Some of the most delightful gardens you might ever visit are tiny, wondrous places thoughtfully and lovingly put together by their owners over many, many years at little or no cost!  Sheer size and a high price tag have nothing whatever to do with the inherent quality of a garden. 

     A good garden is a place that satisfies the needs of its owners;  that allows them to use and enjoy their property to the maximum extent possible;  that –in short– works and, therefore, earns its own keep, year after year, whatever its initial cost!  If a garden doesn’t "work", if it isn’t useful and practical, if you can’t live or do anything in it, it isn’t any good no matter how much or how little you paid for it, how aesthetically pleasing it may be, or how beautiful its flowers are.  You want proof?  Look at your " landscaping" and ask yourself;  "When is the last time that I took a chair to the front lawn to read a book or to relax and enjoy a good cup of coffee?"

     Far from being the luxuries they once were, true gardens are more and more becoming necessities these days.  Where the extremely wealthy continue to have a choice and can opt to surround their huge, rural mansions either with useless, park-like and purely decorative landscaping or with gardens;  i.e. where they can well afford NOT to put the lion’s share of their outdoor property to any sort of practical and private use and enjoyment if they so choose, growing numbers of middle and upper income, urban/suburban American homeowners living on ½ acre or smaller lots, no longer feel that they have a similar option. 

     Having opted for "sensibly sized" and proportioned, well laid-out and planned, smaller yet highly functional homes (such as the ones we propose to design and help create) they are now turning to equally well designed, practical, and highly livable "outdoor rooms without ceilings";  i.e.  to gardens.  in their efforts to maximize and justify the enormous investments they have in their properties.  In fact, the smaller their lots, the greater their need of well designed gardens!

     One reason for this, truly historic, shift lies in the fact that in these days of sky-high realty prices and property taxes, the cost of owning, say, a 1/2 acre (21,780sf), $125,000 lot has risen to the point where most folks are now paying anywhere from $0.30 to $0.35 annually in mortgage interest, property taxes, and maintenance costs for EVERY square foot of the land around their homes whether they use it or not!  In the case of a house and a driveway with a combined footprint of -say- 4.000sf, that means that the owners pay anywhere from $5,300 to $6,200 annually for the "privilege of owning" the remaining 17,780sf of (usually) open and unused land!  NOT to put some, if not all, of that land to the private (exclusive) use and enjoyment of its owners is being viewed, more and more, as a frightful waste of both the money AND the land involved;  i.e. as a choice only the extremely wealthy can truly afford to make!

     Another reason is the fact that home construction costs have risen to where outdoor living space is considerably cheaper to build than comparable indoor space.  In fact, for the cost of one sf of indoor space (ranging from $100 to $150, depending upon where in the US you live), you can now get anywhere from 8 to 10 sf of highly usable outdoor space!  

     Even a tiny townhouse garden where every sf of outdoor space counts and must be made to yield some practical use, and where at least 70% of that space is covered under hardscape, should not cost more than $30 p/sf to build.  That huge cost differential coupled with the high cost of land, more than anything else, is what is fueling the renewed interest in gardens these days!

     Furthermore, by rolling up your sleeves and doing the job yourself over a number of years, you can save better than half of the commercial cost of making a garden.  Except for certain masonry jobs like laying pavers on top of a concrete stoop, for instance – a job which requires a special, fast drying, water tight mortar, special tools, and a great deal of craftsmanship, and skill – earth moving, or the building of a covered (winterized) porch or gazebo perhaps, there is virtually nothing that you cannot do yourself at a fraction of the cost a contractor would charge.