Urban & Small-Lot Gardens

Why we love a tight lot

Every square foot earns three jobs.

Half of our work happens on city lots under a quarter acre. The constraints — neighbors close on three sides, narrow north-side strips, basement light wells, a roof deck that can only carry so much soil weight — are the part of the practice we find most interesting. On a tight lot every bed has to do three jobs. The boxwood is also the privacy screen and the deer barrier. The Japanese maple is also the only tree the lot will ever have. The flagstone path is also where the kids learn to ride a bike.

What follows is the recurring problem-set on small lots, one urban project case-studied, and a quick reference for our top privacy-screen plants — because privacy is the thing every urban garden client asks about first.

Three problems we solve over and over.

The neighbor's second-story window.

A 30-foot-tall plane of glass overlooking your patio. Solved with a vertical evergreen screen — usually a row of Pacific Wax Myrtle or columnar Hornbeam at 30" centers — and a horizontal eye-level pergola.

ii.

The damp north-side strip.

The 4-foot strip of clay between the house and the property line that gets one hour of sun a day. We treat it as a fern garden, set on a stone runnel that carries roof drainage out toward the street.

iii.

The parking-into-garden conversion.

The driveway was poured concrete in 1968 and the family has one car now. We saw-cut three quarters of it out, plant the rest with permeable thyme-and-flagstone, and turn the rest into a courtyard.

Case study · NE Portland

A 38' × 22' courtyard, behind a craftsman.

The clients had a beautiful 1912 craftsman and a back yard that was, on arrival, 85% concrete and 15% bark mulch under a maple. The brief was simple: a place to eat dinner, a place for the dog to lie in the sun, and total privacy from the apartment building behind.

We saw-cut the concrete down to a single 18' × 14' patio, framed in salvaged basalt setts. The maple stayed. We added a vertical screen of Vine Maple and Pacific Wax Myrtle along the rear fence, a planted runnel along the north property line, and a single low-water bed of yarrow, salvia, and tufted hairgrass against the south fence.

0.18Acre Lot

62%Native Plants

$94kTotal Build

14 wkInstall Window

— Privacy plants we go back to

Four screens that actually work on a city lot.

The standard answer to urban privacy is arborvitae. We almost never specify it. Below are the four evergreen screens we reach for instead — slower, denser, more interesting in winter, and easier on the soil.

**Pacific Wax Myrtle***Myrica californica*

**Hornbeam Hedge***Carpinus betulus 'Frans Fontaine'*

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Two hours on the property, $420 visit fee, credited back if you book the design. Urban projects book 3–4 weeks out.

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