Christiane Holmquist Landscape Design

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Successful Backyard Landscape Collaboration in La Jolla

January 23, 2013 By Christiane Homquist

How a homeowner with an artist’s love of beautiful details and a receptive landscape designer found synergy and fertile ground in the garden for a beautiful backyard landscape collaboration.

Successful Backyard Landscape Collaboration in La Jolla Sitting area by the pool

A couple of years after installation, this garden has matured beautifully.  I cherish the artistic collaboration with my clients; it contributes to very personalized and satisfying designs.  In this project, the teamwork was particularly fruitful, as Melissa F., entrepreneur, artist and singer/song-writer,  contributed an immense flow of creative ideas and suggestions.  The result is a garden that is beautiful and incredibly peaceful.

Melissa calls it her ‘outdoor home’ because it’s all here:  living room, kitchen, sitting room and lounge, and vivid plantings that make all come to life.

The previous backyard landscape design consisted of an uninspiring courtyard that a planter bed set in the middle made user-unfriendly.

Shade sails cool the dining area

Melissa and Todor love to cook and entertain outside.  To blend the outdoor kitchen seamlessly, we used bamboo facing, echoing the indoor flooring and the living bamboo hedge. Now, under the cool shade sails,  the outdoor dining area feels like it has always been there.

Despite of the many built elements the hardscapes do not overpower the garden and plants are allowed to soften all.

For each material selection we explored the idea of “weathering”, inspired by the mottled copper caps on eaves and fence posts and the home’s faded wood siding. The naturally rusted steel used for edging, planting troughs, fountain and gas lights provides that patina; matte concrete and exposed beach pebbles continue the theme.

Organized to allow for entertainment, relaxation and play, the garden creates a dynamic and sunny ‘outdoor home’ where plants add color, life and interest and prevent the built elements from overpowering the garden.

Bamboo hedge compressed

The bamboo hedge is a beautiful response to the construction of an oversized home in the neighbor’s yard that threatened the privacy and intimacy of this garden. The hedge helps focus the eye on the interior and defines the boundary of this backyard. It’s exciting to see how the black Bamboo stems echo the dark pavement in a wonderful contrast to the surrounding green foliage.

Most of the original overgrown “tropical” plants were removed and replaced with low maintenance plants, many of them from the sub-tropics.  This xeriscape landscaping was composed in colors of Melissa’s preferred color palette:

Forest Pansy Redbud, bronze Sedge and golden Kangaroo Paw, purplish Echeveria and in-ground Bromeliad with striking foliage. A few splashes of orange and red add highlights to the picture.

One of the landscape lighting ideas was to use steel “fire” troughs.  They provide light, warmth and entertainment after nightfall.  While their mottled rusty walls continue the theme of weathering, they also tie the different spaces together.

Rusted fire troughs illuminate the garden at night

The steel fountain complements the materials used in the landscape and has a calming effect on all senses.

The fountain is a highlight of the garden

If synergy is  “the ability of a group to outperform even its best individual member”, then this residential landscape design is a beautiful example of how two creative individuals with their own aesthetics found common ground in the garden and created a product that will satisfy its owners for years to come. (Landscape designer San Diego Christiane Holmquist).

Photography:  Patricia Bean Architectural Photography

Filed Under: Drought Resistant Landscape, Gardening tips, Landscape Design, Low Maintenance Plants, Low Water Landscape, Outdoor Kitchen, Shade Structures, Xeriscape designs Tagged With: backyard landscape design, landscape designer San Diego, landscape lighting ideas, low maintenance plants, Outdoor Kitchen, residential landscape design, Shade sails, xeriscape landscaping

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Christiane, your design is beautiful. Viewers love the design and color. Thank you so much for all your support while the project was being developed. It would have been more stressful for me had you not held my hand regularly.

Rachel Michel

CHRISTIANE HOLMQUIST LANDSCAPE DESIGN


Download my article published in San Diego Home and Garden Lifestyles Magazine!
Contact Me I offer phone and/or onsite consultations and landscape design.

Phone: 406-246-6065

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