a Malvern home

This family inquired about a low maintenance, full and striking garden. An essential for every garden is acknowledging every season. My intention in design is to companion plant spring bloomers with summer, fall and evergreen specimens. This way, as one plant passes bloom, another comes into bud. A key to ‘low maintenance’ is striking the balance between a full, but not too full, garden. The more plants, the less space for weeds and mulch. I designed with flowering shrubs and groundcovers to get color and texture but skipped the needy perennials. By developing large swaths and keeping an edited planting palette, this garden has serious impact from the street and an easy and consistent maintenance plan. I provided a detailed master plan, two versions of a rendering to visualize the design and a planting palette to communicate seasonal blooms, foliage, color and texture.

Secondly, this home has an area in the back yard prone to flooding. Yes, landscaping can definitely help with mitigating sitting and flowing water. Rain gardens are very diverse and can be quite intricate depending on the scale. Rain gardens are often used in large development projects, urban sustainability projects, hurricane management, rewilding, and home gardening. There is a wetland behind this property, so pooling water is common here. Rain gardens require a specific group of plants to drink up the water slowly, ease runoff, and create cover as not to have a field of mud. I used swamp roses, willow, button bush, filtering grasses and a dense groundcover to mitigate soil erosion and long periods of sitting water.