Lisa Cox, of Lisa Cox Landscape Design has happily designed landscapes ranging from simple tract homes to vast estates.  As she plans an outdoor environment, she envisions a transformation that communicates the lifestyle and personal taste of the client, while incorporating her own style. Each garden is designed and built with all materials including stone, plants, trees, water features, and garden art selected by Lisa using local, top qualified growers and suppliers.

Commitment to sustainability, the use of drought tolerant plants and trees, including California natives, has been an integral part of her design process, allowing a more “naturalistic” result that mimics the local terrain.

When Lisa met with her new clients in the Santa Ynez Valley, they requested that the newly constructed home not have any sod in the front area, and that she use drought tolerant plants including grasses and succulents. Working with a blank slate, except four nice sized olive trees at the entrance, she was free to design the space, including selection of a plant palette that complimented the Hacienda style of the home. With the use of local sandstone boulders, salvias and phormiums as her base, she also incorporated deciduous trees and perennials for color in the Spring and Summer, and a few rows of grape vines because after all, it’s the Santa Ynez Valley!

Choosing Greek terracotta pots from Eye of the Day, filled with “Blue Glow” Agaves gave the clean, rustic look she was looking for on the front porch and the traditional Terrecotte San Rocco terracotta pot in front worked perfectly to show off the “Little Ollie.”

It seems everything progressed perfectly for Lisa and her clients, but there WERE a few important challenges:

1. The need to place a gopher basket for every plant as the local area is inundated with gophers that would quickly destroy the plantings, and
2. The necessity of paying close attention to selecting plants that can stand the heat as well as the sometimes frigid nights where temperatures can go into the low 20’s or below.

As Lisa’s work on the project came to a close, she felt deep satisfaction; in fact she felt this was a home environment she could inhabit herself.  The project was a dream to work on and the end result was exactly what the homeowner envisioned.

Visit Lisa Cox Landscape Design to view more of her work.

Could it be time to add your mobile device to your set of gardening tools? There really is an app for everything. Bring out your inner designer to create the dream landscape you always imagined with the Home Outside Palette app. Move, resize, and even undo with over 280 available elements (trees, paths, enclosures, and more) to an existing or new landscape before even stepping outside. Design on the go has never been easier for novice and experienced designers.

“We created the Home Outside Palette app to help homeowners design their properties,” says Julie Moir Messervy, owner of landscape architecture and design firm JMMDS and creator of the app and the Home Outside online landscape design service. Using any iOS or Android smartphone or tablet, users can upload a property survey and use it as a background, or select a grid or colored background, and mock up their landscape by tapping and dragging hundreds of elements into place. The grouping feature lets you lock permanent elements together (such as the house, garage, and driveway), and the layers tool gives you the ability to play with different versions of a design.

An in-app purchase offers additional elements as well as a measuring tool that lets you input rectangular measurements or “walk-and-click” a GPS-based outline of your space. A drawing tool allows you to sketch free-form garden beds and other features. “From the start we knew that we wanted to include all the green features that today’s homeowners need: laundry lines, greenroofs, chicken coops, veggie gardens, compost bins, greenhouses, solar panels, and more,” says Messervy. “It is possible to have a functional, sustainable yard that’s also beautiful—and this app helps you get the design right before ever picking up a shovel.” When you’re finished, get important feedback before committing to any design element. You can share designs from the app on social media or email them to friends. For additional help with your landscape, the Ask an Expert feature lets you send a design from the app to JMMDS’s award-winning designers for their expert suggestions. The app is designed to be practical and user-friendly for the imaginative homeowner to the professional designer. Messervy adds, “Our mission is to make beautiful design available to anyone, anywhere.”

 

By Jennifer Silver, Marketing and Special Projects Manager of Julie Moir Messervy Design Studio

Jennifer has held a variety of teaching, writing and editing positions. When she moved to Vermont 12 years ago, she discovered her true passion: sustainable agriculture. She is never happier than when writing or gardening. At JMMDS, she gets to write about gardens—what could be better?