The Green Scene: Planning and Planting Your Houston Landscaping
Just as the right frame showcases your favorite work of art, a well-designed landscape shows off your house to its best effect.
The green, growing garden surrounding your home—sets the tone, creates an ambiance, invokes certain emotions. Its purpose is to provide continual pleasure for you, your family and your guests. To get to this point, the best landscapes begin with an overall plan that addresses your wants and desires, your financial outlay and the required ongoing maintenance.
Houston Landscaping – In the Beginning
Like the architect for your house, a Houston landscaping designer or architect develops an encompassing plan. They will design for and around natural features such as surface terrain and drainage systems, types of soil, and the amount of sunlight and shade your yard receives. They’ll take advantage of your view—and if you don’t have one, they can help create points of interest. All of which means you maximize your enjoyment, avoid long-term problems and minimize any naturally-occurring disadvantages.
“The importance of garden design is that it supports and enhances the architecture of the home,” says Jeff Halper with Exterior Worlds. “It creates an experience and evokes emotion as you come up to the house. You want it to address how you get in and out of the space. What do you walk through as you approach the front door, the pool, the garage? What emotion is elicited?”
Your Dream Garden
During the planning and prep work, you get to dream. What aesthetics do you want to bring to your garden? Do you prefer lots of color or the more subtle effect of different textures of green? If you like color, which ones—sunny yellows and happy pinks, rust and golds, white flowers and silver leaves? Perhaps you own an outdoor sculpture you want to feature or have a theme in mind, such as a baroque garden, specimen garden, or an English garden.
While you dream, you want to factor in how you and your family live in the space. Will your Houston landscaping fit your needs, whether that means lots of kids running around or sophisticated entertainment? Another consideration is making your garden fit the style of your home; for instance, an Asian style garden beautifully complements a contemporary house. Finally, you want to be realistic about the ongoing landscape maintenance. Some elements of a garden require continual care. Other landscape choices are low maintenance. Only you can decide what works for you.
Money Matters
A designer or architect also addresses your budget. During this phase, the scope of the work is defined, including phasing in the different garden elements. Cost factors include items like hardscapes (i.e. patios, decks or walkways); tree preservation, fences and gates, arbors; outdoor kitchens; luxury swimming pools and outdoor fountains; lighting; sprinkler systems; types of grass, shrubs, trees, perennials and seasonal color.
Since 1987, Exterior Worlds has been successfully installing projects in the Memorial, Piney Point Village, Bunker Hill Village, Hunter Creek Village, Tanglewood, River Oaks, West University, Bellaire and the greater Houston area. Call Exterior Worlds at 713-827-2255 to request an estimate.
For more the 20 years Exterior Worlds has specialized in servicing many of Houston's fine neighborhoods.
Luxury patios are constructed with the highest grade of materials and project an aesthetic that is both highly personal to the homeowner and customized to the location and purpose of their construction. Entertainment requirements often play a major role in determining the size, geometry, and design of many luxury patios. People who prefer to entertain at home need hardscapesthat provide both comfort and atmosphere for their guests. They also need
Luxury backyards are intended to create living experience that unify the highest aesthetic of landscape design with the pinnacle of indoor creature comforts that define the lifestyles of the Elite. Entertainment is the driving force behind a luxury landscape, with design being developed around key points of interest and patterns of movement between those points.
Among the most popular elements in luxury backyards are outdoor kitchens. Kitchens have become icons
You can view winter landscaping from the bare minimum of basic maintenance necessary to keep your yard vibrant enough to emerge, reborn, next spring. If this is the approach you take, a landscape maintenance plan is the best investment you can make that will make your money count the most for all essential services necessary to keep your plants alive and your water features functional.
In addition to the very
Stone is a naturally durable substance that you can use to decorate virtually any landscape. It can work as a supportive element of a garden or ornamental feature, or it can work as a primary element to a special style or earthwork. It also provides an incredible building material that can not only weather the elements better than synthetic materials, but also blends architecture more effectively with Nature. Stone occurs
Decorative stone landscaping can be used in both traditional and contemporary landscape design.
Many assume that a decorative stone landscape is one built only of natural stones where the presence of rocks dominates the scene. When we take a more decorative approach to planning a landscape theme, however, the principle of less applies more often than not as the forms we create are primarily used as accents to other, larger
Many homes in the Memorial area are built along Buffalo Bayou and its tributaries. The view along the bayou is spectacular in many places. Trees rise up along its course, and many species of birds, land mammals, and amphibians make their home along its banks. If you live in such a home, stone landscaping by Exterior Worlds can enhance your property’s sense of drama, interest, and natural aesthetic.
If
Houston neighborhoods like River Oaks and Tanglewood have a wonderful diversity of beautiful homes. Some of these homes are veritable mansions. Others are smaller, but no less distinctively Old World in their appearance. Lot sizes vary greatly as well. Some yards are relatively small, while other yards encompass several acres.
In every case, however, if you live in a home that features Old World architecture, you can have Exterior Worlds
How Stone Landscaping Walls can Make Your Yard more Interesting than Public Entertainment Spot
Exterior Worlds can build all sorts of stone landscaping walls on your property that will create amazing new environments for special moments and activities.
The near infinite diversity of stone sizes and types in the world allow for total creative freedom. You can create any outdoor living environment you want, in any landscaping style, and you
Coming up with stone landscaping ideas is not as hard as you might imagine. Think for a moment about how stone actually works on a natural landscape and you have a starting point on which to start creating on your own.
In the wilderness, stone is the foundational element for every landscape. The argumentative may try to counter this statement by claiming that soil is the foundational element—until they
Natural stone landscaping can be used to ornament both organic and inorganic elements of your yard.
Forms that are accented by stones look as if they were lifted from a forest or mountain scene. Landscape elements made out of stone offers many opportunities for functional hardscape design, enclosure, and earthwork control.
Any pond on your property looks immediately more appealing when accented by natural stone landscaping.
Water and rocks go
