Situated in Texas’s northern grassland region, Dallas has a humid climate that lends that sultry quality to summer evenings - few things are nicer than an evening outside with family and friends after a hot summer day.

Landscape design offers Dallas residents a chance to get the most from their outdoor spaces. Looking for that indoor/outdoor lifestyle? Yardzen’s done it all outside, from cooking and dining, to work areas, to entertainment and lounge zones. Want to beat the heat? Landscape design can help, with shade trees, breezy pergolas, or space-efficient plunge pools all offering a chance to cool down and enjoy your outdoor spaces.

Yardzen can help you enjoy all that Dallas has to offer, working with you to develop a landscape design for your yard that gets you the look, feel, and function you are dreaming of, then connecting you with a licensed, vetted contractor from the Yardzen Pro Network to get your design built.

Being a massive metropolitan region, Dallas does not have a singular landscape style. You’ll find traditional yards, with hedges, lawns, and tidy rows of flowering shrubs. You’ll also find modern designs that echo the vibrant metropolitan feel of the city - striking paver paths, stylized plantings of ornamental grasses, a foregrounding of simple but elegant materials like concrete, wood, and steel.

Regardless of style, designs tend to embrace open, flowing layouts that prioritize outdoor living by offering a series of spaces, each offering something unique - a fire pit, a kitchen, shade, sun, solitude, room for a crowd - to make sure you can do whatever you may wish to do in your outdoor space. Yards in Dallas are built to get people outside.

Landscape designs in Dallas commonly feature elements that support outdoor living. Hot tubs, fire pits, and landscape lighting are all common requests, helping Dallas residents get the most from cool evenings outdoors.

On the opposite end of the spectrum, swimming pools, shade trees, and pergolas are equally popular elements, each offering a relief from hot summer weather.

Outdoor kitchens, including a range of cooking amenities from grills to stoves to pizza ovens, are immensely popular, often integrating bar seating and, for sports fans, a view to an outdoor TV for watching the game al fresco.

You can grow a lot of things in a place like Dallas, 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, and are apt to perform better while requiring fewer inputs of water and maintenance than species introduced from other parts of the world. Not only do natives promise good performance, they also offer unbeatable habitat value for local wildlife.

Our advice? Absolutely include natives in your design, though it’s just fine to also include a healthy dose of climate-adapted species, which should fare equally well in the Dallas climate. Mediterranean plants like Santolina blend well with native wildflowers like bluebonnets and black-eyed Susans, as well as more robust perennials like Salvias or the showy gulf muhly grass.

Dallas landscape designs should prepare for a variety of weather conditions. Summers get hot, and winters have abrupt cold snaps. Pergolas and other overhead structures offer a place to hang heaters while also providing shade, providing climate mitigation year-round. Trees are a great shade source, too, and fire pits offer a fun way to stay warm late in the year.

Rain in Dallas can get intense, and it pays to have a yard ready for sudden downpours. Keeping plenty of permeable surfaces, especially areas with planting, will trap water on-site, reduce local flooding, and trap pollutants before they enter local waterways. It will also reduce erosion - and the mess it causes - within your yard.

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.