West Hill Design Build: Memeber of the TRIADD Building Group

landscape design / construction

landscape

“moving through a designed landscape should feel
like part of a wonderful journey
that eventually becomes nature’s design…”

A designed landscape should make you aware of nature’s cycles and rhythms - glistening snow at the crest of a hill in frosty moonlight; the softest spring green in drifts of unfurling ferns and backlit leaves; the smell of summer rainstorms soaking into the thirsty earth; and the drama of October’s chilly breezes and deep blue skies, contrasted by brilliant orange and fiery red leaves covering the ground, crinkling beneath your feet as you walk. Landscape should make you feel the magic and mystery of fog, filling a distant valley, and the wonder of water gurgling nearby. It should shelter you from wind with woody shrubs and plantings, while you sit on a comfy bench near your kitchen door, sipping your coffee on an early spring day. Landscape should expand your horizon as you await dawn’s glorious sun rise beyond distant hills.

Landscape design encompasses both the practical as well as the poetic. A designed landscape celebrates sunrise and sunset. It makes full use of the natural materials in your area. It considers patterns of wind and water across your site. It responds to the changes in sunlight and shade across your site each day. It thinks vertically: bedrock, rocky ledge outcroppings, slope, soils types and evidence of the water table, grasses, bedded plants, the range of under story shrubs, the presence of tree canopy and of open sky. It facilitates movement physically and visually. It contains lines of site, long views and circulation patterns. If the land is currently undeveloped, a landscape design considers optimal locations and orientation for structures to be built. Designed landscapes create special spaces which maximizing enjoyment and ease of use of your site. A fine landscape appears to have always been so, blending the fruits of careful observation with the possibilities of carefree imagination.

Your design may require built hardscape with features like steps and terraces, gazebos, shelters, walls, pathways or drives. Other layers of the design may specify, plant materials and locations, amendments to soils, watering systems, necessary lighting and outdoor furnishings. You may want a model to help you visualize specific areas in more detail. You may want a very natural landscape or you may prefer some formal features in part of your landscape. You may want to enhance or preserve the parts of your site that feel special to you. You may want to introduce new features that capture your imagination. How you accomplish this is part of creating a landscape design. As a landscape designer, with experience creating and installing residential and community design projects and gardens, I can help you to sort out the issues specific to your site and to incorporate the features which are important to you in formulating your landscape plans.

Dotti Guiffre
MLA Landscape Architecture,
Rhode Island School of Design