FAQ
Landscaping questions, answered for this city
Cost, timing, trees, soil, plants and water. The answers here are specific to Sandy Springs rather than general, because the local half is where most of the surprises live.
Cost
- What does a landscaping project cost in Sandy Springs?
- It depends which scope you are buying, because these are different trades with different unit rates. Bed renovation and replanting commonly runs $14 to $30 per square foot. A properly built French drain is $40 to $85 per linear foot. Segmental block walls run about $40 to $110 per face square foot depending on height and reinforcement. Paver patios sit around $22 to $40 per square foot and natural stone higher. A whole back yard combining drainage, a wall, a patio and planting frequently lands between $29,000 and $55,000.
- Why do two quotes for the same yard differ by half?
- Almost always because of what is under the ground. The same pavers over two different base sections produce two very different prices and two very different lifespans, and the difference is invisible on the day the job finishes. The other big cause is access: a yard a machine can drive into and one where everything is barrowed down a slope are the same square footage and different money.
- Is the quote free?
- Yes, and there is nothing to sign. Someone walks the property, takes measurements, and sends back a scope with a price against it. The document is yours to keep, compare, or ignore.
- What is usually excluded from a landscaping quote?
- Engineered wall drawings, arborist reports, survey work, rock excavation if the machine hits it, and repair to irrigation lines cut by the work. Ongoing maintenance is almost always a separate arrangement, and so is anything the quote calls an allowance rather than a price.
- What should the quote state?
- The base section, the drainage provision and the plant sizes, given as quantities rather than folded into a lump sum. Those are the parts that get buried and never seen again, and they are what the price is mostly made of.
How a project runs
- How long does a landscape project take?
- A single bed is a couple of days. A full property design and install is two to three weeks of site time, and more if grading or wall work is in the scope. What stretches a program is everything before the crew arrives: the drawing, the plant and material lead times, and the wait for the right planting season. Wet ground is the other one, because clay cannot be worked or compacted while it is saturated and a run of winter rain simply stops earthwork.
- What happens at the site visit?
- Roughly an hour on the property. Reading the slope and where water crosses it, checking the health and position of the existing trees, counting the light each area receives in leaf-on conditions, and looking at access, which is the largest single cost variable here. Then a written scope and a price follow.
- Do I need to be there?
- It helps for the first visit, because most of the useful information is in what you want and what you have already noticed. After that, no. A gate code and a phone number are usually enough.
- When is the best time of year to book?
- Earlier than most people do. Fall is the best planting season in Georgia and it is also the busiest booking period, so a project intended for October is a conversation worth having in August. Hardscape can be built through most of the year, and winter is often a good time for it because crews are less stretched.
- Can the design be done in stages?
- Yes, and on a larger property it usually should be. The useful approach is one plan drawn for the whole site, then phases built in the order that makes technical sense, which means water first, then grade, then hard surfaces, then planting. Phasing in a different order is how people end up trenching through a finished bed.
Trees and root zones
- How close can a patio or a wall go to a mature tree?
- Further out than most plans assume. The roots that hold a hardwood up are shallow and wide, spreading well past the edge of the canopy in the top foot or so of soil, which is exactly the depth a patio base or a wall footing occupies. Cutting or compacting that zone does damage that takes three or four years to show, by which point nobody connects the dead oak to the finished patio. Where a layout has to sit near a big tree, a floating deck, a shallow open-graded surface or a moved alignment are all cheaper than the tree.
- How is a tree measured, and why does it matter?
- Diameter at breast height, which is trunk diameter at 4.5 feet above the ground. Run a tape around the trunk at that height and divide the circumference by 3.14. On sloping ground, which is most of Sandy Springs, the 4.5 feet is measured from the highest point of ground at the base rather than the downhill side, because starting from the low side puts the tape lower on the trunk where it is still flaring and reads wider than the tree really is. It matters because diameter is the shorthand everyone in the trade uses for how much tree is at stake and how wide its root zone runs.
- What quietly kills a mature hardwood?
- Three things, and none of them look like damage at the time. Raising grade over the root zone, which buries the root flare and cuts the oxygen supply. Compacting the soil above the roots with traffic, stored material or a new base. And cutting roots on one side for a trench or a footing. All three produce a slow decline rather than an obvious injury, and the tree usually comes down years later for reasons that get blamed on the weather.
- Is it worth paying an arborist before a landscape project?
- On a lot whose value rests on its canopy, yes, and it is a small fee against what it informs. A certified arborist reads structure, decay and root condition, which is the difference between designing around a tree that has thirty years left and building a patio under one that has three. It also settles the arguments in the other direction, because a tree that looks alarming to a homeowner is often perfectly sound.
The ground
- Is Georgia red clay bad for a landscape?
- It is misunderstood rather than bad. The reference soil here is the Cecil series, classified in the USDA description as kaolinitic and rated low for shrink-swell, so it does not swell or heave the way expansive clays elsewhere do. What it does is refuse water at rate: the Metro North Georgia Water Planning District puts practical absorption at about half an inch of water per hour, and Atlanta storms deliver more than that.
- Why does water stand in my yard?
- Because it arrived faster than the ground could take it and then had nowhere to go. The useful diagnostic is time. Water gone within a day is surface runoff and wants grading and conveyance. Ground that stays soft for several days is saturated and wants subsurface interception, which is a different fix at a different price.
- Should I dig a big hole and fill it with good soil?
- No, and this is the most common planting mistake on clay. A hole filled with bagged mix inside a clay surround behaves like a container: water collects in it and the root ball sits in the water. Prepare the whole bed broadly and shallowly instead, cut planting holes wider than deep, and set the root ball slightly proud of grade with the flare visible.
- My yard is bare orange clay after building work. What now?
- That is compaction rather than bad soil. Construction traffic collapses the thin sandy loam surface layer that makes this ground plantable, leaving subsoil at the surface with the pore structure crushed out. Relieving the compaction and rebuilding structure comes before buying a single plant, and it determines whether anything planted afterwards works.
- Is a soil test worth doing?
- Yes, and it is the cheapest information available about a property. The number worth watching on Piedmont soil is pH, which tends acidic here. That suits a large part of the woodland palette and works against a lawn, and adjusting it is slow enough to be worth starting before planting rather than after.
Plants and lawn
- Will grass grow under my trees?
- Only within a narrow range. UGA Extension puts the practical floor for turfgrass at around four hours of full to filtered sun a day, rates zoysiagrass very good to good for shade and describes it as the best warm-season grass to grow beneath mature trees, holding acceptable quality down to about four to four and a half hours of filtered light. Common bermudagrass rates very poor. Below four hours, a bed is the honest answer.
- Zoysia, bermuda or fescue?
- Light and winter color decide it. Bermuda belongs in open sun and has the best wear recovery. Zoysiagrass is the most flexible on a wooded lot, with very good to good shade tolerance and excellent sun tolerance, at the cost of slow establishment. Tall fescue is the only one that stays green through a Georgia winter and is well adapted to the Piedmont, but it is a cool-season grass carrying an Atlanta August.
- When should trees and shrubs go in?
- Fall, for almost everything woody. UGA Extension describes fall as the ideal time to plant most woody trees, shrubs, vines and groundcovers as well as herbaceous perennials in Georgia, because temperatures are moderate, irrigation demand is lower, and roots keep developing after the tops go dormant. October through early December is the center of the window here.
- Can I add topsoil under a big tree to make a bed?
- That is the classic way to lose the tree. Raising grade over a root zone cuts oxygen to the roots and buries the root flare, and the decline is slow enough that nobody connects cause to effect years later. Woodland beds get planted into the existing soil between the surface roots, with small stock and light mulch.
- What should I do about English ivy?
- Take it off the trees and out of the beds. The City of Sandy Springs describes English ivy as an invasive non-native species that can displace native plants and threaten tree health, and notes that property owners are responsible for the health and maintenance of trees on their property. Ivy up a trunk also adds weight and sail area to a canopy that has to survive summer storms.
Water and irrigation
- When am I allowed to run my sprinklers?
- Between 4 p.m. and 10 a.m., daily. That schedule sits in Georgia law at O.C.G.A. 12-5-7, added by the Water Stewardship Act of 2010, and covers irrigating ground cover, trees, shrubs and other plants. Drip irrigation, soaker hoses, hand watering with an automatic cutoff or handheld container, personal food gardens and private wells carry no time limitation.
- What about watering a brand new landscape?
- The statute exempts irrigation of new and replanted plant, seed or turf during installation and for 30 days immediately following the date of installation. That is the establishment window, and it exists so a new install is not being watered against the clock.
- Can my landscaper connect the sprinklers to the water supply?
- Not the connection itself. Georgia law allows the plumbing component of a lawn sprinkler system to be installed, altered or repaired from a backflow preventer that was installed by a licensed plumber, which leaves the potable connection and the backflow device to a plumber and everything downstream to the irrigation installer.
- My yard falls toward the creek at the back. Is that a help or a problem?
- Both, and which one it is depends on how the water gets there. Fall is what makes drainage possible at all, so a lot that slopes toward water is easier to solve than a flat one. What it costs you is bank erosion: concentrated flow arriving at a soft bank cuts it back a little every storm, and the ground lost that way does not come back. The answer is to slow the water before it arrives and to hold the bank with deep-rooted planting rather than to pipe everything straight at it.
Still unanswered
The guides go further on every subject on this page, and the glossary covers the vocabulary that turns up on a quote. If the question is about your own property, call (404) 737-3568 or use the quote form.
Find out what the yard would cost
Call (404) 737-3568 or use the quote form, and a Sandy Springs landscaping company prices the work at no charge.