resulting documents will show such specifics as plantings, lawn areas, areas of general use and their sizes, landscape lighting, irrigation systems, drainage systems, and the projected budget.

Once you have agreed to the designer’s overall proposal and made your material selections—both plant and non-plant—it is time for the construction phase. This phase comes with its own set of landscaping documents:
• To convey final design intent and material selections for the installation contractors.
• To specify materials and how they are to be installed. These papers are also known as construction documents.
• For permitting.

Regarding permits, each governing body has its own set of requirements for landscape plan approvals. This point illustrates why it is important to hire a knowledgeable professional—because they will know how the permit process works.

What other advice does Exterior Worlds have for us in working with a professional landscaper?
When interviewing Houston landscape designers, look for design firms who do the design work, perform project management and actually install the landscaping. We make this recommendation because you want someone who not only has great ideas, but who also knows the local contractors and their methods of construction, the best use of materials and their availability, and overall budget development and containment.

In the end, though, we think you are more likely to achieve your landscape design goals by hiring a landscaping professional. A creative and well-trained Houston landscaper will take into account not only your aesthetics, but the unique challenges of this region: dense soil, weather conditions of the Gulf coast, drainage issues, and likely insect infestations and plant diseases. And this is important whether your project is a small garden design that only involves landscape planting or a complex construction project or a themed garden, like an English garden design or a Mediterranean landscape design.