Landscaping

Drive through almost any neighborhood around here and you'll see it: a tree sitting in a tall cone of mulch piled right up the trunk. It looks neat, and whoever built it meant well. It's also one of the most common ways a healthy tree gets hurt without anybody noticing.

Drive through almost any neighborhood around here and you'll see it: a tree sitting in a tall cone of mulch piled right up the trunk. It looks neat, and whoever built it meant well. It's also one of the most common ways a healthy tree gets hurt without anybody noticing.

This September was hard on North Texas yards. It set heat records across Denton County, and most of the county went from mid-July to the last days of the month without measurable rain. It is also the month when most of the big landscape decisions for the next year get made. Commercial contracts come up for bid, HOA boards set budgets, and homeowners finally sit outside long enough to notice what the yard is missing.

A lot of Lake Dallas went up fast in the early 2000s. Roughly a third of the homes in town were built between 2000 and 2009, which means a lot of front yards were planted by a builder crew around the same time and have not had much done to them since besides fresh mulch every spring. That is not a knock on anybody. Builder landscapes are designed to look good on closing day, and for a while they do. But plants keep growing, trees keep spreading, and twenty years later the ya

If you are on an HOA board in Highland Village, Flower Mound, Argyle or any other area here between Lake Grapevine and Lake Lewisville, you probably did not sign up because you were excited about landscaping. You signed up because somebody had to, and now you are looking at a grounds maintenance line in the budget that is one of the biggest numbers on the page, and you are not entirely sure what is behind it.

If you manage a commercial property in Flower Mound and your landscape contract runs on the calendar year, September is when you should start thinking about it. Not December. Not January, after the current agreement has already rolled over for another twelve months. I get calls every spring from property managers who are frustrated with how their grounds look and want to make a change. By then the window has mostly closed. They are stuck for another season, or they switch

In some Highland Village neighborhoods, especially the ones backing up to a trail, pond or the lake, you'll see open wrought iron instead of a solid wood privacy fence. That's a nice look, but it also means your backyard is basically on display to whoeve Clay. Dense, sticky, gray to black clay that turns into concrete in August and soup after a good rain. If you have ever tried to push a shovel into your yard in July and felt it bounce back at you, you already know what