Landscape Design & Installation in Shoreline, WA

They introduce a constraint most gardens in this market never face: preservation of views between properties, which means planting height is not purely your own decision. That cuts both ways — it limits what you can grow tall to screen a neighbour, and it equally protects your own outlook from what somebody above you might plant. The practical consequence is that a screening strategy has to be designed within the covenants rather than around them, which usually means solving privacy with structure and layout rather than with height. We establish what applies before designing.

Mostly in what becomes affordable. The single largest cost variable on a Seattle project is moving material through a narrow side return, and on a Shoreline lot that constraint largely disappears — a machine reaches the work and pallets sit beside it. So elements that would be prohibitive in the city, like substantial stone, significant level changes or a large paved area, become realistic. The design consequence is that we can specify for the garden rather than for the access route, which is a genuine difference in what is possible.

Because it supplies nothing. A sloped lot tells you where the levels want to be and gives water somewhere to go; a flat post-war garden does neither. On glacial till it also drains worse than a slope does, so the ground holds water all winter and defeats planting that would thrive twenty feet uphill. The design therefore has to create both structure and drainage rather than working with what is there — which is more design input than a difficult site, not less.

That the ground there behaves nothing like the plateau behind it and may carry critical area designations. The Boeing Creek and Ballinger corridors cut real grade through this city, and ground near a ravine edge responds to both loading and water in ways level ground does not — so anything substantial, and any change to where runoff goes, needs establishing against the parcel first. It is also, incidentally, the most interesting part of these gardens to design, because it is where the site finally supplies some drama.