Your Lake Dallas Landscape Is Probably 20 Years Old. Fall Is When to Fix It.
Updated: 3 days ago
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 yard you have is not the yard that was designed. If you have been looking at your front beds this month thinking they just look tired, you are probably right, and the good news is you are thinking about it at exactly the right time of year.
Signs your landscape has aged out
Most of the Lake Dallas yards I walk that are due for a refresh show the same handful of symptoms. None of them happen overnight, which is why they are easy to stop noticing when you pull into the same driveway every day.
Shrubs that have reached the windows.
Hollies, Indian hawthorn, and similar foundation shrubs were planted at two feet tall and are now covering the bottom of your windows. If they are getting sheared into boxes or balls to keep them in check, the inside of the plant is usually woody and bare.
Beds that used to be sunny and are not anymore.
The trees planted with the house are now big enough to shade the beds underneath them. Sun plants in those spots get thin and leggy and stop blooming, and no amount of fertilizer fixes a light problem.
A patchwork of replacements.
A shrub dies, something different goes in its place, then another, and after a few rounds the bed has no real plan to it anymore.
Edges that have wandered.
Either the grass has crept into the beds or the beds have slowly swallowed the lawn. Either way, the clean line that made the yard look finished is gone.
Why fall is the right time to replant
In North Texas, fall is the best planting season of the year, and it is not close. The air cools off but the soil stays warm, so new plants put their energy into growing roots instead of trying to push out leaves in the heat. Our winters are usually mild enough that those roots keep working through December and January.
What that gets you is a plant that goes into its first July with a real root system underneath it. Plant the same shrub in May and it spends its whole first summer just trying to survive. I would much rather plant in October and have the yard settled in by spring than plant in spring and spend the summer replacing what did not make it.
There is a practical side too. A bed that gets redone in October looks finished by the time family starts coming over for the holidays.
Refresh or start over?
Not every tired landscape needs to be ripped out. The first thing we do on a walkthrough is sort the yard into what is worth keeping and what is not, because keeping the right plants saves you money and keeps some maturity in the yard.
What is usually worth keeping
Mature trees are almost always keepers, even if they are the reason the beds underneath them struggle. We plan around them instead of fighting them. Some overgrown shrubs can also be saved. Plants like nandina and abelia can be cut way back and come back fuller. We mark those now and do the hard cut in late winter, right before they start growing again, so they recover fast in spring.
What is usually worth pulling
A shrub that has to be sheared every few weeks to stay under a window is the wrong plant for that spot, and it will keep being the wrong plant. Boxwood and Indian hawthorn, for example, usually do not bounce back well from a hard cut, so when they have outgrown the space, replacing them is the better call. Anything with ongoing disease problems goes too. Red tip photinia is a common one in older DFW yards, and most of the ones I still see are fighting leaf spot they are not going to win.
What changes when you replant a 20-year-old yard
Replanting an established yard is a different job than planting a new one. The conditions have changed since the builder crew was there, and the new plan has to match the yard as it is today.
The shade.
We plan for the light the beds get now, not the light they got in 2005. That usually means shade-tolerant plants under the trees and saving the sun lovers for the spots that still get a full afternoon.
The soil.
Twenty years of mulch breaking down on top of compacted clay is not great planting soil. When beds are open, we work in compost so the new plants have something to root into instead of a hard layer of clay a few inches down.
The mature size.
Every plant goes in based on how big it will be in ten years, not how it looks in the pot. It is the part of landscape design and planting that gets skipped most often. That is how you avoid being right back here in 2040 with shrubs over the windows again.
The irrigation.
Most beds from that era are watered with spray heads, which throw water onto brick, siding, and sidewalk as much as onto the plants. A landscape refresh is the cheapest time to convert bed zones to drip, since the beds are already open. Our sprinkler and irrigation team can handle that as part of the same project.
What a refresh actually looks like
Most Lake Dallas front yard refreshes are not huge projects. It starts with a walkthrough where we go bed by bed, decide what stays and what goes, and talk through what you want the yard to feel like. From there it is removal, soil prep, planting, irrigation adjustments, fresh edging, and mulch, usually over a few days depending on the size of the yard.
If your landscape has been in the ground as long as your house has, this fall is a good time to take a fresh look at it. Our landscape and planting services cover everything from a single bed to a full front and back redesign. Get a quote and we will come walk the yard with you, or see more about the neighborhoods we work in on our Lake Dallas page.
Rob Dilts
Owner
RD Services
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