FAQ
Landscape Design in Burbank, answered
The questions we hear most from Burbank homeowners.
We spend time reading the property before proposing anything. Slope direction and steepness, where water currently travels and where it stalls, how sun tracks across the yard through the day, what the soil looks like below the surface, which views you want framed and which you want screened, where privacy is missing, and the location and canopy spread of existing trees. We also listen to how you actually live outside. A yard designed for people who entertain looks nothing like one designed around young children.
Most disappointing yards are one undifferentiated space with objects scattered in it. Rooms give the space structure. A dining area near the kitchen door, a lounge zone around a fire feature, a quiet corner with a bench, a working area for utility, a lawn panel where it earns its place. Each has a purpose, a boundary, and a reason to exist where it sits. Planting, level changes, and overhead structures create the edges. The yard then feels larger, not smaller, because the eye discovers it in parts.
Circulation is how you move between the rooms, and it is what people feel without being able to name. Paths need to go where people actually walk, which is why worn tracks across a lawn are useful evidence. Widths matter, because two people walking side by side need more than a single file route. Where a path arrives, what it reveals as you turn a corner, and whether you have to cross a dining area to reach the garage all get decided on paper long before a single stone is cut.
Burbank runs from flat neighborhoods in the south and center up into the Verdugo Mountains foothills, so a hillside property brings terracing, retaining, and drainage into the design conversation immediately. Level ground has to be created before rooms can exist. We plan where the terraces fall, how tall the retaining needs to be, and how water passes through the sequence without loading up behind a wall. Just as importantly, hillside designs are usually organized around the outlook, so the best rooms face the view.
Conditions first, then appearance within what the conditions allow. A plant that wants full sun will sulk under a canopy no matter how good it looks in the nursery, and a shade lover in western exposure burns by August. We map the yard by exposure during the site walk and select for each zone accordingly. Mature size, growth rate, root behavior near paving, leaf drop over a pool or patio, and water demand all narrow the list before aesthetics make the final choice.
Hydrozoning means grouping plants by water need so each irrigation zone serves plants that want the same thing. It sounds obvious and it is routinely ignored. When a thirsty plant sits on the same valve as a drought tolerant one, you either overwater half the zone or underwater the other half, and something always suffers. Designing the planting plan and the irrigation zones together avoids that permanently. It also lowers water use without anyone having to remember to adjust a controller by hand.
Yes, because Burbank operates its own municipal utility through Burbank Water and Power, meaning water conservation programs and requirements are administered locally rather than through a regional agency. We keep that in mind at the planning stage, when it is easy to shape the design around efficient water use rather than retrofitting later. Reducing irrigated turf, grouping planting by need, and specifying drip where drip belongs are all decisions made on paper for effectively no additional cost.
It is, and that surprises people who assume grading is something the equipment operator figures out. Finished elevations for patios, thresholds at doors, the fall across paved areas, where surface water collects, and where the collected water discharges are all design decisions with numbers behind them. If grade intent is not established on paper, the site gets graded by improvisation and you find out where the water goes during the first real storm. Setting it early costs a conversation, fixing it later costs construction.
Because both live in the ground under everything else. Mainline routing, valve box locations, zone boundaries, lighting transformer position, and conduit runs to fixture locations all need to be established before hardscape covers the yard. Planning them at the design stage means the trenches are dug once, in the right places, in the right sequence. Skipping this step is how a finished patio ends up getting cut open for a line somebody forgot, and that repair is always visible afterward.
Substantially. Burbank neighborhoods are established and well kept, with mature street trees creating canopy that shapes both the design and the construction. Canopy determines which parts of the yard are shade zones for plant selection purposes. Root zones determine where paving, footings, and trenches can go without damaging the tree. Both get drawn onto the plan rather than discovered by an excavator. A design that ignores an existing tree either kills the tree or gets rebuilt around it later.
They are drawn together because they define each other. A paved area with no planting against it reads as a slab. Planting with no built edge reads as unresolved. Where a patio ends, something has to happen, whether that is a seat wall, a planted border, a level change, or a screen. Material choice and plant palette also need to agree, since a rough natural stone surrounded by clipped formal hedging fights itself. We resolve both layers in the same drawing.
A plan you can read and understand. It shows the layout of the yard with the rooms and circulation, dimensions so you know how big things actually are, the hardscape materials specified, and the planting laid out by location and type. You can see how the pieces fit together and how much space each area takes before anyone commits to construction. The drawing is also what the crew builds from, so what you approve is what gets executed in the field.
That is the point of doing it on paper. Revisions are expected and encouraged, and this is the stage where changing your mind costs almost nothing. Moving a dining area, widening a path, swapping a material, cutting a feature, or reorganizing an entire zone is a drawing revision at this stage and a demolition bill later. We would rather go three rounds on the plan and build once than build once and hear afterward that the seating faces the wrong way.
Mature size, always. Drawing a shrub at nursery size produces a plan that looks sparse and tempts everyone into planting twice as much as the space can hold. Three years later the beds are a tangle, air circulation is gone, and half of it has to come out. We draw planting at the size it will reach so the spacing on the plan is the spacing that will actually work. The yard looks a little open at first and correct thereafter.
We identify at the design stage which elements will require permits so there are no surprises when construction approaches. Burbank is its own incorporated city, so applications for patio covers and structures, gas lines, electrical work, and walls above certain heights go through the City of Burbank rather than through Los Angeles. Knowing that early affects the design itself, since structural detail, setbacks, and wall heights are easier to accommodate on paper than to redraw after a plan check.
No. Daniels Landscaping builds every project with our own in-house crew. The plan is drawn by our team and constructed by one licensed contractor, which is the reason design intent survives the trip from paper to ground. Details do not get reinterpreted by an unfamiliar outfit. Questions in the field get answered by the people who made the original decisions. One company designed it, one company built it, and one company stands behind the result.
When a design comes from one company and the construction from another, the gaps between the two belong to no one. Details that were not fully drawn get improvised. Costs come in unexpectedly because the designer never had to price the drawing. Field conditions that contradict the plan get resolved by whoever is holding the shovel. Doing both means the plan is realistic before you approve it, and the accountability for how it turns out sits in exactly one place.
Call Daniels Landscaping at (818) 443-9300 to arrange a visit to your Burbank home. We walk the property, assess the conditions, and talk through what you want the yard to do for you, then follow up with a free written estimate that lays out the scope in plain terms. We are licensed in California under license number 1138709, and the same in-house crew that we employ for construction will build whatever plan you ultimately approve.