This is an image of the front of a new apartment complex on James Island. Located just 3 miles from the sands of Folly, the complex’s primary selling point is its proximity to the beach. The property’s location is so important to its brand, in fact, that the complex has adopted the slogan “closest…
This eye-catching image is from the entrance to a James Island car wash. I like this landscape design because it uses a combination of native Charleston plants to create a radiant coastal motif that looks good year-round. (It reminds me of long summer days on Folly Beach.) Some people have an aversion to “spiky”…
The recent historic flooding in South Carolina has left many Lowcountry lawns submerged. This is a precarious situation: Much of the inundated grass has been weakened, and weakened grass is susceptible to damage from fungus and grubs, which will proliferate for some time after the soil dries. Ultimately, some of the grass will die.…
Did the recent days of torrential downpours and historic flooding from the stalled front and Hurricane Joaquin make a mess of Charleston landscape? As a residential landscape designer who works in the field, I’m offering a yard cleanup special for a limited time: Lawn repair Debris removal Trimming dead branches Raking Blowing and bagging…
In recent years, zoysia grass has become a popular sod choice for Charleston lawns. It produces golf course-quality turf (in fact, many Lowcountry golf courses use a variety of zoysia for fairways), is heat and drought tolerant, insect resistant, can be used in sunny and shady areas, and initially spreads laterally as much as…
The other day, a local landscape architect inquired about my academic landscape design credentials. I replied that, while I don’t have a degree in landscape architecture, I started my Lowcountry landscaping career when I was 9 years old, I have an eye for design that you can’t learn in school, and, as a Charleston…
Colorful butterflies add to the beauty of fall in the Lowcountry. If your residential landscape design includes fragrant flowers in full sun or partial shade and you limit the use of outdoor spray pesticides, your yard is likely brimming right now with an abundance of fluttering allure. (They LOVE lantana in sunshine.) Click to…
In my residential landscape design work, I’ve come across many adjacent yards whose beautifully-designed and maintained beds and paths are tragically sullied by unkempt lawns. I don’t understand the logic: If someone takes enough pride in their yard to spend time and effort perfecting some elements, how could they overlook–literally and figuratively–the largest element,…
Property sales are huge transactions. With the median home price in the Charleston area currently hovering around $370,000 and commercial property averaging $21 per square foot, even small percentage deviations in sales price can equal tens of thousands of dollars. Presentation–the way a property looks–can not just significantly add to or subtract from a…
Starting Monday, nights will be longer than days in the Lowcountry until late March of next year. In other words, your property will be cloaked by darkness more than 50% of the time for the next 6 months. If aesthetic appeal of your property is important to you, landscape lighting is a must this…
Evergreens are valuable elements in residential landscape design because of their permanent nature: They look nearly the same during winter doldrums as they do in the heat of summer. As permanent fixtures, many evergreens–particularly Leland cypresses–make excellent natural partitions, particularly between properties. Many people don’t realize, however, that evergreens include all plants that retain…
As a minimalist who prefers low-maintenance residential landscape designs that last for years at a time, I’m a big fan of perennials, plants that return each growing season. Luckily, there’s an abundance of perennials that thrive in the Lowcountry. Of these numerous long-lasting, aesthetically-appealing florae, I have a particularly strong affinity for roses of…
Since I distribute Lowcountry Vistas’s flyers myself (make sure to read my letter to the editor in the Post and Courier about the outrageous experience I had with the USPS), I visit hundreds of yards each week. Sometimes, I’m impressed by what I see. Other times, I’m disheartened by the number of elements some…
Encore for Charleston area encore azaleas! My mother’s encores on James Island bloomed to some degree all summer (recall what I said about buying plants from local nurseries as opposed to big box stores), and, now that the sun is lower in the sky, the days are shorter, and the temperature has cooled, they’re…
The Lowcountry offers abundant natural beauty that can be sculpted and/or enhanced to create impressive residential landscape designs. On the other hand, it offers summers of stifling humidity and swarms of blood-sucking mosquitoes. But here, at the end of climatological summer on the first truly cool morning in months, we enter a golden period,…
The recent weeks of frequent heavy rains and consistently-hot and humid air have led to a proliferation of St. Augustine-killing fungus and armyworms. Symptoms include patches of yellowing and/or dead grass in an otherwise healthy lawn that increase in size and multiply after rains. Armyworms, which are actually a type of caterpillar, grow into yellowish…
I like to use evergreens and perennials as much as possible in my residential landscape designs so that yards look good year-round and maintenance remains minimal. (Annuals, on the other hand, must be replaced each year.) On this project, I used plenty of coastal grasses and sabal minors (look like dwarf Palmetto trees) to…
Sometimes, Lowcountry yards are a diamond in the rough. They don’t require a complete redesign to look good; they just need a good eye and plenty of tender-loving care. For this yard, I removed a significant amount of overgrowth to create a view from the street that revealed it at its full potential: a…
