Blog Posts

The short answer: Winter landscape planning in Mount Pleasant works because a dormant yard is easier to read. December’s low sun shows where shade really falls, slow winter rains show where water sits, and bare branches show every gap in your privacy. Note those things now, and a spring design starts from facts instead of […]

Fall is when most Lowcountry homeowners head out with the loppers and the rake to cut back overgrown foundation plantings before winter. This year there is one more reason to look closely. Clemson University is asking residents to check eaves, porch ceilings, shrubs, and hedges for nests of the yellow-legged hornet, an invasive species first […]

If you live in the Lowcountry, a mailer from Clemson University may have landed in your mailbox recently. It asks homeowners to watch for the yellow-legged hornet, an invasive species that preys on honeybees and puts pressure on native pollinators. A landscape designer cannot do anything about the hornet itself, but good pollinator garden design […]

If you have spent any time looking for someone to design your outdoor space, you have probably noticed that the terms landscape architect and landscape designer get used interchangeably in some places and treated as very different things in others. They are not the same, and understanding the distinction matters when you are deciding who […]

An outdoor kitchen is one of the more consequential decisions you can make about a backyard. Done well, it becomes the reason the space gets used. Done without enough thought about layout, positioning, or the specifics of the Lowcountry climate, it becomes an expensive fixture that sits underused because something about it does not quite […]

Most backyard redesign projects do not start with a clear decision. They start with a feeling. You have been looking at the same yard for three summers and something is off, but you cannot quite name it. Or you renovated the house and the outdoor space never caught up. Or you bought the property knowing […]