Being a major metropolitan region, Atlanta landscapes reflect the wonderful diversity of its population, spanning the stylistic spectrum from modern and minimal to rustic and full. While you can find pretty much any style in Atlanta, designs tend to skew in the traditional direction. You’ll commonly find yards with hedges, lawns, and tidy rows of flowering shrubs – a formal, English colonial look. You’ll also find a more casual approach, with a blend of flowers, vines, shrubs, and ferns mingling within planting areas with swooping borders and rustic stone edging. Whatever the style, every Atlanta landscape shares an abiding sense of “green-ness”, thanks to the city’s humid climate and abundant rainfall.

Landscape designs in Atlanta embrace outdoor living, frequently featuring outdoor kitchens and dining, lounge spaces for entertaining friends, and even outdoor theaters for family movie nights. Atlanta yards also include strategies to manage the hot weather. Pergolas and canopy trees make the most of shade and breezes, while pools (big and small) along with simpler decorative water features offer a cooling encounter, whether or not you actually get wet. Surprisingly, fire pits and hot tubs – also popular landscape elements – are also great amenities for beating the heat, offering a fun activity for a cool outdoor evening. Fire pits do double-duty, providing a heat source to keep you outside when the weather starts to turn cold.

It’s easy to grow plants in Atlanta, but you’ll set yourself up for success if you begin by browsing native plant species. Native plants evolved to thrive in the local climate. This means they tend to perform better while requiring fewer inputs of water and maintenance than non-native species. Beyond their promise of good performance, native plants also offer unbeatable habitat value for local wildlife. Our advice? Plant a blend of natives and climate-adapted species, which should fare equally well in the Atlanta climate. Looking for some suggestions? Oakleaf hydrangeas (try the ‘Alice’ cultivar) are stunning in a traditional landscape, as are bottlebrush buckeyes. If you want more color, try Geranium ‘Rozanne’, or the lower, bluer perennial plumbago. Red maple is a reliable choice for a fall color focal point, while river birch boasts handsome bark that makes for a great specimen tree all year long.

Atlanta landscapes should pay heed to the broad temperature range, intense summer heat, and wet conditions of the region. This means picking native and climate-adapted plants with a proven record of landscape performance. It also means designing for rain, maintaining plenty of permeable surfaces to slow runoff and capture water onsite. With such natural beauty, landscape designs should be a resource for outdoor living in any season, keeping you cool in summer, warm in winter, and able to accommodate a variety of outdoor activities, from cooking and dining, to playing, to working, to relaxing with family and friends.

Now! Any time of year is great to begin work on a landscape project. When possible, we suggest utilizing the winter to work through the design phase – this sets you up to get on contractors’ books early in the build season, so you can have your design installed and ready to enjoy in time for summer. If winter has passed, don’t worry, it’s never too late in the year to begin work on a landscape design project.