Landscaping in Greenwood.

Compact by lake-city standards, closely spaced near the shore, with limited room between houses. Sloping toward St. Albans Bay, wooded, with the lake influencing nearly every property in the city.

Greenwood is small and tightly built near the water, which means neighbours are close and there is very little margin for a job that spreads out. Staging area is limited, the working footprint has to stay tight, and material arrives in smaller loads than a suburban property would take. None of that is unusual for us, but it is the reason a Greenwood job is priced differently from the same square footage inland.

Nearly every property here is influenced by the lake, and shoreland rules apply closer to the water than most homeowners expect. Grade changes and vegetation removal in the shore impact zone can require city sign-off, and it is worth establishing where that boundary falls on your property before planning anything near it rather than after the work has started.

Ground falling toward St. Albans Bay means water leaves quickly and takes whatever is loose with it. Beds on the downhill side of a Greenwood lot need a properly set edge to hold their material through a heavy rain, and where the fall is steep the answer is often to change how water enters the bed rather than to keep replacing what washes out of it.

The housing here ranges from original lake cottages to properties that have been rebuilt to a much larger scale on the same footprint, and the landscaping frequently has not caught up with the change. A garden proportioned for a modest cottage looks lost around a rebuilt house, and correcting that is usually a matter of scale and bed geometry rather than of buying more plants.

Tree cover is heavy and the lots are small enough that a single mature tree dominates a whole property. Its roots occupy most of the usable soil, its canopy takes most of the light, and its autumn leaf drop lands on a yard far too small to absorb it. Planning a Greenwood garden means planning around one or two specific trees rather than around a general condition.

Ground sloping toward St. Albans Bay drains quickly, so Greenwood properties are workable earlier in spring than flatter ground inland. The trade is that the same slope moves water fast during summer storms, and beds installed without a proper edge lose material in a single heavy rain.

Because the lots are small and closely spaced, a project here affects the neighbours for its whole duration. Where material can be staged, how the road is left each evening, and how quickly the site is cleared all matter more than they would on an acre. We plan the logistics as carefully as the planting on a Greenwood job.

The frequent mistake on a rebuilt Greenwood property is leaving the previous house's landscape in place. When a modest lake house is replaced with something considerably larger on the same footprint, the surrounding planting is suddenly at the wrong scale and in the wrong positions. Rethinking the geometry does more than adding anything new to what is already there.