Landscaping in St. Louis Park.

Small and tightly spaced, frequently with alley access and very little room between neighbouring houses. Mostly flat with gentle rises, and the Minnehaha Creek corridor cutting across the south of the city.

St. Louis Park is built at close to urban density, and that decides more about a job here than anything in the soil. Houses sit a few metres apart, side yards are narrow, and there is often no route to the back except through a standard gate. Material moves by wheelbarrow on a great many of these properties, which is a real cost and a real schedule difference that any honest estimate has to include.

The housing here spans thirty-odd years and several architectural eras, so neighbouring properties can need genuinely different treatments. A 1926 bungalow in Browndale and a 1954 rambler in Texa-Tonka have different proportions, different setbacks and different relationships to the street. Landscaping that suits one looks wrong on the other, and the difference is scale rather than taste.

Minnehaha Creek runs through the south of the city, and properties along it are working with protected water and low ground at the same time. Ground near the creek stays wetter, and work that changes grade or removes vegetation close to it can carry watershed requirements. Both are far cheaper to plan around than to discover partway through a project.

Front yards here are shallow — the setbacks are short by suburban standards — which puts every planting decision on display and leaves no depth to correct a mistake. Beds are necessarily narrow, and the plants that work are ones that stay in proportion at maturity rather than ones that look right the year they go in. Overplanting a St. Louis Park front yard shows within two seasons.

The tree canopy across this city is one of its best features and its most persistent landscaping constraint. Boulevard trees planted a century ago now shade both the street and much of the front yards, their roots run shallow through the top of the soil, and the autumn leaf volume on a small lot is substantial. Bed lines here go around root plates, not through them.

The dense canopy makes autumn cleanup here later, heavier and more constrained than in the suburbs west of the city — small lots, close neighbours and enormous leaf volume. Timing it to when the trees have finished rather than to a convenient weekend is what stops it becoming a job done twice.

St. Louis Park is dense enough that what happens on your lot affects the two either side of it. Drainage changes push water onto a neighbour, a tree taken out changes their light, and a job that spreads across a shared boundary is noticed immediately. Keeping work inside its own lines is part of doing it properly here rather than a nicety.

The mistake here is planting for how a bed looks the year it goes in. Front yards are shallow, houses are close together, and plants that fill the space nicely on day one are crowding the windows and the neighbour's line within three years. On a dense lot, mature dimensions are the only dimensions that matter.