Build New Family Traditions Into Your Landscape

Sure, you can cook outside in your landscape.

And you can entertain at all hours of the day and night with the help of low voltage lighting and arbor canopies (for the rainy days).

And of course you can just relax in your landscape, soaking up the sun’s warming rays on a soft bed of green.

But what about family traditions?  Has your landscape been designed to bring your family together?

If you’re a parent, you’re already aware that kids’ schedules these days can spiral out of control.  Soccer, baseball, football, basketball, Boy and Girl Scouts, dance classes….Sure, parts of the family are together through all of it, but you aren’t really together.  You’re just in the same building, or on the same expanse of grass.  Apple Picking

And my stomach is turning even now as I write this: in the blink of an eye our kids will be grown, off to college, off to build their own lives.

But you can easily build family traditions into your new landscape, designed to put everyone in the same place, doing the same (fun!) thing at the same time, together.  And it doesn’t have to cost any more money than any other landscape design.  It just takes calling the right people, who understand how precious and fleeting this time is with your family.

How do we build family tradition into a landscape?  Most of the traditions we have in our lives now have a common thread through all of them: food.  A turkey dinner, an Easter brunch, a cookout at Uncle Joe’s.

Food brings people together.  And preparing that food, as a family, gives you a chance to create more of those moments as your kids grow up.  Here’s my family, picking apples from the McIntosh tree in our backyard.

Every year around the start of school, we pick several dozen tart gems from the tree and spend the better part of a weekend baking scratch apple pies.  Pies are then delivered (sometimes still warm from the oven) to our good friends and neighbors, and we may even try to curry the favor of our kids’ teachers for the coming school year.  And of course, we always save a few of what you see below for ourselves.

Apple Pies made from trees in your landscape

And building traditions like this don’t have to just be about apple pies.  Cherry pies can be your tradition.  Or ripe pears and vanilla ice cream is a wonderful treat, as are raspberries or blueberries.

Chives have cute pink flowers and the foliage can be plucked right from the landscape, chopped up and used in tonight’s dinner.

You don’t have to have a formal garden, either (though we can certainly build you a lovely one!).  All you need is a designer with the knowledge and creativity to use the space you already have and turn it into something more.  Something family.  Something you and your kids will remember for a lifetime.