We are very excited to share our collaboration with Yardzen! After seeing their beautiful landscape designs on social media, we knew that we had to reach out to them. One of the biggest challenges in shifting to a culture of adapting to wildfire is to change our home and yard aesthetics. We need to take into account new environmental conditions when we create and maintain the spaces around our houses. Yardzen is a leading designer that has a vision to make these spaces functional, beautiful and fire-safe.
The co-founders of Yardzen, Allison and Adam Messner, have personally experienced the impact of the wildfires in California. When the Tubbs fire spread rapidly in October 2017, they had to flee with their young kids as their neighborhood burned. When it was time to rebuild, they started navigating the landscaping process, searching for a better way that doesn’t cost property owners tens of thousands of dollars for the design alone. They created a process that delivers a professional landscape design plan and connects homeowners to vetted contractors to help bring the vision to life. They are now the leading online landscape design service in the United States that creates custom designs.
Here is a short excerpt from an article that Yardzen wrote highlighting the relationship of landscape design and wildfire safety.
“Beyond being excellent fuel breaks, hardscape features like paths and walls also happen to be excellent frames for planting. The materials and form of a hardscape feature along the edge of a planting area plays a crucial role in expressing an overall design style.
Long, gracefully curving edges made from rustic pavers lends a welcoming, traditional feel.
Straight lines and sharp corners from features like concrete walls, corten steel edging, or oversized pavers interspersed with decorative stone express a modern feel. This approach looks particularly attractive when framing billowy grasses, rangy perennials, and sculptural shrubs like larger Manzanitas.
Focus on using framing to achieve your aesthetic and functional goals, and the hardscape breaks will be baked in.”
