Landscape Design and Installation in Central Florida
We revitalize your lawn and curb appeal with beautiful landscape designs. A common favorite is incorporating native fruit trees that survive and thrive, not only looking amazing but giving back to the homeowner! We plan and install beds, trees, palms, pavers and sod across Volusia, Lake and Seminole counties, and the crew that plans it is the crew that plants it.
Where does a good landscape design start?
With the yard itself, before any plant list. We look at where the big trees throw shade, how water moves across the lawn after a storm, and what you see from the street. Then we count sun. Stand in the bed at midday and add up the hours of direct light, because a full sun plant will stretch and sulk in a spot that only sees three.
That's how the Lake Mary front yard came together. An oak shaded half the lot, so we picked plants that hold their shape in part shade and gave the oak a smooth mulch ring. We also check what's worth keeping. A mature oak or a healthy palm saves you years of waiting, so we design around it before we buy a single plant. See it in our front yard landscape design in Lake Mary. At Roeling Green Lawns, nobody hands your drawing to a subcontractor.
… Michelle and Eddie completely transformed the landscape of my front yard making it look 10x better. …
Can a landscape include fruit your family can eat?
Yes, and we'd love to plant more of it. We can design native fruit trees into your landscape so they grow right alongside the palms and shrubs. The trick is picking fruit that will survive here, because Central Florida sand drains fast, a cold night can still hit in winter, and the shade from a big oak rules out plenty of what people hope to grow. Some fruit won't make it.
So a fruit tree gets the same treatment as any other plant in the design. It goes where it'll get the sun it needs, with room to grow, on a sprinkler zone that can water it. Fruit growers take chips from our tree jobs to put around their fruit trees, and those chips can go around yours. Tell us what your family likes to eat. We'll tell you which of those stand a chance in your yard, and we would rather say so at the planning stage than watch you water a tree for three years with nothing to show for it.
Which plants hold up in a coastal Florida yard?
Plants that can take salt, wind and sand, in that order. Salt drift reaches yards a few blocks back from the beach, and coastal sand drains so fast that anything needing rich, damp soil is a waste of money. Fertilizer won't save a plant that can't take salt, so we pick for the site first and the color second, and we'll talk you out of anything that won't last.
The New Smyrna Beach bed we installed used Christmas palms for structure and muhly grass, which throws a pink haze of seed heads every autumn. Orange bromeliads handle full sun and salt. White bird of paradise went along the back for height, with pentas at the front for color. It's all in our coastal front yard landscape design in New Smyrna Beach. Grasses and flowers fill in within about one growing season. Palms take two or three years, so we set them first and build everything else around where they're headed.
How do you plant a landscape bed under a live oak?
Carefully, and mostly by hand. An oak's feeder roots sit in the top foot of soil, right where a new bed goes. So we don't till, we don't raise the grade, and if a planting hole hits a big root, the hole moves. The plant list leans toward things that can handle dry spells, because the oak will win every fight for water.
Scale matters as much as roots. The Winter Garden job was a circular island bed in a paver turnaround with an RV pad, planted in a single day. Canna lilies went through the middle for height and red flowers, silver foliage ran low around the edge, and young palms went in to grow up under the canopy. That bed also screens the parked RV, as our driveway island landscape bed in Winter Garden shows. Young plants need regular water until they root, so we check the sprinkler coverage before we call it done.
Why stage every plant in its pot before planting?
Because nobody reads a planting plan, and everybody understands a yard full of pots. Before we dig, every plant gets stood up in its final spot, still in its nursery pot. The palms go first. Then we walk out to the street and look at it the way a neighbor would, because spacing reads differently on the ground than it does on paper, and sliding a pot two feet beats digging a plant back up. On a bigger job, you can stand there with us and move pots around until it looks right to you.
This is also where we talk you out of planting too tight. A bed that looks completely full on day one will crowd itself within three years. So we leave gaps on purpose and space for what the plants will become. It takes an extra half hour on install day and saves years of hacking the bed back.
Can you clean up an overgrown yard before you landscape it?
Yes. A cleanup is often the first step, and it's work we want more of. Many of the overgrown yards we see are at foreclosed houses. We mow it all down, pull what's dead, and haul everything away ourselves, and then we can see what's worth keeping. We can usually tell you that on the first visit.
From there, your budget decides. Some owners stop at a clean yard. Others add irrigation installation and repair, new beds or a few trees. Planting trees is another job Jeremy would happily do all week, whether that's one shade tree for a bare front yard or a row of palms. For a DeLand shopping center, we planted sabal palms in the parking islands overnight so the stores never lost a space. Tell us what you want to spend and we'll tell you what gets you the most yard for it. Start small if you want to.
Can landscape design include mulch, pavers and sod?
Yes, and they work best planned together. At the Lake Mary home, the paver walkway got a soldier course border, and the sod was edged clean against the new beds after the grade was set. We handle that in house, so you have one crew to call if something doesn't line up.
Mulch goes on two to three inches deep and stays off the stems and palm trunks. Piled against a trunk, it holds moisture right where rot starts. Plan on topping it up about once a year. Where pavers and sod both meet a bed, we set the grade once so nothing sits high. Businesses need that upkeep too, and we maintain a bank property with that kind of regular mulch and tree work. You can see what commercial grounds involve in our commercial tree trimming at a DeLand bank, where we kept the drive through and the parking lot open while we worked.
