Designed for year three, not just install day

Most landscaping fails for the same three reasons

When a landscape looks wrong two years in, it's rarely because someone picked ugly plants. It's almost always one of these.

1. Nobody planned for mature size

That row of shrubs looked right at install because they were one-gallon pots spaced for the day, not the decade. Three years later they're crowding each other and swallowing your windows, and the fix is ripping out plants you paid for. We space for mature width and accept that a new bed looks a little sparse at first — that gap is the design working.

2. The wrong plant for the light it actually gets

Full sun on a plant tag means six or more hours of direct light. The south side of your house in July is a different environment from the north side, and a bed under a mature oak is different again. We look at where the light lands before we decide what goes there.

3. Drainage was never addressed

Plants sitting in water die, slowly enough that people blame the nursery. If a bed holds water we deal with the grade or the drainage first, because no plant selection survives a spot that stays saturated. Sometimes that means the honest answer is a drainage job before a planting job.

The edge does most of the work

If you only spend money on one thing, spend it on a clean, defined bed edge. A modest planting inside a crisp edge reads as maintained. An expensive planting with a ragged edge reads as neglected. That line is the single highest-return detail on any front yard.

What we tell you before you spend

If a plan is more than the property needs, or if the thing you're describing wants hardscape rather than plantings, we'll say so at the estimate. It's a shorter conversation than the one where you're unhappy in year two.