The best landscape designers don’t use perfect plants, pavers, or products!

The best advice I can give any designer is to go back and critique your work. I have been doing this for over 20 years. Although it is not always flattering, it has made me the successful designer I am today. The best designs are those that comes the closest to meeting your client’s wishes. It took me about 10 years to realize the properties that look the best are not the ones that are maintained the best, but the properties that have lack of maintenance designed in.


This discovery has made me search high and low trying to find the perfect plant, paver or product for a designated area only to come up empty. It’s not because I don’t know the materials that exist. The reality is the perfect, you fill in the blank does not exist. Successful designers realize this and search for the best plant, paver, or product. Knowing the weakness of the material and how it will decline over time is crucial. When designers don’t understand this, it results in a disposable landscape. This understanding will help you design a landscape that will improve as time goes on and need little to keep it going.