Re: Gardens and Fruit Trees
I strongly second the master gardener suggestion. I know for a fact Wichita Falls has a very strong master gardener program (I've been to one of their conventions). Dallas and Plano are strong too.
My issue with landscape architects is that they tend to live in a dream world where things only have to look good for a year or so. I get sooo tired of going to look at a house with DH because they are having tree problems and realizing that the person they hired 1) used the wrong plant material and 2) used too much of it. One house we went to had 3 pines in an area that would hardly support 1. See, they looked good when he planted it and just 1 small one would have looked bare, so he planted for the now rather than the future. So now those homeowners had to decide which 1 of the 3 they wanted to keep and none of them were in the best spot (they were in a triangle and the best spot would have been in between the 2 outer edges - midpoint of they hypotenuse). Plus, they were a pine that was extremely susceptible to the diseases our soil carried so they were probably going to die anyway, there were other pines that are not susceptible, but they aren't as pretty, especially when small.
If you use a landscape architect, ask him to project growth for 5-10 years and then ask if you can scale it back.
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