Site Design: A Personal Work In Progress
For me, there is no better way to kick off our conversation about site design than with my own personal experience. It’s been three years and eight months since Sarah and I purchased our first home in Ballard. Coming from a Landscape Architecture background, it took me all of two weeks before I ripped out the newly laid turf blanketing our yard. It has taken three complete summers of long days, a hernia operation (blue stone is heavier than I thought) and money we didn’t have for us to get to this point. What we have so far, in my prideful opinion, is a landscape that incorporates native and drought tolerant plants, bird habitat, a green roof and beauty that we can enjoy everyday.
Of course, what took me so long to get to this point was that fact that I had never built anything significant before in my life. Regardless, overwhelming anxiety and high expectations shoved me into building a garden shed with green roof, water feature, stone patio, corten steel screen, privacy fence, and a planting palette I can be proud of. This summer’s project will be an outdoor kitchen - a project I know nothing about yet.
Although our site footprint is small, I was able to divide our space into four outdoor “rooms”, each with their own unique materials and plant combinations. The 16′x16′ Pennsylvania blue stone patio is flanked on two sides by two stone boxes (one acting as a planter and the other as a water feature) wrapped with a corten steel skin. Behind the water feature is a corten steel screen acting as vertical fins to separate the patio from an intimate pathway covered in English moss. To provide a bit of drama to the steel screen, feathered reed grass gently sways in the wind between each fin casting dark dancing shadows onto the ferrous colored steel.
The planter box is filled with tulips, coreopsis and liatris - separating the patio from a native Pacific Northwest forest floor planting. In this native garden room, I can sit below our cherry tree in my hammock and appreciate all the plants I grew up with; sword fern, bracken fern, salal, evergreen huckleberry, snowberry, vine maple, yellow and red twig dogwood, and bunchberry. In all, our landscape has a complex planting palette, but it was designed in such a way that it does not require irrigation. There is nothing better than a maintenance free garden.
To top it all off, I designed and installed a six inch soil profile green roof that acts as a surprise center piece to our yard. Sloped towards the patio and our bedroom window, this 11′x11′ shed roof is full of perennials, succulents, grasses, and wildflowers. With the selection of these plants and the soil medium, I have created a drought tolerant and maintenance free landscape that retains enough stormwater during heavy rain events that only a slow trickle of water begins to emerge after the rain has stopped. The trickle is subtle enough to allow the runoff to slowly infiltrate into the garden floor. This is in stark contrast to the deluge that flows off the traditional roof of our house during the same storm event.
Although the installation of these landscape elements took me almost four years, they are still very simple concepts. Thoughtful and simple design can be achieved and will have long lasting positive effects on our natural environment and personal well being. Stay tuned for an update on my outdoor kitchen project this summer.
