Services Provided
Landscape design for front and back yard, yard cleanup, build new paver patio, install automatic irrigation, install new fence, plant trees/shrubs/groundcovers, build vegie beds, put new lawn and rejuvenate existing lawn, install drainage from open down spout, put top soil and mulch for planting bed
Experience and Good Comments
We hired Lara from Natural Greenscapes to redesign our yards after we move into our house. Lara is the landscape designer and she has a crew to construct the plan.
- After meet up in our place, once we decided to move on with Lara, we pay $650 for the design fees. Lara listen to our desires and budgets, and provided CAD for the design. She is very professional and great at listening to our needs. She bring us to her designed house to show us some inspired ideas; she took us to Bellevue Botanical Garden to learn which plants we like; she went to Mutual Materials/Rock Mountain together with us to show us different types of paver and water features; she set up a shared page on Pinterest so both of us can put our liked feature into it. The design come with a colored CAD and an estimation on the construction based on our budget. She knows the plants in sun and shades quite well, choose the plants based on our low maintenance requirements, and make suggested on budget saving (e.g., concrete vs different pavers).
- Once we complete with design phase, she set a construction start date. She has a crew of 4-5 people. They come every weekday, work from roughly 8am-4pm. Lara usually came in the morning and gave instructions to her crew. She wrote emails to us to report the progress twice per week, and discuss some adjustment she would suggest to have during construction. Overall, we are happy with the work quality. The work has been done for 2 years, we haven't found any big issues. The work invoice clean sheet is very clear, how much is the materials cost, how much is the labor cost, which nursery the plants are from, how much its plants cost including planting them, which brand of mulch and composite she used in our yards, etc.
- Lara gave us a yards maintenance handbook after the work, and provide a gardening coach in the coming spring. She also replaced a few dead plants with no charge as she has warranty for 1 year. We also occasionally pay her people for some items in our yards such as irrigation system winterization, moving brunches broke by storm, etc.
- After taking care the yards for 1 year ourselves, we decided to hire Lara's crew to do yards maintenance for us as we are lazy. They are not the cheapest we quoted, but we know they do a nice job and Lara know the plants in our yards quite well. They do not only mow our lawn. Lara came to our yards every other month or every season to do necessary pruning. She also give us suggestions on things as when should put mulching again, or when we should consider change our irrigation schedule.
Not-So-Good Comments
We know that Lara's crew is not the cheapest one. If we have time to find contractors to do work individually, we probably can get cheaper price. We just want to save our time and energy, and have easier arrangement. E.g., last year, we build a new fence with our neighbor together, the unit cost is ~20% less than Lara's quote. Also, she is quite conservative about eco friendly, which may cost more money sometimes. We asked her to quote for removing 3 old fruit tress in our yards this year, as she does not like to use any chemicals, she quoted as cutting the tress + digging out all the roots, which is quite expensive. We finally hired a contractor suggested by our neighbor, who cut the trees, drilled some holes on the trunk, and filled with some chemicals to prevent them sprouting again. Cost half of Lara's quote.
