I’m proud to be a Charleston native. After all, we’re a rare breed: According to the Charleston Regional Development Alliance, the population of the Charleston metropolitan area is growing at 3x the national average, relocation the primary driver of the impressive growth. The rapid growth of the Lowcountry has made “Charleston native” a unique…
I apologize for the long period between posts. Lowcountry Vistas and my Spanish tutoring side business have been keeping me busy, to say the least! I wanted to take this opportunity to describe a couple of projects I’ve completed since my last post. A few weeks ago, I had the opportunity to build colorful…
The featured image of this post is from a downtown Charleston bar I frequent for Spanish happy hours. The bar, which did a wonderful job of renovating the building, clearly spent good money on this raised, stucco, self-draining planter on the back patio. Unfortunately, they’ve let it go. The planter, for which good money…
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…
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…
