Landscape Design & Installation in Clark County, WA

Estimates and a straightforward planting layout for work we are installing come with the project. If you want a full drawn design package to shop around or to phase over several years, that is a separate paid service and we will quote it up front.

For shade: Japanese maple, hydrangea, sword fern, hellebore, rhododendron and azalea. For sun: dwarf conifers, ornamental grasses, spirea, barberry, lavender and rosemary. The bigger factor than the plant list is drainage — most plant failures in our clay are root rot from winter wet, not cold damage.

Yes, and for larger yards we often recommend it. We sequence it so the messy structural work — grading, drainage, walls, irrigation sleeves under future patios — happens first, and the phases that follow do not require tearing up what came before.

Bark holds moisture, moderates soil temperature and breaks down into the soil, which is better for planting beds — but it needs topping up every two to three years. Rock lasts effectively forever and suits low-water beds and areas along a foundation, but it reflects heat and makes future planting changes harder. Many of our yards use both, in different zones.

Grade and drainage, then irrigation sleeves and hardscape, then soil, then planting, then mulch. It sounds obvious and it is routinely done backwards. Planting a bed before the drainage is fixed means digging up established plants a year later, and running a patio base through a finished lawn means rebuilding the lawn.

It depends how you use it, but a common mistake here is too much lawn and too little of anything else, which leaves you mowing ground nobody walks on and watering it through August. Beds, paths, a patio and some structure usually give you more usable outdoor space and less upkeep than an unbroken sheet of grass.

Low maintenance is not no maintenance. It means right plant, right place, generous beds so things are not fighting, mulch to suppress weeds and hold summer moisture, and irrigation where it is needed. Beds packed with plants that will outgrow the space in three years is high maintenance dressed up as a design.

Autumn, comfortably. Planting in October or November gives roots the entire wet season to establish before they have to face a dry summer, and it dramatically reduces how much watering you have to do. Spring works. Summer planting is possible but commits you to keeping everything alive by hand through the driest stretch.

Where they suit the spot, yes — and there are excellent Pacific Northwest natives for the shaded, damp conditions a lot of local yards have. Native does not automatically mean carefree, though. A plant native to a shaded stream bank will struggle in a hot, dry, south-facing bed just as much as anything else.

In the rural parts of the county — out toward Hockinson, Brush Prairie, La Center and the edges of Ridgefield — deer pressure is real and it shapes the plant list. No plant is genuinely deer-proof when the animals are hungry, but there are plenty they leave alone. Tell us at the walkthrough if you see them, because it changes what we spec.

A mix, deliberately. A few larger specimens give the design immediate structure; the rest go in at a size that establishes well and catches up quickly. Planting everything at full size costs a great deal and the plants often establish more slowly than smaller stock beside them.

The old rule holds up here — first year it sleeps, second year it creeps, third year it leaps. Expect visible gaps in year one, because a bed that looks full on planting day is a bed that will be overcrowded by year three. Mulch and sensible spacing are what get you through the awkward stage.

A few inches, kept back off plant stems and tree trunks rather than piled against them. Bark breaks down and feeds the soil, so it needs topping up every couple of years. That breakdown is a feature, not a fault — it is the main reason we usually prefer it to rock in planting beds.

You can hand water a small, well-mulched, sensibly planted garden through our summer. You cannot realistically hand water a large new landscape through July, August and September, and the plants that die are always the ones at the end of the hose. Irrigation is cheapest to install before the beds and hardscape go in.

Yes, and we are happy to. We will read it properly and tell you if anything in it fights the site — plants specified for drainage the ground does not have, or hardscape drawn across the route the water actually takes. We would rather raise that at the start than build it and watch it fail.

Very common request, especially on newer lots where houses sit close together. The trick is choosing evergreens that reach the height you want and then stop, rather than something that screens beautifully for six years and then becomes a forty-foot problem overhanging a fence. Mature size is the first thing we ask about.

Carefully, and with respect for the root zone. Piling soil over roots or trenching through them to install a bed is a slow way to kill a tree that took forty years to grow. There is usually a way to get a good bed in there — it just needs planning rather than a machine.

We are in zone 8b, with average winter lows around 15 to 20°F, so hardiness is rarely the limiting factor. Wet is. Plants that need sharp winter drainage sit in saturated ground from October to May and rot, which is why so many things that look fine on a nursery label fail here. We select for that.

Nursery stock usually carries the supplier’s own terms, and we will tell you what applies to what we install. What we can genuinely control is putting the right plant in the right place, in prepared soil, with a route to water — which is what actually determines whether it lives. Anything relying on the homeowner watering it through August we will be plain about.