Landscape design for Bozeman yards

Layout first: where the patio sits, how you get to it from the door, how much lawn is left to water. Then the plant plan, bed by bed, with sizes at planting and the spacing they need grown in. Then material picks: paver or stone, gravel, mulch or rock in the beds. Then grades and drainage. Then phasing. A landscape plan names the build, not just the look: 3/4" clean crushed base, 8" to 16" deep depending on the soil and the application, compacted in lifts, under anything hard.

A landscape design that cannot be built is a picture. We measure the yard and check what a machine can reach: gate width, the side yard, alley access in the older Bozeman neighborhoods, whether material comes in by wheelbarrow or narrow track loader. We look at the grade off the foundation and where water goes in a wet spring, because a patio gets pitched away from the house and beds do not sit in the runoff. Newer subdivisions often have a drainage swale that cannot be filled. On county property the well and septic drain field set hard limits on digging.

Most yards get built in pieces, and the drawing decides which pieces and in what order. Anything needing a machine or a trench comes before anything soft: excavation, base, walls, the paver patio, then irrigation, then beds and sod. Phased that way, the crew is not running a loader across finished work, and the spend splits over two or three seasons without paying twice for access. The plan says what phase one includes and what it leaves ready for phase two.

Bozeman sits at about 4,800 feet, with a short season, wind and dry summer heat, so plants that look right in a catalog do not all hold here. We pick bed by bed for the exposure it has, because a south facing gravel bed against a wall is a different list than the north side of the house. Deer pressure is a fact of this valley, and the plan accounts for it in what goes in and where. Native and xeriscape plantings come up often: they take the wind and cut what has to be watered.

Newer subdivisions come with landscape rules, and they are not all the same: what has to be planted and by when, which trees are on the approved list, whether rock mulch is allowed in the front. We prepare what the committee asks for, the design drawing, the plant schedule and the material list, in the format they want it in. What we cannot do is promise how a committee votes or how long the packet sits.

Landscape design is quoted in writing before it starts, and it is a separate line from the build. You are paying for drawing time, so it gets scoped and priced on its own. We design and build, so the drawing comes from the crew that has to build it. If there is already a plan drawn by someone else, we will build from it. When a design of ours becomes a build, the proposal lists materials, base depth, inclusions and exclusions, the same as every other hardscape proposal.

Three things move it along: photos of yards you like and yards you do not, a rough budget, and a sentence on what the yard is for. Dogs, kids, a grill that needs a landing, a hot tub someone is buying in two years, a trailer that has to park somewhere. The budget matters most, because a real number decides whether phase one is a patio and a wall or a patio and a gravel path.