Overhead view of backyard concept design showing path, furniture, and plantings
After stripping our backyard down to bare dirt, my friend recommended an online landscape design service, Yardzen. For $1000, they’ll create a design for either your front or backyard — which is much cheaper than you could get a landscape designer locally. Having a limited budget, we’re hoping to put as much as possible into the installation rather than the design.
You don’t interact directly with anyone, but upload photos and videos of your yard, answer some style quizzes, identify your priorities, share some inspiration photos, identify your overall budget, and answer some questions about likes and dislikes. They advertise the whole process as taking 4-6 weeks but we received our concept design just over a week after submitting all our information. Next, we’ll provide our feedback and they’ll prepare a revised final plan.
Inspiration and Goals
Inspiration: glen at Butchart Gardens with ferns and hostas
Inspiration: street plantings in Tofino with grasses, conifers and rocks
I also picked two examples of Piet Oudalf designs, one a lovely meadow with coneflower and grasses, and another from his home Hummelo. My fifth pick was a fun Victoria garden incorporating sculptures that echoed the shape of allium flowers.
We identified a few plants we wanted to keep, but were OK with letting go of the garden beds. It turns out that we’re just not that interested in growing veg these days — and that’s fine. So we don’t need to take up a huge amount of real estate like now.
Because of the freeway noise, we’d like the yard to be mostly for looking at, rather than with lots of spaces to use. Our priorities are planting native, wildlife-friendly, and drought-tolerant plants (although the soil is relatively wet and we get lots of wetland species volunteers). A special request was for late summer hummingbird flowers, as well as incorporating rocks. I called out that in the front yard I use yellow and purple as my accent colors, though I didn’t explicitly ask them to use those again here. We asked for four-season interest since it’s main goal is looking pretty.
For reference, we initially said we had $20k to spend, but after they told us we couldn’t afford what we wanted, said it could go up to $25-$30k. (I sure hope that accounts for local pricing because Seattle is pricey.)
