FAMILY RETREAT

The renovation of a 1920’s Bungalow in Madison’s first planned community won the Perennial Plant Association’s highest honor award for landscape design. The gardens are inspired by English cottage-style gardens and provide continuous bloom throughout the seasons and an abundance of cut flowers for the house.

This residential design addressed a complete site renovation for a lot with severe slopes, drainage and circulation problems, and privacy issues.

The owner’s hectic work and travel schedules meant that the landscape and gardens needed to provide an important retreat, sanctuary, and place of renewal. The client wanted to be able to wander through the gardens in privacy at night, and to have a variety of places to view the gardens from her home and yard.

Many of these goals were met by carefully designing the site as a whole, and using the existing steep slopes to create stepped paths, hidden areas, screening and framing views.

The primary engineering issues were to address the inherent drainage and erosion control problems of the site. This was accomplished with the careful interaction of grading, retainage, structure, planting areas and perennial gardens.