What does your home landscape look like?

I created a blog were I show all the news in my garden “http://jardimehorta.blogspot.com/”. unfortunately is in Portuguese, I don’t have the time, yet, to make it bilingue. but you can have a look and then tell me what you think of it.
By the way, your garden seems fine but a bit fresh, it needs time to be more expressive. Good luck

I have also lived in my fair share of apartments or homes without a yard, until now! I am renting a home in the city, so while the yard is small, it has a lot of potential. The owners were the previous tenants, and with 4 black thumbs between the two of them, the yard is now mostly weeds. I would love to invest my time and labor into the yard, but it’s hard to invest money when I will be leaving the property in just a few short years. I am in the process of convincing the landlord to take the opportunity while he has free labor, to invest in a new landscape. We’ll see how it goes! I am also a fan of taking any usable plants from a job site before it’s destroyed. It’s a great way to recycle, and makes our own yards bloom.

yep – goes without saying! I consider myself lucky to have a garden at all, it has been a tremendous help to me in professional practice at least in residential work. I often find that I know/understand plants better than my employers.

I too use my yard as a testing ground for plant material. 30 years in the trade and I learn something new everyday, particularly with plant life. If you just have a small plot, begin to experiment with all the herbaceous plants out there. Most of their characterisitics will manifest themselves in a relatively short period of time – you could then change them out and try something different. What you learn from this “test plot” would be so valuable in your design work.

Roland,

The recession gave my wife and I (partners in our LA business of 30 years) the time to completely re-landscape our house. We removed all shrubs and groundcovers and all pavement except the driveway. This proved to be important because the grading could be done right (50 years of soil build-up and settling in and around the plants could not be corrected in and around the plants). We installed a complete irrigation system w. smart controller, and planted native California plants last Fall. The project cost about $15,000 in materials and a small amount of labor. We did most of the work ourselves. We’re in the 100 degrees of July now, so we’re learning all about the “smart controller”. The experience has been very educational – about the “smart controller” and also about the realities of using natives in a suburban landscape. I’ll attach some recent photos.

Paul & Annalisa Deering – Deering Design, Davis, California

I always used to say that despite being a landscape architect, my landscape was unkempt because it was “like how the pastor’s children are the most lawless”, but I like your analogy much better. I have lots of ideas for my yard, but meeting the needs of the client (my wife) rather than designing for the sake of design has been an issue; along with cashflow/time/and laziness…