Texas Excellence in Landscaping Awards featured project
MasterScapes received Honorable Mention recognition for this project submission to the 2010 Texas Excellence in Landscaping Awards. This property is located in Eastland County near Cisco.
Inside MasterScapes
Building Good Bones: Garden Structure
Let’s examine basic garden layout and its structural components - paths and areas of paving, lawns, trees, hedging, pergolas and other features - and how they can contribute to the overall style of the garden. These form the garden’s architectural framework and give it its unity: a combination of hard building materials and living plants inside which more ephemeral and colourful ’secondary’ planting schemes are contained. Without this framework the secondary planting, however pretty, may lack coherence and fail to satisfy.
Interestingly, in many successful gardens, when the secondary planting has matured, the garden framework may become unobtrusive and quite difficult to analyze, but its very existence gives an air of purpose. It also provides strong and dense shapes, whether of walls, fencing or evergreen shrubs and hedges, which are essential backdrops for brighter flower and leaf colours. A black and white photograph of a garden, or a pencil sketch using just the vertical and horizontal lines, will reveal the garden’s components without the distraction of colour - just as the winter picture of the Canneman garden clearly gives its shape and outline. In monochrome, plants become structural and have density and weight, contributing balance and rhythm. They are playing architectural roles, whether singly as focal points, in pairs or groups to frame a scene, or arranged in a continuous line as hedges or, like grass or other groundcover, massed together in a horizontal carpet. Plants form the bones of the garden through all the seasons.
The structure of a garden does not have to be complicated; in fact, as with all garden themes, an essential element is simplicity to achieve balance. It is the fussy, over-elaborate design which can damage the garden’s atmostphere.
excerpt from Garden Style by Penelope Hobhouse
The Allure of Stone
The use of natural stone in a garden adds a sense of timeless permanence and the variety of materials is endless. This 2009 Breckenridge project features grand steps and retaining walls constructed from regional materials: limestone, Oklahoma flagstone and slabs, and moss boulders.
Summer Pools
Summer time is pool time! We can design your perfect pool to blend seamlessly into an existing landscape or as part of a new master plan. Here are a few of our favorites: …read more
Warm Weather Color
Summer is here and it’s time for new color! Take a look at some of our seasonal color selections. …read more