Landscaping
A property planned and built in the right order
A whole property planned and built as one job, rather than five contractors solving five parts of it in the wrong order.
The problem
The property does not work: the useful ground is in the wrong place, there is nowhere to sit, the grade fights you, and you cannot tell which of the six things that need doing has to happen first.
Almost every landscape project on a sloped Hudson Valley lot has a required order, and getting it wrong is expensive in a very specific way. Water and grade come first, because everything else sits on them. Then the structures that hold the grade. Then the surfaces. Then the soil. Planting is last, and planting installed before the excavator's final pass is planting that gets driven over.
So a design here starts with what the site is doing, not with a plant list: where the water goes now and where it should, what the grade actually is, how much of the property is unusable because of slope, where the sun lands, and how close the ledge is to the surface. Some of that is visible on a walk-through; some of it is not known until something is dug.
The plan that comes out of that is a sequence with a budget attached, and it is normal for it to run across two seasons — walls and grading in one, planting and finish in the next. We would rather tell you that at the start than discover it in August.
What the work includes
- Site assessment: grade, drainage, sun, soil and ledge
- Concept and planting plans
- Excavation, regrading and soil preparation
- Hardscape coordinated with the planting plan
- Planting installation and bed construction
- Landscape lighting and irrigation coordination
- Phased builds across multiple seasons
What you end up with
A property where the pieces were built in the right order and each one accounts for the others — instead of a patio that had to be lifted to fix the drain under it.
How long it takes
Design and site assessment is two to four weeks. Installation depends entirely on scope: a bed renovation is days, a full property is a season, and anything involving significant regrading is planned around ground conditions rather than around a calendar.
Where we do landscape design & installation
Across Putnam and northern Westchester County. The ground is not the same in all four of these towns and it changes how this work gets built — each page says what changes there.
Usually goes with
These three come up on the same properties often enough that it is worth pricing them together rather than twice.
Get a landscape design & installation estimate
Tell us what you are trying to do and we will come and look at it. Free written estimates, no obligation.