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From Boring Yard to Garden Joy: Six Steps to Help You Create Your Dream Landscape Design (Part I)

September 30, 2013 By Christiane Homquist Leave a Comment

Rachel's outdoor living area Are you dreaming of a peaceful, functional and relaxing outdoor living space?

One that you want to spend every free minute in?

For a successful home landscape design that brings you enjoyment, peace and comfort, take these ingredients:

  1. Dream it (and now’s the time to pull all the stops)
  2. Determine your needs (i.e. what you can realistically do);  assign required space dimensions to each element
  3. Define your style
  4. Draw a plan (or get landscape design help)
  5. Remove and keep only what’s desirable (f. ex. a shade tree) and put it all together
  6. Enjoy!

It’ll work for you, too, with this recipe!  Here’s how we did it for Rachel’s garden:

Grasses soften the edges of the walls1. Dream it 
When I first met Rachel she had come with her garden club to visit a garden that I had designed. She complimented me on the beauty of the design and asked if I’d be interested in helping her with her yard:  She didn’t think much could be made of it since it was so small, but could I come to see it anyways?

Rachel, at her wonderful age of 83, is a very active member in a few different clubs, and as we talked it was apparent that she had a clear idea of what she dreamt of:

  • Have more friends over and entertain them in her garden.

She hoped for a space in her garden in which to serve some light foods and drinks, surrounded by color and beauty.  The lawn wasn’t comfortable anymore to walk on, and over the years the shrubs had been disfigured and pruned into boring blobs; many had just disappeared and had never been replaced.

  • Where would I create this entertainment space, since the yard was so small?
  • And would there perhaps be room for a lounge chair in a reading nook?
  • And could she have a fountain, or other water feature?
  • And would we have enough room still for many flowers and interesting textures?
  • The entire yard was enclosed by a 5 ft wall not high enough to block out the neighbor’s window.  Could we make the garden more private without blocking her view of the ocean?

A comfortable chaise-lounge invites to reading and dreaming

2. Determine your needs (i.e. what you can realistically do);  assign required space dimensions to each element

The first thing I asked Rachel was to define and tell me about how she planned to entertain her friends:

  • Would she want to sit down at a table and serve food there?
  • And how many people would she like to seat?
  • And where would the food be served from, since the main kitchen was upstairs, on the first floor?

We determined that she wasn’t going to serve hot food but only salads and finger foods prepared in the smaller downstairs kitchen in her guest apartment. This way she wouldn’t need any tables to sit down as most people (mostly groups of up to 10 to 15 people) would be standing or strolling through the garden; some seating could be provided with benches.

(Note: To seat 4 people around a table we would have needed at least 10 sq ft ; this seems to be the bare minimum, and if you need circulation space around it or your chairs are a bit oversized, 14 sq ft for this dining area would be needed.)

However, to accommodate these groups, two “entertainment” areas would be best, and I suggested to allow for each about 12 x 12 ft : This would allow room for benches, some additional (temporary) seating if necessary, and still have enough planting space around them to soften all.  Also, these spaces would need to be connected with easy pathways.  (Inviting people to stroll from one area to the other would be a perfect way to display plants to be discovered on the way.)

Since most of her friends are elderly, the pavement under foot needed to be safe, which in my mind excluded any materials with uneven surface such as flagstones or gravel.

This left stabilized/compacted DG (decomposed granite), concrete, tiles and interlocking pavers; which one would we be using?

A plain as-is 3. Define your style

Examining her house and garden for elements that would help define the style of this new backyard landscape design, I noted these clues:

  • The main assets of the existing garden were a mature Pine tree in the corner that provided lovely shade (unfortunately pruned very unprofessionally but not beyond repair); also two mature fruit trees in the other corner, and a beautiful view of the ocean, in between a couple of roofs in the neighborhood. We would try to keep the mature trees.
  • Enclosing the garden was a 5 ft wall that had the potential of making it more private if it could be raised in a few critical areas?
  • Architectural style:  Her house is a Southwest/Perceived Spanish 2-story building with white stucco and red tile roof, and an upstairs balcony from which she views her garden and the ocean.
  • There was an existing, albeit small patio paved with grey concrete; any new pavement would need to harmonize with it since we there was no budget to remove this pavement.
  • About Rachel’s preferred style:  The strongest clues as to Rachel’s taste were, as with so many design clients, visible inside the home:  She loves Mexican and Southwestern art, as displayed everywhere in terracotta tile floors, furniture, colorful cushions, glazed ceramics, paintings and souvenirs from the Southwest. Red tile was used everywhere, and the walls surrounding her garden are reminiscent of a Spanish courtyard whose surrounding walls allowed a beautiful view of the ocean.

We have now assembled the first ingredients of this recipe .  For how to put them together for your dream garden, please read my follow-up post.

Filed Under: Backyard Landscape Design, Drought Resistant Landscape, Landscape Design Projects, Low Water Landscape Tagged With: home landscape design, landscape design, landscape design help, landscape design ideas, outdoor living space

From Boring Yard to Garden Joy: Six Steps to Help You Create Your Dream Landscape Design (Part II)

July 31, 2013 By Christiane Homquist 2 Comments

In my previous post, I described the first 3 ingredients to creating your most inviting outdoor living space:
1. Dream it;  2. determine your needs and assign physical space  requirements to each element;  3. define your style.

Here now are the remaining three steps to make this happen:

4. Draw up a plan for your home landscape design (or get professional landscape design help)

curved wallTaking in all the clues from Rachel’s interior design, the architecture of her house and her preferred color palette a picture was quickly emerging in my mind:

  • I pictured a low water landscape breathing peace and beauty, brimming with color and plant life.  The garden would be laid out around two main paved areas reminiscent of Spanish/Mexican courtyards.
  • Benches would offer seating to take a drink or finger food, to enjoy the many colors or to feel the comfortable atmosphere and peaceful mood of the garden.
  • One area would invite more  for quiet sitting and contemplation of a fountain ;
  • The other area, closest to Rachel’s kitchen, would be the main food serving area.  Here two benches would form a square for people to mingle, with room for side tables that Rachel could bring in if she had more trays than she wanted to place directly on the benches.
  • A walkway would be connecting these spaces, and their layout would be following the shape of the house (its walls were slightly curved outwards); the new pavement would be placed directly adjacent to the existing patio to allow people comfortable access to all areas of the garden.
  • Doing this suggested either a similar or a completely different pavement…
  • The benches would allow me to introduce more colors into the garden: They would be in  complementary colors to each other, to the perimeter walls that I’d also paint, and to an additional, purely ornamental wall that I would use as “room divider”, “weight” and upright element in the garden.
  • This wall, in the shape of an undulating wave, would complement and contrast a water feature that would be the focal point of the quieter sitting area.

Rachel First Draft
 5.   Remove what’s not needed;  and put all ingredients together:

Rachel was very excited about the first draft of this backyard landscape design and approved all of it.

She was most thrilled about the idea of applying paint to all of the walls, the perimeter wall included.

Stone slab fountain

And she loved the fountain idea which consisted of two stone slabs, mounted one on top of the other at differing angles, with a central core from which water would run over both stones.

For the new pavement we opted for grey concrete with an acid wash finish (which brings out the sand aggregate in the mix).  This seemed the most elegant and cost-effective material that would harmonize with the existing grey concrete. (In the photo outlines of the future design elements are drawn onto the ground to help fine-tune their shape and dimensions, and to help the homeowner visualize the future look of the garden. It also shows how all plants have been removed except for the fruit trees and the Pine Tree in the opposite corner.)

Accents

And so the final design came together very quickly.  After a soil test we chose a mix of some  “Southwestern”  plants with some other ones that like it here in Leucadia, too: Rock Purslane Calandrinia spectabilis, Aloe ‘Red Hot Chili Pepper’, Red Yucca Hesperaloe parviflora,  Aeonium ‘Cabernet’ and Crassula ‘Campfire, to name a few’;  more drought resistant plants such as Sundrops Calylophus drummondii and Penstemon Margarita BoP; the “bones” and structure of this low water landscape would be provided by the shrubs ‘Goldstar’ Yellow Bells  Tecoma stans stans ‘Goldstar’ and Dwarf Variegated Myrtle Myrtus communis variegata compacta,  to which Rachel added a favorite of hers, a Yellow Mexican Bird of Paradise  Caesalpinia gilliesii.   We placed another shade tree to shade the reading nook (Crape Myrtle “Centennial Spirit” Lagerstroemia x hybrids), over at the other end of the garden; its orange-red color will be a nice color teaser when in bloom.  Ornamental grasses add a light and airy, even dreamy character to the plantings. Here we used Hairy Awn Mulhly Muhlenbergia capillaris, Golden Variegated Sweet Flag Acorus gramineus ‘Ogon’, and Blue Oat Grass Helictotrichon sempervirens.

Purple Bougainvilleas drape a post-and-wire-trellis in two critical places to raise the privacy screen around the perimeter but leave a window to view the ocean.

To the colors of the plants those of the walls would be a permanent contrast, stimulus and harmonious “compliment” .  We chose Orange for the perimeter wall; “Violet Majesty” purple for the seatwalls; and Chartreuse/lime for the curved wall across from the fountain.

Rachel and me

6. Enjoy!

Sitting in the sun with Rachel recently on one of the colorful benches, and enjoying a sweet breakfast Danish (a “prop” left-over from staging her garden for the photo shoot),  she remarked on how much she loves her garden now, and how she marvels at discovering, every morning when she comes outside to visit it, another plant in bloom or just colorful on its own.

At that moment a bee was visiting a rock purslane flower right behind her shoulder, and as I was pointing the bee out to her she hardly moved away and said she loved how so many of them are now visiting her garden.  This is what she had dreamt of, and she’s learning to take care of the plants and delight in them any moment she can.

This backyard landscape design was faithfully executed by  San Diego Landscaper  Mark Sterk/Columbine Landscape Inc.

A Rock Purslane draws the visitors hungry for its nectar

Filed Under: Landscape Design Tagged With: backyard landscape design, home landscape design, landscape design help, low water landscape, outdoor living space

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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


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Christiane Holmquist

Christiane HolmquistLandscape Designer
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I'm published in Home and Garden Lifestyles Magazine!

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