Every household has a corner it has stopped seeing. In some homes it’s the shelf above the refrigerator; in plenty of others it’s the back yard, which currently holds a rectangle of gravel, one tired shrub and a bucket that has been waiting for a purpose since spring. If you’re researching landscape design Reno, you’ve probably begun to see your own corner again, which is the first step of the whole business and, conveniently, free.
I have spent a good deal of my reading life among gardens made by people who had no choice but to be sensible. The courtyard houses of hot, dry countries gather around a patch of shade and a splash of water, because the shade and the water are the entire point. Japanese garden makers have long treated the view beyond the wall as part of the garden, and arranged the foreground to frame it. Neither tradition began with a catalog of plants. Both began with a plain question about how a person would sit there.
That’s the question this slow Sunday guide is built around. Before anyone picks stone or shrubs, it helps to work out what the yard is for, what the climate will and won’t allow, and what belongs on paper before it belongs in the ground. None of it requires a shovel, which is rather the charm.
Sunday shortcut
Decide how you want to use the yard on an ordinary Sunday first, draw that on paper, and only then let anyone choose plants, stone or sprinklers.
The yard is a room nobody furnished
We furnish the inside of a house with something close to devotion. Rugs are auditioned, lamps are moved four inches to the left, and a chair that doesn’t suit the room goes back to the shop. Then we step outside and accept whatever the previous owner, the builder or the weeds decided. I find this odd, because in a great many places the outdoor table is where life actually happens. In the warm countries around the Mediterranean, the evening meal drifts outdoors for months at a time, and the terrace is planned with the same seriousness as the kitchen. In cooler northern Europe, people tend to put the bench wherever the first spring sun lands, and will defend it against all comers.
The practical version of this is what I’d call the sitting survey. On a single Sunday, carry a chair to three or four spots in the yard and sit in each for a while, once in the morning and again in the evening. Notice where the sun lands and where it’s merciless, which way the wind comes from, what you can see from the kitchen window, and the route your feet already take from the back door to the gate. Write it all on the back of an envelope. A landscape designer will ask for exactly this information, and you’ll be able to answer in detail instead of with a shrug.
The survey has a quiet side effect, too. The spot where you keep ending up is probably where the patio, the bench or the fire pit wants to be, and it’s far kinder to your plans to learn that with a kitchen chair than with a trenching machine.
Dry country has opinions
Gardeners in dry parts of the world have been refining their approach for a very long time, and what they arrived at looks nothing like a lawn. Think of the gravel and herb gardens of Mediterranean hillsides, or the shaded courtyards of desert towns: stone underfoot, plants chosen because they can cope with the sun, and water treated as the valuable thing it is. Reno sits in dry, sunny country with cold winters and hot summers, so a yard there is asked to cope with both ends of the calendar. A plan that only looks good in June has completed half the assignment.
That’s the second thing a thoughtful design settles on paper: how the yard behaves across a whole year. Which plants share a watering routine because they have similar thirst. Where rain and snowmelt will run when they arrive, since water always finds the lowest point and has no respect for your new flower bed. Where the shoveled snow will go (it has to go somewhere, and the answer shouldn’t be the one shrub you like). What the yard looks like in February, when the leaves have left and only the bones remain: a wall, a path, an evergreen, a good shape of stone.
Shade deserves its own line in the plan. In hot, sunny places the people who built courtyards, arcades and pergolas understood that a bench in full afternoon sun is a decoration rather than a seat. A tree takes years to do the job, a built structure does it sooner, and either way the location is worth deciding before the furniture arrives. The same goes for the hard surfaces. A patio, a path and a low wall are the parts of a dry-country yard that look the same in every season, which makes them the backbone around which the planting can afford to be looser and more forgiving.
When you talk to a designer, ask how the plan handles water and winter before you ask about flowers. If the conversation about flowers comes first, steer it back, gently, the way you would with a dinner guest who has started on politics.
Paper is cheaper than gravel
There’s a reason architects draw before they build, and it isn’t tradition for its own sake. A drawing is the one inexpensive place to make a mistake. A designer measures the space, asks a great many questions and puts a plan on paper, and the better ones give you some way of seeing the finished yard before the first stone arrives, whether that’s a scaled drawing or a 3D view you can turn around on a screen. Either one lets you notice that the path is too narrow for two people to walk side by side, or that the patio you pictured sits exactly where the afternoon sun never reaches.
I’m fond of the way many Japanese gardens set their stepping stones so that you have to look down at your feet, then up at the view, then down again. The path is designed to slow you. That sort of decision is invisible in a catalog and obvious on a drawing. Anything structural, such as retaining walls, large patios or changes in grade, also deserves a conversation about permits, and the right person to ask is the local building department, not the neighbor who built a deck once.
For a first meeting with any designer, a little preparation makes the hour better:
- photos of the yard taken in the morning and again in the evening;
- a rough sketch showing doors, windows, gates and where the sun falls;
- a plain list of how you use the space on an ordinary weekend;
- the things you would rather never see again (the bucket qualifies);
- a sense of the budget you’re comfortable with, said out loud early.
Which brings me back to the corner you stopped seeing. The bucket, I’m sorry to say, has had a long career and can be retired. Before Monday, carry one chair out to the yard, sit in it for ten minutes with your coffee, and write down the three things you’d change if the yard were a room. After ten minutes I suspect the corner will have become the one place in the house you can’t stop seeing, and you’ll know exactly what to ask for.
