A Drain on Your Yard – How Ensuring Your Landscape Design Includes Proper Drainage Can Prevent a Landscape Disaster

What’s the most important part of your landscape planning and design process? The patio area? No… The placement of plants and planters? No… The sprinkler system. Nope… The most important part of landscape design starts with the foundation, drainage.

Drainage is often not the first or even the last thing on people’s minds when they’re thinking about redoing their landscape. In fact, most people get caught up in the excitement of planning their yard that they forget about drainage in the design process. This can be a major mistake that can turn your yard into a plant graveyard or, in some cases, a water hole.

Some common mistakes when planning drainage:

• Steep slopes that drain water away from the sloping or “hill-top” plants requiring extra watering or, if forgotten, plant doom.
• Low spots in the yard that don’t have a proper escape for water and it ends up sitting there causing soggy grass, mud or sometimes a new pond.
• Sloping the yard towards your home without proper house-side drainage or a retaining wall can lead to potential water damage, mold and other concerns.
• Overly sandy or gravely soil acts like a sieve causing water to get lost deep in the ground where most plants, especially newer ones without deep rooting, can’t reach it.
• Thick or clay-like soil can hold onto water causing overwatering for many plants and encourages fungus growth, both which can be detrimental to plants, new or old.

To avoid the parched-dead-plant or fungus-ridden-unwanted-pond-look, we spend a little time planning the how and where of water flow and drainage in our yards. If you know where the water is going to be successfully drained to, or better yet, a few places it could be drained to, then you can properly plan grades and slopes, planters, gardens, retaining walls, tree locations, patios and the number of other possible items that can go into ones yard.

Is all this drainage talk making you worried or tired?… Then get an experienced landscape contractor to worry about it for you.

A professional, experienced and knowledgeable landscaping contractor can usually solve all of these problems in a far less time that the average person would and without losing touch of the needs and wants of the client. Finding the right contractor will make the process simpler and go a lot faster. This means that you, the client, will have more time to think about all those above ground things that are going into your landscape without worry about what’s going below them.

After all, there is the old saying: “get your mind out of the gutter.” So get it out of there and find your landscape contractor.