Permaculture food forest in Orange Park, Florida
Our sweet client Michele (and her adorable puppy Charlie) wanted to transform their yard in Orange Park into a naturalistic, eco-friendly, functional, productive food forest and pollinator paradise. This landscape design and installation is highly personalized just for Michele!
Like many suburban landscapes our client’s backyard lacked functionality. There were several areas of her property that were inaccessible and, due to a lack of screening, allowed the sounds and lights of the city to flood in to a potentially tranquil space. As a whole this backyard lacked purpose and was not providing maximum value to our client. In the front yard our client’s adorable home lacked a bit of anchoring to connect the house to the landscape. This is common with this style of house and its visible foundational pad. Overall this project was about personalizing this space for a client who wanted to add whimsy and warmth and to ultimately utilize her entire property as an extension of her home.
Since our client lives along a busy thoroughfare and although a beautiful new wood fence blocks provides plenty of privacy, the light and sound of the busy outside world needed to be dampened to provide the tranquil atmosphere our client desired. We turned to our favorite insta screen, Graceful Bamboo. Most clumping bamboos produce sheaths over their axial buds. These sheaths become lose over time and gently rattle in the breeze, as a collective clump this sound acts as noise canceling white noise! In front of this screen we built a secondary screen using 4 beautiful moringa trees. This edible/medicinal plant grows extremely fast and gives this design dramatic levels and depth. We utilized the existing line of trees of the remaining fence line to build a beautiful filtered light pollinator and edible garden. To break up the expansive space in the middle of the backyard we built a new pollinator garden around her back patio and a newly planted Tabebuia tree. Lastly, we built a beautiful “secret garden” in the unutilized space between her fence and house. In the front we chose to add beautiful white pine window boxes and trellises to help anchor the front of the house while covering the above grade foundation pad.
As we were wrapping up the finishing touches on the design for the backyard, we were inspired with a beautiful (and affordable!) solution to fancy up Michele’s front yard as well. We had Matthew, of Jax Woodcrafters, build a beautiful, custom wooden planter & trellis for her front yard cottage planter based on our hand-sketched design. Since she wanted a warm and cozy cottage vibe he painted the entire planter white to match her existing trim, adding that perfect “darling” affect she desired. We also finished up her design with a thorough pressure washing, cleaning her garage doors, driveway and home exterior which gave our new installation a fresh, clean backdrop.
This space was designed to develop into a little to no maintenance food forest. Our client has done a fantastic job establishing the design and as the warmth of spring coaxes new growth this design should flourish as a nearly self sustaining ecosystem. This is the first project we utilized Moringa trees as a foundational screen which meant a lot to our client whom lived in Africa for several years. (Side note: The Moringa tree although not native to Africa is an important nutritional resource for any subtropical region. Its ability to thrive and produce large amounts of biomass in nutrient poor soil is complimented by its amazing ability to sanitize drinking water.)
It will be amazing to observe how this thick foundation of plants will develop and create tons privacy, depth and visual interest over the months to come! We are most excited that we were able to utilize every part of her backyard reclaiming areas that were out of sight and mind. Keep an eye on this one! It will surely continue to develop into one of our most transformative, eco-conscious landscaping creations yet!
Our client was so inspired by her new garden that she dusted off her big camera and took the last 9 photos in this gallery of photographs! What a pleasure it was to work, be inspired by and befriend, Michele!
