Environmental landscape design
Planting that works with the water.
Most landscape plans are drawn for the day they are installed. This is design for the fifth year, when the water has had time to show you what it actually does.
On the coastal plain, water is the design. Ground sits low, the water table is close, the soil drains fast in one corner and not at all in the next, and every summer delivers rain in quantities no pipe was sized for. A plan that ignores that gets standing water, dead plantings and a maintenance bill that never ends.
So the grading and the planting are drawn together, and both are drawn around where water arrives, sits and leaves. Done properly it costs less to keep, because the plants are in conditions they want and the water is going where it was always going to go.
“There are no unsacred places; there are only sacred places and desecrated places.”
What we design.
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01
Stormwater as landscape
Swales, rain gardens, basins and infiltration that read as part of the place rather than as an engineering leftover behind a fence. The same volume, held somewhere you would want to walk.
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02
Living shorelines and marsh edge
Stabilising a bank with marsh grass, sill and oyster substrate instead of a bulkhead where conditions allow it. It holds better in a storm, it keeps the edge alive, and the permitting path is different, so it is decided early.
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03
Buffers and wetland edges
Planted buffers that satisfy the regulation and also do the job the regulation was written for: slowing water, catching sediment, and keeping the ditch out of the creek.
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04
Native and adapted planting
Species chosen for the soil, the salt and the flood regime on that parcel, so establishment does not depend on irrigation and survival does not depend on a chemical programme.
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05
Canopy and existing trees
Surveying what is already there and designing to keep it. A mature live oak is worth more than anything that can be planted to replace it and takes a century to get back.
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06
Gardens that feed people
Kitchen gardens, orchards, and productive planting at whatever scale suits the property, from a raised bed to a market row.
At any scale.
This is a service for a single house lot, a farmstead, a commercial site or a whole community. The parcel does not have to be large and there does not have to be a farm anywhere in the plan.
Where there is one, the same thinking runs from the kitchen garden up to the field edge, which is the point at which this work turns into an agrihood.
Tell us about the land.
A parcel you are thinking of buying or selling, ground you already own and are tired of worrying about, or a site that is not working. Tell us what it is and what you want from it.