Desert Crest Press

Making the most of Arizona outdoor living spaces adds so much to home and entertainment possibilities. Custom Phoenix outdoor fireplaces can function as more than one element on your patio.

Sure, its a fireplace, but it can become so much more with planning and foresight. Naturally for most homeowners around Pheonix, patios are a big part of both backyard activities and the landscaping. The questoin is, where do you place this large hardscape element and what else do you want it to give you besides ambiance and warmth on a chilly evening?

As in the backyard pictured above, by adding flanking seat walls, this Phoenix outdoor fireplace’s function takes on two more assets. First, it separates the children’s play area from the patio, yet offers unobstructed vision for parents who need to keep a watchful eye. With such a design, depending on placement such a fireplace design can create the feeling of different rooms in outdoor living spaces without closing off one area from another.

Secondly, by adding expansive seating on each side of the fireplace itself, the patio is always equipped for large gatherings. Were you to place a similar design in the middle between the patio and pool deck and have it open on both sides, your outdoor fireplace’s appeal increases. It can also have a taller back on the seat wall and create more privacy and seclusion from adjoining neighbor’s backyards.

Naturally, where you place it and how much of a seat wall one can add to it is dependent on available space and how you envision using your outdoor living space. The backyard in the photo above is quite small, with most of it taken up by the patio and built in gas grill’s space. Both the children and adults have ample room for all their favorite activities and the stone and stucco fireplace structure keeps the view from the house elegant, though there are toys in the play area just beyond.

For some Phoenix patio designs, the fireplace is added after the patio is built. For others, both patio and fire feature are all one project. This too can dictate where you will place such a backyard element. Working with stucco and stone masonry, allows just about any combination of colors and textures, making it easy to coordinate outdoor fireplaces with the house and patio surface – no matter if you’re adding on or doing it all at once.  Additionally, custom fireplace designs give you so many options in shape, size and extra functions.

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Evergreen plants are widely used in Peoria landscape design and here’s one many Arizona homeowners are sure to find attractive for both outdoor living spaces and curb appeal. Dietes bicolor gives you low maintenance and four full seasons of interest.

Originally from Africa, where it is called the wild yellow lily, it is known in the greater Phoenix – Scottsdale area as the Bicolor Iris, though some areas it thrives in around the U.S. it can be referred to as the Peacock Flower. This evergreen perennial forms well behaved clumps of lovely architectural blade leaves. When not in flower, Dietes bicolor looks for all the world like a great accent grass. From May through September though it will give you waves of light to medium yellow flowers that are both beautiful and delicate looking. You may also hear the plant called the Fortnight Lily, because during the blooming season the plant puts out a fresh crop of flowers every two weeks. This makes it a desirable accent in Peoria landscaping.

While the Bicolor Iris grows along stream banks in the wild, it is also quite drought tolerant. It is a favorite among Arizona tropical plants and attractive to butterflies. The best spots to grow this plant in your yard will have excellent drainage and be sheltered from that brutal afternoon sun. In many Arizona yards, this will be on the east side of the house or in a location that large trees cast shadow throughout the afternoon and evening hours. If your soil is clay in the place you select to plant Dietes Bicolor, plan on amending it well.

For most Arizona homeowners, low water usage is high on the list of needs. Though the Bicolor Iris will tolerate dry soil, you do need to plan on giving it a good drink twice a week. With drip irrigation at the root zone, it will take less water to keep your plant thriving than traditional hose in hand means. Unlike the demands of keeping lawn areas green, light watering a couple times a week on selected plants is by no means a waste of water. Especially when the majority of the other plants in your Peoria landscape design are more drought tolerant or xeriscaping champions.

Like many perennials, you can coax the Bicolored Iris into giving you many more blooms, by deadheading. This term means trimming off the spent flowers. With some perennials, you might only need to clip back to the next set of leaves. With strap leaf plants like iris and daylilies, deadheading is far less tedious. Simply follow the flower stem down inside the clump of leaves and cut it off. Not only will this make the plant much more attractive, it will also work harder at making flowers, rather than seeds. Its also best to fertilize most plants used in Peoria landscaping, most especially those that flower.

Image one courtesy of miheko, CC  2.0. Image two courtesy of Missouri Botanical Garden PlantFinder.

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Its not hard to maintain a good deal of interest in Phoenix and Scottsdale landscaping thanks to our mild cold season. We enjoy a lot of color from flowering shrubs, trees and other landscaping plants from spring through fall, but not that many options exist in winter flowering plants. Not all of the plants we use in xeriscaping landscaping will tolerate frost without some damage though.  Eremophelia or Emu Bush, as it is commonly known, is a tough drought and frost tolerant evergreen shrub that offers you winter color and a variety of choices.

The latin words that make up its formal name, eremo and phelia, literally translates to desert love. A perfect description for this family of desert landscaping shrubs. In Australia where the Emu Bush originates from, these rugged arid region plants flourish where even man cannot survive. If you were landscaping a home in Australia you would have even more selections from this diverse group of shrubs to pick from. Still here in Arizona, we have variety in bloom color, leaf color and even the size at maturity when working Emu Bush into Phoenix or Scottsdale landscape design.

Valentine Emerophelia is a very popular shrub due to its rich winter color. Cold weather puts a red flush into the tiny leaves, giving the entire bush an overall appearance of being dark red. Brilliant red blooms seen in the image above appear in January and continue until April. In summer this fine textured plant will revert to its normal medium green foliage.  While the Valentine Emu Bush will mature to 4 feet high and up to 5 feet wide, you can keep it smaller with clipping after the blooming is finished. Left to take on its natural shape, your finished xeriscaping landscaping plant will have a lovely architecture with dense branching and a softer appearance than those that have been sheared.

Spotted Emu Bush (Emerophelia maculata) flowers in March and April. The inside of the trumpet is spotted, giving this variety its name. The color of the blooms can vary greatly with this selection, as can its mature size, because E. maculata readily crosses with other Emerophelia species, of which there are over 200 known to exist. These can be a dwarf from reaching only 2 feet tall on up to medium classified shrubs that will tower at 9 feet high. The blooms can be any number of shades including light or deep pink, yellow to orange or red to purplish red. Spotted Emu Bush has good frost tolerance and is excellent at sailing through dry weather without much watering once established in your Scottsdale landscaping.

Easter Egg Emu Bush (E. racemosa) has blooms that change colors in each stage from bud to finish. A medium to large shrub, it will mature at 4 feet to 6 feet high. This selection blooms heavily in spring, but will lend sporadic color to your xeriscaping until cold weather arrives again. Blooms on this Emerophelia start out yellow then turn orange in bud and mature to pink and purple. In Australia, this plant is almost extinct as it doesn’t thrive for more than a decade in the wild, causing it to slowly decline in numbers. Having more care in your xeriscaping landscaping than it gets in the bush means you will be enjoying it far longer than that.

Blue Emu Bush (E. cancii) adds the interest of lavender blue flowers to late winter and spring and its silver foliage is present year around. Its quite lovely and grouped with Valentine can create quite a show in winter to spring color, though Valentine will begin to bloom earlier.

Another lovely silver leaved Emu Bush is Emerophelia glabra ‘Muchinsons River’ with a common name of Fire and Ice. Here’s a plant that demands a super arid location. It is stunning and also known to be short lived in Phoenix and Scottsdale landscaping for either improper drainage conditions or too much water being applied. The blooms on this small shrub sprawls across the ground and can reaches  4 feet high with a spread of up to 9 feet. The flowers are a beautiful red giving a very smart look for early color.

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For homeowners anywhere, not just in Scottsdale or Phoenix, landscape design can be a rather mystical thing. After all, you can’t really see the finished product until the installation is completed. Someone needs to have some vision to make a fabulous looking space between what the designer puts on paper in scale and the outcome of the process.

Unless you’re the guy with the vision, it can be hard to imagine what truly will exist when a landscape design is translated from symbols and fill patterns to reality in your yard. Hopefully, the landscape designer in Phoenix or Scottsdale you’ve hired has more artistic talent than you see on the CAD drawing of the space they show you before any work is started. Using the scaled landscape design above as an example – can you really tell what the scene will actually look like in the end? Chances are, you can’t. You might have some kind of idea, based on the material samples that will make up the patio pavers, and your knowledge of what the different plants labeled in the print look like. The rest of it may be very mysterious indeed.

You may think that the plants are too sparse in the initial design for your Scottsdale landscaping or Phoenix landscaping. Over time though, those plants will grow into much larger presences than they appear on that scaled print. They may even look more sparse when the installation is finished than your landscape design depicted. Rest assured, they will increase and not that long into the future, they will occupy a far larger space than they do in the beginning. For the most part, your landscaping plants arrive as toddlers and will quickly grow into their adult stature after they’ve established themselves in your ground soil. As a landscape client once said, “Its like taking a picture and waiting a year or two for the film to be developed.”

Even so, a good deal of what will one day be can be seen by the time your Arizona landscaping is completely installed. All that is left after that is for the plantings to fill. In the meantime, you’ll hopefully be enjoying excellent straight lines and fluid curves on masonry and pavers that is in itself beautiful. Truth be known, fuller plants can’t do that much at disguising shoddy hardscaping craftsmanship.

Naturally it helps if your Scottsdale or Phoenix landscaping company has a great deal of experience in all facets of work that they will be doing in your yard. If the company has a lot of pictures of previous work to share, and many positive client reviews, you’ll have the satisfaction of knowing that no matter how mystical the symbols on that paper look, things will look lovely in the end.

The design we used for an example above is a reality. Here’s the newly finished Desert Crest installation below. Straight lines, great flowing curves and smart looking masonry that coordinates beautifully with the travertine pavers in this now xeriscaped Sun City backyard.

The question is – does this backyard look anything like the original landscape design used to create it? Yes, but it looks far more fabulous in person and fully 3D. Definitely, far more attractive than that CAD drawing had the ability to convey. We weren’t worried about it, and neither was the client. When it comes to landscape design for Scottsdale, Phoenix and all the locales in between, Desert Crest has many years experience at bring beauty to life. You might say, we have that vision that makes what was on the paper design come to life in the most amazing way.

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