Professional Garden Design
Professional garden design by Exterior Worlds distinguishes itself from typical lawn and garden services advertised through traditional media abroad. In addition to providing the basics of planting, irrigation, drainage, and fertilization, we also devote a tremendous amount of time and energy toward meeting client expectations, blending hardscape elements with softscape elements, and systematic, scaled planning of the garden itself to make certain that inorganic and organic elements blend seamlessly together to create an impeccable unity.
We begin the process by looking at the property itself. Home architecture, lot size, the initial condition of the lawn, existing trees, and any distinguishing landmarks are carefully noted. Once we have a clear picture of the environment at hand, we next sit down with the clients to discuss specific elements of their individual lifestyle.
We listen closely to the desires they have for their own home aesthetic. We also begin preliminary planning for specific events they plan to host in their new outdoor environment once it is completed.
Clients are encouraged to furnish our professional garden designers with any photographs, wish lists, do-it-yourself garden magazines, and any books on landscaping they feel may contribute value to the project. All of these resources represent potential sources for attractive garden elements.
Before undertaking construction and planning, our experts always create a professional garden design using special landscaping software.
This plan is very important because it keeps everything in scale with the house and the rest of the yard. Each landscape element is specified and also drawn to scale. This allows the team, when necessary, to efficiently subcontract any specialty services such as masonry work that may be required in the creation of the garden. There is never any question, and little room for error, when multiple teams of people tackle the same project that is clearly sketched out in diagram form prior to implementation.
This plan is approved by the homeowner before any contracts are signed with partner companies and before any work on the project begins.
The first element of professional garden design that we plan is any relevant hardscape forms.
Hardscape represents 60 percent to 80 percent of the average Houston landscape. Virtually any garden we install will feature some type of hardscape element. This can include courtyard walls, masonry, ornamental gravel beds, or even special custom patios.
In this respect, professional garden design represents a form of construction that establishes plant life within definitive boundaries of the landscape design plan. This gives the garden a structure and a cohesion that garden shops, garden services, and do-it-yourself manuals often fail to provide.
It is also vitally important to the entirety of the design because it is the hardscape elements of a garden that tie the vegetation directly back to the home. Without this, the garden may be very pretty in its own right, but it will lack the sense of being connected to other elements in the yard.
Professional garden design also requires paying a great deal of attention to botanical science.
At the end of the day, we have to concede that with the exception of contemporary gardens and a few custom gardens derivative of modern styles, most gardens are predominantly softscape (meaning vegetative) in nature. It is very important to know plant species, life cycles, flowering cycles, and fertilization requirements to give the garden the maximum organic impact that it is intended to have on the landscape at large.
Houstonians are fortunate in the sense that species from all over the world can thrive in our soil. On those infrequent occasions when a client prefers a plant species that requires a different type of soil than our own, we can replicate native soil in a special environment and create a custom irrigation and drainage system to reproduce the soil and water content of its indigenous environment. In almost every case, this has proven successful, and on the rare occasions where exotics possibly cannot be planted here, substitute species with equal aesthetic value can be used instead.