Vancouver Landscape Design

Gardenia has been designing landscapes in Vancouver for over 40 years. That work spans residential garden design across Point Grey, Kitsilano, Shaughnessy, and the east side, rooftop and terrace design for downtown buildings, and planting plans for homeowners who want the layout resolved before they commit to construction.

How we approach a city lot. Scale is the discipline. Fewer, larger gestures make a small garden feel bigger than a collection of small ones does: one generous terrace instead of three cramped zones, one well-placed tree instead of five competing for the same air. Level changes, even shallow ones, break a long narrow yard into rooms without walls. Where privacy is the issue, and on a Vancouver lot it usually is, we resolve it with planting and screening at the height it's actually needed rather than fencing the whole perimeter.

Planting for the city. Vancouver's wet winters and increasingly dry late summers ask something specific of a plant list. We build around structure — evergreen mass, hedging, architectural foliage — so the garden holds through November to March, with seasonal colour layered over it. In small gardens especially, foliage does more work than flowers, because it's what you're looking at eleven months of the year.

Seeing it before it's built. Every project can be modelled in 3D before construction. On a tight lot this is worth more than it sounds: it shows you whether a table actually fits on the terrace, and how much of the neighbour's second storey you'll still see once the hedging matures.