Category: garden design

City of Norman Landscape Award for Pi House

One of our flagship projects ,the Pi House, has received City of Norman Water’s Worth It™ Landscape Award. The city presents the award every month “to a resident of Norman for creative and attractive landscape maintenance and appearance, while demonstrating wise water use. Conservation techniques and native or drought tolerant vegetation are greatly encouraged”. We have made every effort to make this site as drought tolerant and eco friendly as possible. We designed and installed the irrigation system which is mostly drip based and uses a rain/freeze sensor and we have also selected plantings that need very little of the irrigation water. Our main design mandate with this project was that all plantings should be either native, water-wise or edible. It’s nice to be recognized by the City for this project and the award itself is a really cool idea. I hope it will encourage more people to consider alternatives to the landscape status quo and to conserve our precious water resources.  I’m also hoping that the city won’t be able to complain about our Wheat/Sweet Potato rotation Ag lawn since they’re giving us an award! I’ll be posting more about this project as time permits (thus far I’ve only covered the interesting little patio design.)

water wise buffer zone

Water wise buffer zone

 

pi house 9 '14

Buffalo Grass lawn Buffalo Grass lawn

switch grass

Switch grass

view of sweet potatoes in the Ag lawn area

Sweet potatoes in the Ag lawn area 

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Tessellation Patio

An interesting recent design project we did involved repurposing some concrete blocks left on a site by the builder and turning them into a decorative patio. The blocks looked kind of cool how they were but they didn't really serve a purpose and they were in a prime spot better served by a walking path and plantings. Left with 15 somewhat odd shaped heavy blocks we set about trying to come up with a small patio area that would also add a distinctive decorative element. As you can see from the photos a number of possible designs were experimented with but in the end we went with this semi tessellating design with mortar to fill in the cracks. Thanks to the hard work of Eco experts Jason and Tyler we made the design a reality.
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House Front Garden Addition

Here are some before and after photos of a recent project.  Most of the plants are just breaking dormancy so it may be hard to visualize this as lush as it will be by summer’s end but just the addition of the bed itself has added a much more inviting and pleasing feeling.  This front side of the house is actually not used that much as an entry but adding this bed makes it at least feel like more of the front of the house.  We went with a combination of reliable standards (Cherry Laurels, Crape Myrtle “Burgundy Cotton”, Liriope etc) and some natives and prairie plants (Rudbeckia Laciniata “Herbstonne”, Pink Muhly, Echinacea Purpurea etc.).

jess before

jess afterjess before2 jess after2

 

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