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Woodland Rain Gardens
The 2014 ASLA Award of Excellence went to Jeffrey Carbo Landscape Architects for this northwest Louisiana residence. Carbo’s plan provides the homeowners with a series of level play lawns for visiting grandchildren; water collection systems that address rapidly diminishing rainfall while doubling as garden features such as rills and, above, a pervious limestone parking area; and walking paths and driveways that make the five-acre parcel’s hardwood forest a part of the owners’ daily experience.
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A lush underplanting of ferns and other native plants surrounds the walkway between two of the lawn terraces that serve as flexible play areas for the grandchildren.
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The landscape architects installed a serpentine driveway and walking paths through the forest of native hardwoods and pines.
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Brazilian ironwood trees and ornamental grasses soften the property’s bold façade.
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City House in a Garden
McKay Landscape Architects created fenceless privacy for this Chicago home, tucking its entry behind a street-facing raised garden that features Royal Frost birches, dwarf Japanese maples, and Boston ivy. In addition to the front garden, a generously planted walkway leads to an entertaining space at the rear of the house, and a combined green roof and vegetable garden fills out its upper level.
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GM House
For a client’s weekend retreat outside of São Paulo, landscape architect Alex Hanazaki sculpted the sloped terrain into multiple terraces, punctuating the levels with Jabuticaba fruit trees and other native plantings. Cor-Ten steel retaining walls and embedded LED lighting further delineate the landscape’s sculptural components.
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The design includes a soccer field, topiary, cantilevered terraces, and this sunken landform topped by a grass-covered bridge.
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Thanks to intensive planting and gravel gardens, more than half the site is covered in permeable surfaces, which drastically reduces water runoff and provides relief from the summer city heat.
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A view from the compound’s main house, looking across a water feature to the narrow play lawn that is flanked by native bluestem prairies punctuated by cactus and agave.
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At the rear of the house, the bluestone, board-formed concrete, copper, and ipe hardscape is contrasted with layered plantings of katsura, fernleaf beech, Japanese stewartia, mugo pine, quince, tiger eyes sumac, perennials, and ornamental grasses.
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Hill Country Prospect
For a family compound in the central Texas Hill Country, Studio Outside set out to restore the native prairie, preserve existing habitats, and introduce a more sophisticated aesthetic to constructed outdoor spaces. This outdoor fireplace, for example, enlists modern materials and contemporary lines, but it is also ensconced in native vegetation and flowering perennials that provide color through most of the growing season. The westward setting affords spectacular views of the surrounding 200 acres and sunsets.
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Across a meadow from the main property, the pool pavilion has low-maintenance permeable grass parking with Cor-Ten steel parking stops.
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Le Petit Chalet
This early-20th-century chalet sits on an unusual private easement within the bounds of Maine’s Acadia National Park. When Hurricane Hanna devastated its grounds in 2008, Matthew Cunningham Landscape Design was asked to restore them and add stormwater management strategies that would serve the client’s aesthetic needs while conforming to state and federal conservation guidelines.
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Dry-laid masonry walls, using locally reclaimed granite, give definition to the steeply sloped property while also helping to stem erosion by slowing water runoff.
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To replace vegetation stripped away by the 2008 storm, a completely indigenous plant palette was enlisted, including soil-stabilizing swaths of mosses, lowbush blueberry, hay-scented fern, and wintergreen.
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Sky Garden
For a penthouse built onto a parking garage—a South Beach landmark designed by Herzog & de Meuron—Raymond Jungles took advantage of underused roof space to create this lush secret garden. The high point of the garden looks across Biscayne Bay toward the downtown Miami skyline.
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The architect situated the penthouse under the garage’s top slab, which allowed Jungles to design on two levels.
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The planting had to conform with an average planting depth of six inches, so Jungles chose resilient natives and noninvasive specimens that could withstand site conditions. The plant palette includes vines (railroad, Virginia creeper, and grape), Giant Silver bromeliad, gulf cordgrass, agave ‘Gainesville Blue,’ gaillardia, imperial bromeliad, Mexican breadfruit, and seaside goldenrod.
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To complement the home’s restrained new color palette of silver, smoky gray, and amethyst accents, Lewis chose warm gray domestic limestone paving, blue lyme grass, and this grove of silvery olive trees.
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Vineyard Retreat
A Napa Valley home, surrounded by vineyards, underwent a major makeover, which involved decluttering its site, color palette, and traditional perennial garden. Scott Lewis Landscape Architecture connected the property to its larger site by removing sheds that obstructed views and breezes, reducing the outbuildings to a carefully selected few, including this pavilion located at the highest part of the property.
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West Texas Ranch
In Marfa, Texas, Ten Eyck Landscape Architects designed a residential plan on the 8,000-acre site of a former working ranch. The firm focused on developing 2.5 acres of the property into a place-appropriate residential garden that includes a pool, lawn, shade, and flowering beds.
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In an effort to reduce the site’s impervious surfaces (which Lewis did by almost 70 percent), gravel paths and drought-tolerant plantings now cover most of the outdoor areas. For the expanded meadow areas, nine grass species were interwoven in large swaths.
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A new orchard of pecan trees was planted to create a shaded outdoor dining area.
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ASLA honored the project for its “raw elegance” and careful use of shadows, textures, and subtle colors. Attention was paid to restoration and replenishment of the overworked and compacted grounds, and native plantings such as yucca, agave, prickly pear, candelilla, Apache plume, mesquite, and desert willow were widely reintroduced.
