Commercial Landscape Renovation

Knowing when maintenance has stopped working

There is a point where maintaining an area costs more than replacing it, and most properties pass it without a decision being made.

The signals are consistent. Repeated replanting in the same spot. Shrubs cut back hard every year because they outgrew the bed a decade ago. Turf reseeded into shade it cannot survive. Beds that need weeding every visit because the planting never closed.

The test is arithmetic. Add up the annual cost of the extra visits, replacements, and complaints for that area. If two years of it would pay for doing it differently, the maintenance is the expensive option.

That calculation is easy when somebody has kept a record and nearly impossible when nobody has.

If two years of the extra cost would pay for a permanent fix, the maintenance is the expensive option.

Removal is half the project

Renovation is usually priced on the new planting and determined by the removal, which is where the difficult work is.

Old shrubs have substantial root systems that have to come out, not be cut at ground level. Anything left resprouts through the new planting, and removing it later means digging through what was just installed.

Bermuda and other running grasses are the specific problem. Any fragment left in a bed regrows, and it is close to impossible to remove selectively once the new planting is in. That has to be dealt with before anything goes back.

Soil is the other half. Removing old planting exposes soil that has been compacted and depleted for years, and that is the moment to fix it, since it will not be accessible again.

1. Remove old planting including root systems, not just top growth
2. Eradicate running grasses completely before replanting
3. Break compaction across the whole bed, not just planting holes
4. Incorporate organic matter through the bed
5. Correct any drainage problem while the bed is open
6. Modify irrigation to suit the new planting before it goes in

Not rebuilding the same problem

The most expensive renovation is the one that recreates the conditions that caused the failure.

Before designing the replacement, the question is why the previous planting failed. Wrong plant for the exposure, irrigation that never reached it, drainage, soil, or simply age.

Age is the only one where replanting something similar makes sense. Every other cause will produce the same result again.

The commonest miss is irrigation. A bed replanted with different species on unchanged irrigation has a new set of plants on a schedule designed for the old ones, and it will fail for the same reason with a different appearance.