Total Transformation House Landscape Installation

Those Plant Ladies

Hey Plant Lady! We’re so excited to share with you our recent landscape story at our biggest project yet – the Total Transformation House! While this may not have been our largest landscape installation, we have been overseeing a ton of changes to the exterior of this home to bring the full vision of Fawn Renae Design’s custom design to life. You can catch up on all of the changes in our series of posts related to this project.

The Total Transformation House by Those Plant Ladies -- picture taken after the brick was painted.

This post is all about one of the very last touches, installing the new landscape! If you are new to following us, we want you to get to know our crew. We have an amazingly talented crew of female professional landscapers who bring their skills and knowledge to every installation to give our client the very best horticultural care in the business. We have many, many years of experience from all corners of the horticulture industry and quite a few horticulture and turfgrass degrees onsite for every job we take on. We take a lot of pride in our team and have no doubt that we get the job done right and leave our clients with a high quality product. (You can read more about that here!)

Here’s what’s even better: our mission is to inspire, educate, and empower women to get their hands dirty is at the heart of our business. What better way to do that than to give them hands-on opportunities to work right alongside our professional crew? That’s exactly what we do because we open every one of our jobs up to volunteers who are welcomed in to learn and experience the whole project from start to finish. We want women to have a chance to ask questions without being embarrassed and to try new things without fear of judgement. We are truly blessed when we have these opportunities to pour into other women and hear them walking away feeling empowered and inspired to tackle this kind of work in their own yards because of their time with our team. This was our biggest team of volunteers yet!

The largest crew of volunteers with all their swag at The Total Transformation House landscape installation.

We get to thank our amazing homeowner and our very own TPL team member, Claire for that! Claire and her husband, David, are so inviting and supportive of those around them that their friends and family showed up and showed out to get this landscape installed for them. All the credit goes to this sweet family for being such great clients and just all around great people. We’re so excited to see them enjoy this space with friends and family for years into the future!

Okay, onto the installation! Like every installation, our team was onsite the day before to lay out the plants, according to the design, and make sure that everything is looking perfect for the next day. When the plant material came, we knew we were in love! The plant selection for this design was a gorgeous variety of textures and to reflect Claire’s love for more muted and neutral colors while keeping things from looking dull and plain. Our favorite plants were the ‘Dark Knight’ bluebeards and the ‘The Blues’ Little Bluestem!

The next day our volunteers arrived bright and early in the morning and we were able to get them all geared up with their very own Those Plant Ladies crew shirts and swag bags full of gardening goodies! After our team meeting, we hit the ground… well, literally!

The front yard posed a huge challenge as we worked beneath a very mature oak tree right in the middle of our new landscaping bed. On a typical job, we use a gas-powered auger to dig most of our holes but we knew it was too dangerous to our crew and the tree to use that machinery in this area. That’s right, time to get out the shovels and the mattocks! It was slow going with lots of pauses to move plants a little this way and a little that way to avoid the big gnarly roots we ran into along the way but our crew still finished this whole bed and covered it with mulch, all before lunch.

Next was a quick lunch break with our signature homemade ice cream treat from Heather’s dear mother-in-law and we were back to work to finish off the backyard!

In the backyard, we were able to use our auger but the design called for mulching with river stones for these beds instead of bark mulch. We love the benefits that wood mulch brings to the table but, in some cases, stone is the way to go (and we do think it looks pretty darn good). In this case, Claire and David have a dog with a fondness for digging holes so stone was chosen to keep the dog out of the area and from throwing the mulch all over the yard.

By the end of the day, our volunteers had a chance to learn about planting plants, spreading mulch, incorporating topsoil, post-planting care, moving and laying stone, operating a tractor, bed edger, and auger, aerating and overseeding a lawn, and everything in between.

All in all, we wrapped this job up right on time and it looked stunning! We’re so proud of this finished product and our clients are thrilled to see these plants installed. Stay tuned for an upcoming blog post to show you the final reveal of the full project. We’re also updating you on the progress of the grass growth over on Instagram stories — it’s amazing how quickly new grass babies start popping up when all of the steps are followed! Be sure to join our mailing list below to stay in the loop!

The homeowner + her daughter at The Total Transformation House -- a project taken on by Those Plant Ladies.