Blog
Dry Streambeds for Nature-Inspired Landscapes
The Pacific Northwest is known for its natural beauty with soaring trees, green farmland, sprawling streams, and cascading waterfalls. It’s no surprise that our residents often want to capture that nature-inspired awe right in their own backyard. While we can’t mimic exactly what you see on a trip through the Columbia River Gorge, the team at Landscape East & West can bring a year-round natural feel to your own backyard through a well-placed dry streambed.
As the name implies, a dry streambed is meant to look like just that: a natural stream that has dried up. It typically consists of a shallow, winding trench filled with stones. The stones, gravel, and boulders used, along with natural plants along the borders, are meant to mimic the flow of water. In some cases, they even capture and direct rainwater that flows through a property. They can serve both a strictly aesthetic purpose and a solution for practical drainage problems.
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Prepare Your Yard for Winter
We’re in the countdown to winter. At Landscape East & West, that means we’re busy prepping yards around the region before the first rains fall and the temperatures drop below freezing. Our decades of experience have taught us that the rain tends to start full force around the second week of October, so it’s time to clear out dead plants, plant winter gardens, prune, and winterize your irrigation system. You can tackle many of the fall maintenance items for your landscape, or you can contact us to do the hard work for you. Then, you can spend your weekend watching the Ducks and Beavers or just watching the leaves fall.
Here’s what we address when protecting your landscape from winter weather and preparing it for a beautiful spring:
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New Home, New Landscape
A new house provides the opportunity to start fresh on your home design. Each room is a clean slate waiting for your personal touch. The same is true for what sits outside the windows. A new home deserves a new landscape, whether it’s replacing the builder’s special square of grass and cement patio or transforming a chaotic wildlife habitat into something more useful. Planning your outdoor living space should be exciting. The consultants at Landscape East & West are ready to help you create your design and get to work installing the yard of your dreams. (more…)
Rescue For A Brown Lawn
This may be the time of year when your landscape turns from lush lawn to scorched earth. After months of no rain and high temperatures, all living things are beginning to crave a little moisture. If your grass has gone brown, there’s not much you can do about it now, but wait for those first rainy days to bring it back to life. However, with some strategic planning, you can keep that landscape green throughout next year’s dry season. Contact Landscape East & West’s experts when you need some help to return to green.
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Plant Selection Tips for Year-Round Beauty
Our part of the Pacific Northwest is officially designated as zone 8 or 9 for plant growth and hardiness. That zone designation considers the average temperatures and rainfall over several years but as we well know, there is no such thing as an average year anymore. Those extreme heat spells, ice storms, and extended dry periods are anything but normal making it challenging to select the right plants for your Oregon yard. However, at Landscape East & West we have some tricks of the trade to ensure whatever you put in the ground has the best chance of survival.
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Enjoy Summer in Your Outdoor Living Space
The official season of outdoor living is here! After enduring the cold, damp winter, it's time to reward ourselves by soaking up the sun and enjoying the great outdoors. Having an outdoor living space right outside your home is perfection, but if your landscape is less than perfect, it may be time to refresh. If you’re ready to explore the many options for creating an outdoor living space, contact Landscape East & West to start the transformation.
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Trending Now: Paver Patios
As you spend more time outside in your yard enjoying warm days, are you finding your patio is looking worn out? You’re not alone. Spring and summer Landscape East & West regularly takes calls from homeowners who are ready to change their landscape and, right now, they want paver patios. Let’s explore why this trend is catching on in all the best yards around town.
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Take Time to Inspect Your Irrigation System
Every year around this time we have an unseasonable, and unfortunately short, bout of summer weather. One week we’re cranking up our thermostats, and the next week the AC is on. While this often prompts buds to burst, and bits of green to pop through the soil, it isn’t time to worry about watering yet. Even a week or two of warm and dry air is not reason enough to turn on the irrigation system. However, this taste of summer is a good reminder that now is the time to ensure your irrigation system is in working order for when the summer season finally does arrive.
At Landscape East & West, we’re happy to visit your home or business to conduct a spring tune-up on your irrigation system. Whether you call us or want to tackle the job of inspecting and repairing yourself, here’s what we recommend to make sure your irrigation system is in good working order and ready to flow into summer:
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Outdoor Lighting for Security and Aesthetics
The term landscaping often brings to mind plants, grass, or structures like arbors, but an essential ingredient to landscape design is outdoor lighting. When you invest your time and resources to beautify and secure your yard you should be able to enjoy it, and see what’s in it, whether day or night.
The landscape designers at Landscape East & West carefully select and position outdoor lighting fixtures to both add to the aesthetics of your yard and enhance the security of your home. There are strategies we use to get the most out of your outdoor lighting.
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Retaining Walls Done Right
The Pacific Northwest has a rugged landscape. To the experts at Landscape East & West, that means mountains and valleys, forests, and lots of rocks. While altering terrain is what gives this area interest and beauty, it can also bring challenges when creating landscapes.
Here, we tend to rely a lot on retaining walls to level off sloping yards to make them usable spaces. But there is a right way and a wrong way to install a retaining wall and too often in our travels we see the results of those incorrectly installed. Let’s take a look at what to consider to ensure a retaining wall in your yard stands the test of time.
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