Landscaping

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.

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“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.

What is Tree Landscaping?

Trees contribute shade, create privacy screens, ornament homes and outdoor buildings, and lend dramatic vertical impact to garden design. They also add a very important sense of dimension to any Houston landscaping plan. Because they grow to all sizes, tree landscaping can make a major contribution to any Houston yard. Privacy is one of the most important aspects of outdoor living that people often never think about until they notice
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Fall Landscaping Ideas

Fall landscaping ideas are something you can develop and share with a professional Houston landscaping designer. Typically, we find that any structure or plant that appeals to a homeowner can be adapted to compliment the house and yard. Theme is something you create, while style is something we add to help make all the many things that interest you work together to create an outdoor living environment. Colors are important
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Shade Tree Landscaping

Shade tree landscaping ads curb appeal to your property. The tabletop appearance of the flat Houston landscape becomes a completely different world when populated by the vertical impact of trees. Trees of varying heights create multiple levels of dimension with the yard. Colors can also be added to certain landscaping designs by choosing trees with bright, colorful blossoms. Many people think of planting trees as a way to cool the
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Garden Landscaping Ideas

There are many readily available sources of garden landscaping ideas. Literally thousands of pictures can be found in a single online image search. You can also look through home and garden magazines, which contain detailed descriptions of materials and methods used to build the forms. Driving through a high-end neighborhood is a great way to get out of the house and absorb the many different formal styles that often characterize
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Garden Landscaping Design

The ultimate intention of garden landscaping design is to create an aesthetic unity between architecture, lawn, and tree growth that ultimately results in a feeling of peace and inner harmony when perceived. Gardens have an almost magical way of tying together elements that are very diverse in their own right. Forms such as patios, driveways, walkways, arbors, outdoor buildings, swimming pools, outdoor water features, and trees all can be tied
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Garden and Landscaping

The goal of Houston garden and landscaping design is to transform a property from a plane residence into a true work of art that speaks of luxury Houston outdoor living and enhanced curb appeal. The job of Exterior Worlds is to get a sense of the burgeoning vision our clients already have of what they want, then put feet to vision and build those images into concrete realities in the
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Landscaping Pond

The ideal location for a landscaping pond is in a part of the yard that gets continuous sunlight. A pond that is completely shaded will have trouble supporting plants that need light to survive. A pond too close to trees may soon become covered in leaves and suffer from stagnation from rotting organic material. Open areas are therefore much more practical both from the standpoint of aquatic vegetation and practical
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High Quality Landscape

A High quality landscape is distinguished by exceptional softscape elements and impeccably designed hardscapes constructed of superior materials. This combination creates an exceptional outdoor living space characterized by a quality of life that is comparable in terms of amenity to luxury indoor living. The elements that are essential to creating such an environment include exceptional soils, plants, trees, architecture, and construction methods. A high quality landscape may be crafted out
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High End Landscape

The high-end landscape offers the upwardly mobile Houstonian the opportunity to communicate personal values and taste in a tangible form. It increases the joy of the living experience by bringing the comforts, amenities, and pure sophistication of custom home interiors into the outdoor realm of Natural beauty and open wonder. Outdoor Kitchens Outdoor kitchens are a staple of the high-end landscape. They provide much more than a place to prepare
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Landscape Phasing

Are you a homeowner on a budget? Do you have a big property with several big projects on your wish list? Are you bumfuzzled as to where to start on putting together a coherent landscape plan? If so, landscape phasing may be the answer to your question. As the name implies, landscape phasing develops your landscape design over time using incremental steps. The involved, expensive undertakings are spaced out in
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