Clients frequently ask me how much of their home’s value they should spend on landscaping. There isn’t a great rule of thumb for that question – it is a hard one to answer with any real certainty, because we need to drill down into a number of things: what your real estate market is like, how […]

As fall settles gloriously around us, it’s easy to forget that we have FIVE months of cold dark winter approaching. The hardest thing for me about living away from North Carolina is tolerating those last few months of winter. March is beautiful in the South. Here in Iowa? it’s brutal. And sometimes April is dark […]

Anyone out there live in a brand-new house? Around the Des Moines area, new homes are popping up all the time. Since most new neighborhoods are built in former corn fields, the houses look so lonely! This project used the landscaping to help this new build look like it’s been there forever. I’ll walk you […]

Image from Proven Winners Are you thinking about curb appeal, wanting to clean up the planting beds along your home’s foundation? Did you just add a deck, and the yard around it looks bare and forgotten? Does your back yard have a pretty garden space left over from the former owners, but now it looks […]

The wonderful couple that approached me about this project was not afraid of hard work OR plants. They bought this house from a plantsman, and they saw how everything had slipped away from its former glory. While they didn’t want to re-create the same exact look that the previous owner had created, they did want […]

It’s time to think about buying plants for your yard- you’re excited about some color and something new. But what do you look for? How do you know you’re getting a good deal? How do you know you’re getting quality plants? What if there’s more than one size- which one do you buy? They say […]

I am often asked for help because people don’t even know where to start with their yards. They see a plant they like in a magazine or at a nursery and want to use it, and maybe they have so many ideas from Pinterest that they’re just overwhelmed. In order to get a landscape done […]

I started gardening next to my mom and grandmother, but I didn’t even know that horticulture or landscape design was a thing until I was in my mid-20s. Taking on this career has been a dream come true. I’ve carved out workspace in four different houses before finally getting this incredible office space. As soon […]

With snow surrounding us in Iowa (and lots of other places), I’m dreaming of summer landscapes. To me, the most quintessential summertime style is a the prairie-inspired landscape. This style takes its cues from the vast grasslands that used to cover most of Iowa, blending grasses and flowering perennials into a graceful, ever-changing scene. A […]

Here’s the thing about neighbors: you love them, but you need a little space – a little separation sometimes. With some yards, that can be hard because there’s nothing defining your yard as separate from your neighbors’ – many new construction homes have yards that are just a big open blank slate. Mowing leaves these […]