Planted Earth

Planted Earth was called upon to rebuild an outdoor living area that was destroyed by a house fire. The home and all the surrounding landscape were destroyed. One of our Landscape Architect partners, Campion Hruby, had designed new gardens that included a swimming pool, a reflection pool at the front door, concrete retaining walls cladded with ½” Corten steel coverings, major plant installations, irrigation, landscape lighting, new gravel driveway.

Our challenge was to work hand and hand with the builder who was rebuilding the home from the foundation up. The schedule was extremely aggressive, there were always other contractors in our way and the modern design required a high level of detail. The pool was designed to extend through the large (10’ high) retaining walls, the retaining walls were to be covered with Corten steel, the reflection pool required two exceptionally large (1- 10′ wide and 1 8’ wide) slabs of Pennsylvania bluestone to be set on concrete piers for support. The idea was to have these stones “appear to be floating in the water.” The reflecting pool is dyed black to create reflections off the large windows in the front of the home. A large amount of grading and underground drainage was installed to manage the additional run off created.

The planting portion of the project involved nursery visits with the Landscape Architects to hand select plant materials, extensive soil preparations due to all the compaction created by the construction, tree protection for a 100-year-old Red Oak that was just far away from the home to avoid the fire. The Planted Earth team completed large tree installation and ¾ of acre of new tall fescue sod. They installed irrigation for the plantings and the new turf. Our outdoor lighting team installed path, up, and down lighting to illuminate the gardens at night.

In total, the project took 7 months to complete.  The following Spring,  Planted Earth began our maintenance program which continues to today. The photographs were taken several years after installation and speak to the longevity and growing beauty of this landscape.