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…
