The new plantings complement and enhance the house colors, which fulfilled my clients top request.
I recently got this great email from my client Cathy. She said “Hi Carol, People stop on a regular basis and ply Greg and I for info on who did the landscape design. We both often blank on your name but Greg did remember your company name today. Anyway, the inquiries are frequent enough I feel I should have your business cards on hand to pass out. So please feel free to send me some.”
Before: Classic NE Portland bungalow needs thoughtful no lawn landscape plan.
Garden designers love to be asked for our cards, especially under these happy circumstances.
I had created a design for the back yard a few years prior. Cathy was so pleased with the results she called me back to design the front. She had a list of priorities for me and at the top was her concern about selecting plant colors to work with the dark plum brown foundation. Cathy had put a lot of effort into paint color selection for her bungalow including historic research. The plum brown was a very powerful color and I was excited to work with it.
Friends and family and the postal carrier love using the new path to the side door.
Another unusual feature of the house is that it has two front doors. The family tended to use the side front door and so did the friendly neighborhood mail carrier. When we made a beautiful stone path to the side front door there was a lot of joking about how much the mail carrier would like his new path.
With me it’s always a collaborative process. I wanted to add drama to the front walk so when I suggested we offset the front steps Cathy thought about it and vetoed that idea. So to add interest I brought in boulders, set them back from the walk so there would be room to place interesting plants as companions to the boulders.
Here is an example of the colors we used to complement the plum brown foundation. Plants include Sedum ‘Fulda Glow’, Lavendar, Gold Leafed Spirea
This made the design even better. I loved Cathy’s existing rock garden and selected a similar style of plantings around the public sidewalk. So this helped integrate what was left of the old garden into the new design. The best thing about the design is how beautiful it makes the house look.
White Coneflower (Echinacea purpurea), Blue Oat Grass (Helictotrichon sempervirens), some sedums and creeping thyme are holding there own in this NE Portland parking strip.
Cathy used my plant broker, Homescaper, to purchase her plants. He worked closely with Cathy’s contractor, Tellurian Gardens who installed the landscape. Now my only job is to drive by and deliver a nice stack of business cards and ooh and aah.
Carrie is a real estate agent and understands the importance of curb appeal. She wanted some for her own home. She hoped for colorful easy care plants, low water needs and a good winter look as well as the other seasons.
We added a Crape Myrtle, (Lagerstromia ‘Natchez’) which has 4 season beauty; beautiful bark in winter, nice leaves in spring, summer flowers and hot fall color. Ornamental fountain grasses were combined with my favorite Echinacea (Coneflower) ‘Kim’s Knee Hi Red’, Heather, dwarf creeping ferns, and several evergreen ground covers.
