Living Lounge: With a verdant yard as a backdrop and a newly renovated pool in the foreground, a comfy loveseat is the perfect setting for a relaxing afternoon.
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For an outdoor living area, the Hawaii Kai home’s yard sure had an awful lot of walls.
A 6-foot-high stone wall separated the pool and deck area from the driveway, while another wall cordoned off a side yard from the rest of the space. For the home’s new owners, all these barriers seemed unnecessary, especially because they had another, much larger wall with a gate that ran along the perimeter of their property.
It was enough to make anyone feel closed in. So the homeowners decided to knock down all those walls. A few days into the renovation of the crowded landscape, the site looked less like a remodeling job and more like a total demolition. Besides the walls, the work crews from Reliable Landscaping and Sprinklers also dismantled and hauled away a large, broken-down gazebo that was tucked away in a corner of the yard.
But they didn’t just remove broken concrete, rocks and wood. The landscape had also been populated by thick bushes and large palms, some of which were inexplic-ably planted right in the middle of the yard. It looked as though the landscapers would be taking more things out of the ground than they would be putting in.
Workers tore down a 6-foot-tall wall that separated the yard and pool areas from the home's driveway, replacing it with a wall of green.
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“The landscape had evolved into quite a hodgepodge over the years. There were a lot of barricades and plant material, so it felt cramped and crowded even though it’s a pretty big space. People have some funny ideas,” says Alan Gracey, project manager for Reliable Landscaping and Sprinklers. “The homeowners wanted to keep things simple and clean. They wanted their kids to be able to kick their ball around, so the first thing we had to do was open things up.”
After Gracey and his crew cleared out the area, they rearranged the yard furniture, so to speak, moving and replanting some of the existing palm trees. Gracey placed the areca, Manila, red sealing wax and lolu palms toward the perimeter of the property, which provided both screening from the neighboring properties and covering for the home’s stark, white outer wall.
Below the palm trees, Gracey planted a small but colorful collection of ground covers and shrubs: lariape, variegated garlic, black taro, crotons and ti plants. In shady areas of the yard, he also installed the large-leafed monstera as well as its smaller cousin, xanadu philadendron. Throughout the landscape, Gracey also sprinkled lauae ferns, plants he had reclaimed from the previous landscape. In addition, he used river rocks, gravel and mulch to fill in the planting areas, a measure that helps control weed growth.
| Palms
Spring: A wide variety of palms populate the outdoor living area. Not
only do the trees provide screening and hold up to the area’s high
winds, they also produce very little debris, a desirable characteristic
with the pool close by. |
Besides giving the yard a clean, elegant look, the relatively small selection of plants also made the landscape easy to maintain. None of the plants that Gracey selected produces a lot of flowers or leaf material, which would have eventually ended up in the pool.
“The wind really whips up here,” says Gracey of the property, which sits on the edge of the Hawaii Kai Marina. “So not only did we have to select plants that could hold up to the breezes, we also wanted ones that wouldn’t make a lot of mess that would get blown all over the place.”
In the shady corner where the gazebo once stood, Gracey put in a small lawn of El Toro zoysia grass. He installed more of the grass along the sides of the house, as well as the back. He framed the new lawn with a rocky border and also created stone walkways in the yard’s highly trafficked areas. The result was a natural, rustic and flowing space.
In the main entertaining area, near the dining table and barbecue, Gracey constructed a fountain out of a large ceramic pot, a “pondless” water feature. Water flows off the sides of the pot and into the gravel below, which conceals a catch basin and pump. The water is then cycled back up into the pot.
The small, delicate flowers of variegated society garlic provide eye-catching color without the mess. |
To showcase this and the other eye-catching features of the landscape, Gracey installed an extensive outdoor lighting system (35 fixtures total). He estimates that the average landscape employs fewer than half of that number. But he points out that, with the pool, marina and mature palm trees, this landscape probably has twice the sights to highlight.
“With all the walls and big palms, the yard used to be all covered up and closed off. Who would want to cover up something like that?” says Gracey, pointing at the marina and the morning sky. “The homeowners spend a lot of time out here and do a lot of entertaining. Now, if you had something like that, wouldn’t you want to share it?”
