Pam Prescott's garden design

I was gratified to receive this email recently from Pam Prescott, a landscape design client in Boulder, Colorado:

…. I can’t tell you how often I am stopped on the street by people telling me that our landscaping is drop-dead gorgeous. I always give them your name and say that you deserve all of the credit. You clearly have much bigger, more spectacular projects, but the fact that you used your creativity and artistry to make our small project a thing of beauty speaks to the spirit with which you design.

Thank you again, for making our property beautiful.

What is particularly interesting is that this was the first of about five or six residential projects done with a team of people, including a developer, an architect, a builder, and landscape contractor. It is an example of the wonderful new homes that can be created when a great team of professionals works in harmony with one another. I think that Pam would make a similar statement about any member of this team. It’s a real tribute to great teamwork.

Prescott garden design: dry stream bed with bridge

Essential to this garden are the wonderful perennials, in juxtaposition with beautifully scaled rock formations. A man-made dry stream bed provides grading and drainage, and becomes the focal point of the garden.

Equally important, the walkway from the sidewalk to the front door features a combination of natural sandstone slabs and precast concrete pavers which have been tumbled for an antique look. We utilized several drought tolerant groundcovers, including an extraordinary native called “pussytoes” between the stepping stones. Part of the walkway is a bridge crossing the dry stream bed.

Following the stream bed further into the property, we see it suddenly becomes part of a group of beautifully wild naturalistic rock formations, set into a plethora of flowering perennials and ornamental grasses. This landscape design project involved a great deal of shaping of the earth, with berming for privacy. As the dry stream bed runs into edges along the berm, it carves away at the base of the berm, exposing a ledge outcropping, as would happen in nature. A beautiful flowering, fruiting multi-stemmed tree on top of the berm provides additional privacy, blocking out both houses across the street, as well as the traffic.

Prescott patio

Prescott garden design: side view

It is the front yard that is the primary garden space. It’s an entry garden. We put most of our strong intention and creativity into beautifying the experience of approaching the front door, as well as looking out from the dining room. Often enough, people put so much of their effort into a more private rear garden, and here this is a garden that greets visitors, establishes the ambiance of the property and the house, as we had hoped that this entry garden would do. Even with the privacy features, it is still quite open to the street, so it adds to the whole neighborhood. It’s no surprise that a lot of people stop to talk and to compliment Pam on her garden.