Does Your Garden
Need a Makeover?

April 11, 2002 -- David Guerrette knew he wanted a little more than grass in his backyard, but that was before the landscape designer weighed in. Three months, a backhoe and 150 tons of dirt and rocks later, he had a patio, a pool, elaborate terraces -- and a bill for $120,000.

"Spending the money was painful," says the Dutchess County, N.Y., homeowner. But there's a bright side. "We have our own resort in the backyard."

Talk about the greening of America. This spring, homeowners are calling in landscapers in numbers right out of the big-spending '90s. From Applegate, Calif., to Wilmington, Del., gardening pros say business is up 20% to 30% from a year ago, when Americans spent an estimated $8 billion on landscaping services. The pace has even created a new gardening term: waitlist. In one national survey, two-thirds of firms said they were having trouble hiring enough people to do all the work.

Credit everything from record new-home sales to more Americans staying put to the unusually warm winter in many places. Then there's the gardening industry itself, with its high-end catalogs, magazines and TV shows pushing increasingly sophisticated designs. A simple cottage border? Not when your yard has to live up to the $1,500 chaise lounges. Roses? Forget it. The year's big trends range from Greek Revival (think Parthenon on your patio) to the "wilderness" look (strategically placed boulders).

But calling in a pro can be confusing. So we asked designers at three price levels -- low, medium and high -- to come up with a plan for our two-acre Connecticut home. We got a lesson on drainage from a place called Vinny's, talked "hardscape" with a midrange pro, and discovered our "palette" of woodland shrubs from a landscape architect whose usual clients spend more on retaining walls than we paid for our home. We even got tips from someone who calls himself America's first "exterior decorator."

Our goal: to find out whether it took vision -- or just a lot of money -- to pull our yard together. And while we haven't yet gone beyond the planning stages, we did end up surprised at whose ideas made us want to keep going.

Nationwide, there are about 75,000 landscaping firms and the number of high-end landscape architects alone is expected to grow 21% over the next five years. They're doing particularly well now, analysts say, because post-Sept. 11 people are spending more time -- and money -- at home. Also helping: Some 900,000 new homes were sold last year, many with bare yards ripe for landscaping. Home buyers "want instant gratification," says Nancy Jacks Montgomery of the American Nursery & Landscape Association.

But only a few states, like California and Connecticut, require landscapers to be licensed or registered. In other states, requirements vary by county or even town. In some places, "anybody can get a pickup truck and say they're a landscape contractor," says Marilyn Good of the Texas Nursery & Landscape Association. And no matter what, the cost of maintaining a fancy garden each year can be steep. Indeed, including watering, mowing and bed maintenance, owners can end up spending thousands of dollars a summer to keep it all looking nice.

Still, Jim Deutsch of Easton, Pa., realized the value of a pro job when he tried to landscape his new home on his own. Over a year, he spent 10 hours a week and $10,000 installing shrubs, perennials and peat moss -- and still somehow it never seemed finished. "It was lot of plants but it didn't look like much," says Mr. Deutsch, who eventually brought in a landscape designer -- and spent another $20,000.

For our project, we paid each landscaper his regular fees but didn't disclose our press credentials to the low- and middle-priced designers until the end. We wanted to see what typical consumers get for their dollars. We had to tell our high-priced designer who we were from the outset, because most wouldn't have returned our phone calls otherwise. Below, our tale:

Thankful for Vinny's

Would anybody work for us? Don't laugh, we may live in an 18th-century Litchfield County farmhouse with stone walls and a barn, but one big Manhattan designer turned us down after looking at photos of the place. Thankfully, there's Vinny's Home & Garden Showplace a few towns away, whose representative shows up 10 minutes early for our appointment. "It's quaint," says Vincent Corso, as he measures the property. "We'll just dress it up."

As with all our designers, we haven't given him a hard and fast budget, but we've hinted that it's on the lower end of his average $5,500 to $7,500 job, and it seems like he can work with that. Sure, our junipers need to be eliminated, our yews are ragged, and did we notice the erosion near our Japanese maple? (Yikes, no.) But Mr. Corso says we don't need any major changes. He can have a plan for us in about a week.

Unlike our other designers, Mr. Corso is a one-stop landscaping shop, who will plan and build our garden, and sell us the plants. He's also a registered contractor, which means he's signed up with the state but doesn't need special training (though he has taken design courses). We meet him the following Saturday at the nursery to go over his sketches. Good thing we're sitting down, because the changes look pretty major after all. He proposes a lush border circling the house, with 22 kinds of plants, including a dwarf peach tree. Not to mention 10 bags of dehydrated cow manure, 240 bags of cedar mulch and a whole bunch of topsoil. The total: $12,433.

We must have blanched. "I get carried away," Mr. Corso says, sounding apologetic.

A Notch More Expensive

"Bad circulation." That's John Nuzzi's diagnosis. Mr. Nuzzi, who runs his own firm in Brookfield, Conn., has a degree in landscape design. In that sense, he's a notch above Mr. Corso -- and a notch more expensive, too. Today's visit is free, though if we use his design but hire someone else to do the work, he'll charge us about $350.

Pretty quickly we're talking hardscape: The entrance from the road feels "pinched" by our stone wall, he says. The solution: Take out a few stones on either side. Easy and cheap. But then, to help guide visitors to the front door, we should widen our stone walkway -- and perhaps we'd like a patio for entertaining (together, about $15,000). To make room for that, we'll have to push back the lawn and put in a low stone retaining wall ($14,000). Oh, and our rutted gravel driveway could use something called "a hot oil emulsion."

So far, we've spent more than $30,000, and Mr. Nuzzi hasn't mentioned any plants. That's a big lesson: When it comes to a major job, in many cases plants will be the least important -- and certainly least expensive -- part. They're "like the icing on the cake," Mary Ann McGourty, a nearby nursery owner, tells us. And Mr. Nuzzi, anyway, seems more inclined to rip stuff out, including those junipers ("suburban"), our mangled yews ("deer food"), the forsythia and an "in-your-face" dogwood tree. Our exterior decorator, John Danzer, of an elite garden-furniture store in New York, will later call this stripping-down process "going to a place called empty." Right now, we're happy to follow Mr. Nuzzi there.

A Hopeless Homestead?

By the time we meet our high-end designer, Doug Reed, we've gotten insecure about our home. Charming? Rustic? More like hopeless. As a landscape architect, Mr. Reed has a Harvard master's degree and has passed a licensing exam. His Boston firm, Reed Hilderbrand, does projects for clients like a member of the Estée Lauder family. What will he suggest? Razing the whole yard?

We're in for a surprise. Mr. Reed is the first expert we've consulted who spends more time telling us what is right with our property than what is wrong with it. And we love the way he talks about our place. "Beautiful," he says. "There's a genuine, rural quality to this landscape." Our lawn -- which others have called claustrophobic and inhospitable because it slopes toward the house -- he poetically describes as a "convex knoll." We want to hug him.

Still, as he talks, we realize that he might make just a few changes: Like almost everyone, he nixes the junipers, the dogwood and the forsythia -- "I don't know the meaning of that," he says. Our 75-foot Norway spruce can stay, but an equally big white pine is a goner. His vision, it becomes clear, is of our place -- only better. After he's finished, our woods will somehow be woodsier, our open lawn more invitingly open, and all the untrue elements swept (or bulldozed) away. It's an incredibly seductive idea and it's what sets Mr. Reed apart from his lower-priced colleagues.

If we were really hiring him, at this point Mr. Reed would mull things over for a few months, then come back with a schematic design and a cost estimate. Once we'd approved the plans, he'd do detailed technical drawings and get bids from contractors. All that could take more than a year. We don't have that much time, but we do ask Mr. Reed to give us a rough sketch of the project, plus an estimate, and begin to fantasize that we really will have some work done.

A few days later, we get his plan by fax. Keeping our place genuinely rural, it seems, is going to take some work: There's demolition, grading and drainage; up to $40,000 for plants, and $75,000 worth of new stonework, lighting, irrigation, gravel paths and a new driveway; plus Mr. Reed's own fees, based on an hourly rate. Altogether, it adds up to about $166,000.

Well, it's a small price to pay for the natural look.

-- Sarah Collins contributed to this article.

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