Landscape Design Services

The landscape drawing set that goes into your project. That means the layout and materials plan for hardscape, and the grading and drainage plan. Then the planting plan with its schedule, the irrigation layout, and the lighting plan where it is in scope. Construction details for paving, walls, steps, edges, and site furnishings come with it. Earlier in a project the same person produces site analysis, concept plans, and the illustrative plans a client actually understands. Later they support the plant substitutions and field questions that always arrive during construction. Your architect or landscape architect of record reviews and seals what is submitted. On sites where grading and stormwater drive the design, the work is coordinated with the civil engineering scope. It is not drawn in isolation and handed over to be reconciled later.

Only with the right inputs, and this is the honest limit of remote landscape work. Planting is the most regionally specific decision in the discipline. What makes it work is method rather than intuition. Start from the USDA Plant Hardiness Zone Map for the site, your region's native and approved plant lists, and the municipal street tree list. Add a current availability list from the nurseries you actually buy from. Microclimate, soil, and irrigation water quality come from your site information. Firms that do this well keep a regional plant palette their designer works inside, which is faster and safer than open selection. Your local reviewer checks the palette before it is issued. Anyone who tells you plant selection travels freely across climates has not been called back about a failed planting.

Water use, stormwater, trees, and accessibility, in roughly that order of how often they bite. Landscape water efficiency is regulated at state and local level, and California's Model Water Efficient Landscape Ordinance is the strictest widely copied example. Stormwater requirements reach the landscape plan through the site's drainage design and any water quality features it carries. Tree ordinances govern removal, replacement, protection during construction, and required canopy, and they are municipal, so they change between neighboring towns. Accessibility applies to every path of travel through the site, including slope, cross slope, surface, and landings. We select candidates for experience in the regulatory environment your projects sit in. Compliance is confirmed by your professional of record, not by the person drawing. Tell us which state and city the work sits in before you interview anyone.

AutoCAD with Land F/X for production and planting schedules. Civil 3D where grading and site engineering are involved, and Vectorworks Landmark in the offices that standardize on it. Concept and modeling work runs in SketchUp and Rhino, and visualization in Lumion, Enscape or Twinmotion. Irrigation design comes out of Land F/X or the manufacturer's own tools. Plans and presentation sheets are finished in the Adobe suite when the output is illustrative rather than technical. The professional works in whatever your office already licenses, on your template and title block, and the licenses stay in your name. Tell us during qualification which tools you run. Matching a candidate to your stack removes the first week of friction. That is a week you would otherwise pay for while somebody learns an unfamiliar package.

When landscape is a real part of the work but not a full time role. Plenty of architecture practices carry landscape scope on a third of their projects. That is enough to matter and not enough to justify a permanent hire. It also comes up when a project needs more landscape resolution than the firm normally produces. Or when a local landscape architect is available for the seal and the site visits, but not for the drawing hours. The arrangement scales with the pipeline, works your hours, and carries a written replacement if the match is wrong. Onboarding for a standard profile takes less than 72 hours once you have selected the person. The arrangement earns its place when the drawing hours are the constraint and the seal is not.