This project is about replacing a water-thirsty lawn with a living, breathing, colorful landscape.
This project was photographed by Claire Takacs, and featured in her new book with Giacomo Guzzon, Visionary: Gardens and Landscapes for our Future
Claire Takacs is a freelance photographer who has specialised in capturing gardens and landscapes around the world for the past twenty years. Her work features regularly in international magazines, including Gardens Illustrated. She has contributed to many books, and this is her fifth title, which she has photographed exclusively. Previous books include: the highly acclaimed and successful Dreamscapes (Hardie Grant), which she also authored, Australian Dreamscapes (Hardie Grant), Windcliff; A Story of People, Plants, and Gardens by Dan Hinkley (Timber Press) and Wild: The Naturalistic Garden, with text by Noel Kingsbury (Phaidon).
Giacomo Guzzon is a landscape architect and expert in planting design. He has taught planting design at several schools and universities, such as Sheffield, Greenwich and KLC, and currently serves as Head of Planting Design at the international landscape architecture firm Gillespies in London. He contributes to conferences and publications and has spoken in Hong Kong, the US, and throughout Europe. He is currently pursuing a PhD in plant science at the Technical University of Berlin.
This project illustrates how you can overcome challenges with your property and create and eco-friendly haven.
This couple came to us with a builder-grade landscape that they wanted to transform with native and adapted plants. They had a high water bill and wanted a landscape that was more sustainable and alive. It was a bold move because it involved basically taking out all of the existing landscape. The builder had put down river rock everywhere and you couldn’t walk around the house. It was a bla landscape, and further away from the house, there was a bunch of sod with spray irrigation. It was hard to maintain & cost a lot in water each month.
How could we create a more sustainable landscape that was more appropriate for their amazing hill-country setting? Their property is quite large and they really care about doing the right thing for the land. Surprisingly when doing our site analysis we discovered some baby Madrone trees at the bottom of their lot, outside their fence, and showed them where they were. We were all excited to restore the property back to its native roots.
They also wanted to maintain some areas around the house as being more formal and there was a big dropoff with a sloping backyard where the land needed to be retained. We were worried about the maintenance of the whole property being costly and wasteful.
Peralta Before - First Site Visit
We decided to create a steel retaining wall to divide the backyard into two areas, one being more formal and the other being more natural. We created an infinity edge lawn to emphasize their wonderful hill country views. The steel retaining walls also provided a modern framework for creating a wonderful, natural landscape below to be seeded with wildflowers and grasses which require little water and maintenance. It’s often all about the framing of a landscape and letting it go wild within that frame.
We planted all of this during the beginning days of COVID which was such a strange time, but it was good to have such a fun project to escape to. The hardest part was taking out the sod, and the steel walls went in swimmingly. Our plan was relatively conceptual and we made elevation adjustments on site. The clients were great and construction was a blast. It was such a wonderful site as we began to take the back lot back to its more natural state. Within a year, wildflowers were up to our noses. These clients keep in touch and we’ve had the pleasure of revisiting the project to see it blossom.