Native Landscape Design
Our native plant landscape design and installation division specializes in designing for clients who want to focus on replacing their standard yards with beautiful environments that utilize natural resources and plants that are native, edible, and medicinal. We suggest contacting us for a full site design consultation. While designing, we consider the site as a whole, including harvesting resources like water and sun aspect to their maximum potential. Below you’ll find a few examples of the types of work we consistently encounter on the myriad of sites we have worked on over the years. Our hope is that it will give you a sense of how we approach a property and design, even if it isn’t fully applicable to your particular site.
We offer consultation and total landscape design and restoration. Here, Bryant talks with a client about property lines for a project. The property now includes a garden, native landscaping including a dry creek bed, and a small orchard.
Invasive plant removal and ecological restoration
Nathaniel uses a wood chipper to mulch felled trees back into a future horse pasture. The mulch returns organic matter back into soil and helps kickstart the ecological restoration process.
Many of the sites we visit are over run with invasive species. We often arrive onto a client’s property and find that the entire area is choked out aggressive invasive spreaders like Japanese or Chinese privet, Japanese honeysuckle, multiflora rose, or various vining plants that are strangling old growth trees. Before we begin the work of restoring a native ecosystem, we start by removing the invasive species. For larger species like privet or burning bush, we use a wood chipper to return the organic matter back into the ecosystem so it can begin breaking down and enriching the soil for native species that will follow. Depending on the size of the property and the intensity of invasive presence, this could be a one-time work day or it could be a year-long project concurrent with other work.
Water Management
This small rain garden is part of a cascading series of similar gardens that help mitigate and maximize rainwater collection from a gutter system on the house.
Many of the sites we visit waste the potential of the water that falls onto the property. Using a variety of techniques such as rain gardens (pictured above), rain barrel collection systems, or swales, we design a system that uses water wisely while also conserving this precious resource. We have excellent relationships with water quality specialist in Chattanooga who we also work with to qualify clients for various city-backed reimbursements.
Installation
Marshal and Kara finish weeding a hillside of invasive plants while Nathaniel and Joe lay down seed for a native meadow. The meadow is shared by three property owners who worked together to install the meadow between their three houses while avoiding pesticides.
We offer full installation of the designs that we create. We often install in stages, monitoring the progress and efficacy of each piece of the design. For instance, in the above photo, the soil fertility on the slope was so poor that we needed to seed a winter cover crop to jump start the biology in the soil before we put down the native prairie seed mix and plugged in more mature perennial flowers. This required two rounds of seeding between which we killed off the cover crop using occultation. The advantage is we are able to avoid using pesticides while also improving soil health. This gives the whole project a much higher rate of success.
Maintenance
We also offer maintenance contracts on existing native landscapes. Although we didn’t design East Lake Park, we are subcontracted to do the ongoing care to bring the park up to the standard the City of Chattanooga wants to achieve for the project. We have several contracts with home owners who quote us a set amount they wish to spend monthly, and we help set priorities and then begin the work of improving the existing landscape over time.