Maria von Brincken Landscape Garden Design

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It went very well.  Usually Maria creates a design and serves as the contractor/manager to implement it but in our case we love gardening and chose to do it ourselves.  We wanted something that we could build and maintain without a lot of outside professional help.  Our acre yard plan included a circular path/flower garden with a brick walkway passing under a grape arbor and front brick sitting area from which to enjoy it all.  We have another sitting area in the back overlooking a pretty big koi fish pond surrounded by flowering perennials.  On the south side we have herb and vegetable gardens and in the East we have various fruit trees and on the north a grassy play area.  Around it all are native trees and understory, mostly pine and oak.  It has taken us a while to do everything and there have been changes along the way but it still looks very much like Maria's original design.
Maria has an amazing knowledge of plants and a real artist's eye for pleasing arrangements of texture, color, and shape.  She helped us choose plants that were hardy for our climate and conditions (New England winters, very sandy soil and much shade) so that maintenance wouldn't be a onerous chore.  We didn't want a lot of repetitive planting so we relied on her advice in choosing perennials with successive flowering throughout the growing seasons.  Her advice has been spot on and she continues to answer our questions about the original design and changes we can make.  She helped us understand the importance of the "hard" stuff too like brick paths, stone borders, fountains, bird baths, waterfalls, fences and arbors.  To save outside expenses her design made good use of our preexisting conditions so that massive changes were unnecessary.  We couldn't be happier.  Thank you for working with us Maria.