How a Landscape Designer Chooses Materials for a Natural Landscape Design in the Green, NJ, Area
Choosing the right materials for a landscape design can make or break the project. If you’re curious about how a landscape designer chooses materials for a natural landscape design in the Green, NJ, area, here’s what typically happens.
Your Vision
Ultimately, you are the one who has the final say on the materials used in your landscape design. While we can make recommendations and help guide you in making material choices, we are driven by your vision or the vision you have entrusted in us. The materials that end up being part of your final design should reflect your personal preferences and meet your practical needs as well.
We take inspiration and design cues from nature. Some elements are molded, if you will, into man-made shapes (patios and fire pits, for example) and everything follows an intuitive approach for the perfect placement of each stone and plant. The ultimate goal is to make each element appear as if it has always been there—and present its most attractive face for your enjoyment.
Local Flavor
Capturing the essence of natural landscapes requires one “ingredient” that ties it all together: local flavor, or the use of softscape and hardscape elements that are native to the area.
In creating natural landscape design, the best results tend to come from being true to the surroundings and choosing native plants and landscape elements. Trees, shrubs, grasses, ground covers, flowers, as well as stone and boulders should look as though they belong—so that when you’re outdoors, you feel that you are in a natural and not an artificial setting.
Choosing native plants also has another benefit: low maintenance. Native plants are perfectly adapted to the local climate and soil conditions and have built-in defenses against local pests and disease. They generally require very little supplemental watering, fertilizer, or pest control—unlike exotic plants that may struggle to cope with the area’s temperature extremes and potentially unfamiliar stressors like pests or disease.
With so many choices in native plants, your landscape can become a showpiece of beauty, bounty (fruit if you so choose), and practicality (shade and windbreaks, and habitat for local pollinators and wildlife).
Natural Stone
Locally sourced stone and boulders are key to a successful natural landscape design. Wherever possible, we use locally sourced materials to avoid a look that’s forced or awkward.
Some stone will end up underfoot, on patios, steps, and walkways. A local favorite stone is bluestone (quarried right here in the mid-Atlantic states) with its dramatic steel-blue colors. Granite, slate, and limestone are other great choices. In terms of color, they fit in perfectly with lush New Jersey foliage. Whether they are left uncut or they are shaped, you can’t go wrong with these material choices.
Some stone will be used on vertical elements: fire pits or outdoor fireplaces; retaining walls; pillars; and water features.
Decorative boulders add a bit of drama to your landscape. They can flank a stone slab staircase, provide seating around a fire pit, define spaces, or simply add a vertical dimension The key is to choose boulders that look as though they’ve been in place—in this particular place—for millennia.
Sometimes, the best inspiration for choosing a specific type of stone for vertical features comes from visiting local historical homes and seeing what types of stone were used on the homes’ foundations and structures such as fireplaces and walls. Before commercial transportation, materials were sourced locally—which is why historical properties always seem to blend in so well with their surroundings.