When somebody asks us to transform a yard, what they are usually picturing is the last day — plants coming off the truck and going into the ground. That day is real, and it is the shortest and cheapest day of the job. Almost everything that decides whether the yard still looks right in three years happens before it, underground, where nobody photographs it.
It starts with the grade, and in Miami-Dade the grade is the whole ballgame. We sit low, the water table is high, and a summer storm can put two inches down in forty minutes. If the ground falls toward the house — and on a lot of older lots it does, because thirty years of mulch and topsoil have been added to beds against the wall without anyone checking — then no amount of planting fixes it and you will keep having a wet slab. So the first thing that happens is that the ground gets cut and shaped to move water away from the building and out to where it can leave. That is dirty, unglamorous, and it is the difference between a garden and a problem.
Then the lines. Where a bed stops and the grass starts is the single most visible decision in a front yard, and it is worth more than the plants that go in it. A bed line should be one continuous curve or one straight run — not a wobble that follows wherever a mower happened to turn. We lay it out with a hose, look at it from the street, from the front door and from the kitchen window, and move it until it reads right from all three. Then it gets a hard edge, in steel or aluminium, because a spade edge in South Florida sand is gone in one wet season.
Then the stone, which is where our own work goes. Anyone can pour gravel into a bed. Setting river rock, white marble chip and gold pebble into a deliberate pattern — a scroll, a medallion, a border that follows the bed line — is slow, and it is the reason people stop their cars in front of the yards we have done in Miami Springs and Hialeah. It also solves a real problem: a stone bed in full South Florida sun is far easier to keep than a planted one, so a mosaic gives you a front yard that looks like effort and takes almost none.
Only then does anything get planted, and the rule is that everything goes in at the size it will be, not the size it is. A green island ficus at three gallons looks lost; at maturity it is eight feet across. Half the yards we get called in to fix were planted correctly and simply planted too close, and there is no pruning your way out of that — it is a spacing decision made three years earlier.
Lighting goes in last and it is the thing people cut from the budget and then add later at twice the cost. Low-voltage cable is trivial to lay while the beds are open and miserable to retrofit once they are planted and stoned. It is also, honestly, the highest-return money in the whole job: a yard you can only see for eleven hours a day is half a yard, and in a climate where nobody goes outside until the sun is off the terrace, the lit version is the one you will actually use.
A typical front-yard transformation runs three to five days on site. A front and back together, with a terrace in it, is closer to two weeks. We phase them when it helps — plenty of our customers do the front one year and the back the next, on the same plan, which is one design rather than two jobs that do not match.
MariErich Landscaping & Design designs and builds across Miami Springs, Doral, Hialeah, Coral Gables, Kendall, Coconut Grove, Miami Beach, Key Biscayne, Weston and Hollywood. Free estimates — call (786) 985-5921.