Landscape Design & Installation in Bastrop, TX

Most landscape plans that fail in Bastrop fail for the same reason: they were drawn for somewhere else. A plant list that works in Round Rock clay or Houston gumbo lands on our sandy loam and behaves nothing like it did on paper. Water runs straight through. Roots dry out in August. And whatever the deer find palatable is gone by the second week.

We design here because we work here. Every plan starts on your property, walking the ground, checking where water goes after a storm and where the pine canopy actually throws shade at 3 p.m. in July.

What makes Bastrop ground different

Bastrop County sits in the Lost Pines — an isolated stand of loblolly pine roughly 100 miles west of the rest of East Texas pine country. That geology gives us conditions you won’t find an hour in any direction:

• Sandy loam over clay. The top layer drains fast — sometimes too fast. Below it, a clay layer can hold water and drown roots after a heavy rain. A bed can be drought-stressed and waterlogged in the same season.
• Pine shade and open sun on the same lot. Plenty of properties here have deep canopy on one side and full western exposure on the other. One plant palette will not cover both.
• Pine duff and soil acidity. Needle drop builds up and shifts bed chemistry over time. It matters for what you plant and how you mulch.
• Zone 8b to 9a, with real winter events. We get triple-digit summers and we got 2021. Plants chosen only for heat tolerance are a gamble.
• Deer. In Tahitian Village, Pine Forest, ColoVista and out toward Paige and Rosanky, deer pressure is a design constraint, not a nuisance.

How the design process works

1. Walkthrough. We come out, look at the whole property, and ask what you actually use the yard for. Drainage problems, dead spots, the view you want to block, the tree you want to keep — all of it gets noted on site.
2. The plan. You get a layout with plant selections, bed shapes, hardscape locations and material choices, with the reasoning behind each one. If a plant is on the list, we can tell you why it’s there and what it will look like in year three.
3. A written quote. Itemized — plants, materials, soil work, labor. No verbal estimates that drift. If you want to phase the work across two seasons, we’ll price it that way.
4. Installation. The same crew that walked the property does the install. Bed prep, edging, drainage corrections, planting, mulch, and the first watering schedule handed to you in writing.

Plants that hold up here

This is not the full palette, but it’s the honest short list — the plants we keep coming back to because they survive Bastrop’s swings without constant intervention.

We lean native and adapted, but this isn’t a purist rule. If you want a crape myrtle or a bed of roses, they can work here — they just need to be sited and prepped correctly rather than dropped in and hoped for.

What installation actually includes

The word “installation” hides a lot of variation between landscaping companies. Here’s what ours covers:

• Soil work. Compost and expanded shale worked into beds, not a bag of topsoil spread over sand.
• Drainage corrections. Regrading, French drains or dry creek beds where water is collecting against a foundation or pooling in a low spot.
• Edging. Steel, stone or cut edge, depending on the look and how hard the bed has to fight back against Bermuda runners.
• Planting and mulch. Set at correct depth, watered in, and mulched to the right thickness — thin enough to breathe, thick enough to matter in August.
• Hardscape. Patios, walkways, retaining walls and stone work, designed as part of the plan rather than bolted on later. If the project is mostly hardscape, see our patio and stone work page.
• Establishment guidance. A written watering schedule for the first 90 days, which is when almost all new-planting losses happen.

What drives the cost

We don’t publish a price per square foot, because the honest answer is that two yards the same size can differ by a factor of three. What actually moves the number:

• How much soil work the beds need. The single biggest hidden variable, and the one worth spending on.
• Hardscape square footage and material. Stone and labor, not plants, dominate most larger projects.
• Drainage. A regrade is cheap. A French drain run around a foundation is not.
• Plant size at install. Five-gallon shrubs cost less and often catch up to fifteen-gallon plants within two seasons on our soil.
• Irrigation. New zones or a full system versus hand-watering through establishment.

Phasing is normal and we’d rather plan for it than pretend. A lot of our projects run beds and drainage in one season and hardscape the next.

Where we work

We design and install across Bastrop County — Bastrop proper, Tahitian Village, Pine Forest, The Colony, Smithville, Cedar Creek and the acreage out toward Paige, Red Rock and Rosanky. If you’re not sure we cover your area, ask — the county page lists every community we serve.

After the install

A new landscape is not finished when the last plant goes in. The first year decides whether it establishes. Most of our design clients keep us on for mowing and lawn care and for leaf and pine needle removal in the fall, which matters more here than most people expect — needle mat will smother new plantings faster than it will established turf.

You can see everything we offer on our services page.