Work done around heritage oaks, tight lots and a tree ordinance that governs where you can dig. Design, lighting, irrigation and stone.
Alamo Heights protects its trees more seriously than anywhere else we work, and any contractor who does not open a job by asking about it is going to cost you money.
Inside the city, a removal permit is required for any tree over 8 inches in diameter at breast height. Heritage status applies at 24 inches DBH for most native species, and at smaller diameters for particular species. Where removal of a heritage tree is approved, replacement runs at a minimum 1 to 1 ratio measured in diameter inches, with a mitigation fee in the region of $300 per inch, capped in residential zones.
The part that catches landscaping projects, though, is not removal. It is the critical root zone rules. Around a heritage tree, no more than 50 percent of the critical root zone may be covered with impervious cover, and none of it closer than 3 feet to the trunk. No more than 30 percent may be trenched, excavated, damaged or removed. Protective barriers matching the canopy diameter go up before site work starts.
Read that against a normal landscaping scope and you can see the problem. A patio, a driveway extension, an irrigation trench, a drain line and a footing for a wall are all either impervious cover or excavation inside the root zone of a big oak. On an Alamo Heights lot, several of those trees are shared with the neighbours root systems.
So on these jobs we work out where the root zones are before we design, not after. Irrigation and drain lines get routed around them or bored rather than trenched, patios get set at grade with permeable joints where they have to come close, and anything ambiguous goes to the city before a machine turns up. Ordinances change, so confirm the current requirements for your address rather than relying on a web page.
A great many of these lots have no side gate a machine can pass, a driveway shared with a neighbour, or a back yard reachable only through the house. That changes a job more than the design does. When every ton of base, soil and stone goes in by wheelbarrow, the labour line doubles and it is honest to say so in the quote rather than discover it on day one.
Systems here are frequently decades old, extended in pieces by different hands, and running heads and valves that are no longer made. They also predate the rain sensor requirement. We are usually not replacing a system, we are working out which parts are worth keeping, and a licensed irrigator is genuinely necessary rather than a nicety.
Under a mature Alamo Heights oak you are frequently below 4 hours of direct sun, and no grass sold in this market holds there. The honest answers are Raleigh St. Augustine where there is just enough light, a shade bed of decomposed granite and shade tolerant planting where there is not, or turf. Repeatedly resodding the same bare ring is the expensive answer.
No oak pruning between 1 February and 30 June, and any wound made in that window painted within minutes. It is oak wilt season, and in a neighbourhood where live oaks have been growing into each other for eighty years the root grafts between them are a highway for it.
If there is one service that suits Alamo Heights better than any other, it is landscape lighting, and the reason is the canopy.
These streets have live oaks that were mature when the houses were new. Two or three uplights under one of them turns the canopy into a ceiling and the limb structure into the shape of the whole front garden at night. On a small lot, where there is not room for a dramatic planting scheme, lighting is what gives the property depth after dark.
Downlighting suits these trees particularly well. Fixtures mounted high in the canopy, aimed down through the branches, drop a pattern of leaf shadow across the lawn and the path that reads like moonlight, with nothing visible at eye level. Over a small back garden it does more than any number of ground fixtures.
Everything runs at 12 volts through a transformer, which is what keeps the cable safe at shallow depth. That matters on these lots specifically, because shallow burial and careful routing is what lets a lighting system go in around root zones the ordinance protects. It is one of the few landscape improvements here that adds a great deal and disturbs almost nothing.
Colour temperature stays warm and consistent across the property. Mixed colour temperatures are the tell of a system added to in pieces, and cool white LEDs against a 1930s limestone facade look wrong in a way that is hard to unsee.
Uplighting and moonlighting the oaks, on cable routed around protected roots.
Decades old systems assessed by a licensed irrigator before anything is replaced.
Shade planting under old canopy, and nothing planted where it will fail.
For the ring under the oak that has been resodded three times.
Stone that suits a house built in the 1930s, set without trenching root zones.
Bed renovation on established gardens that have got ahead of their owners.
Our office is at 28991 IH-10 W, Suite 104, in Boerne, and Alamo Heights is the far end of our service area rather than the near end. We are honest about that: it is a run down the highway, not a five minute hop.
What you get in exchange is a crew that spends its week on limestone, alkaline soil and mature live oaks, which is exactly what your garden is made of. We have been doing this since January 2019, we are BBB accredited, our irrigation is run by Elijah Washington, TCEQ licensed irrigator LI0029636, and 74 homeowners have rated us 5.0 on Google.
The wider northwest side.
North up 281.
Everywhere we work.
No charge and no salesperson. Someone comes out, looks at the yard, and tells you what it needs. We work in Boerne, Fair Oaks Ranch, Helotes and northwest San Antonio, Monday to Friday from 8:00 AM to 6:00 PM.
28991 IH-10 W, Suite 104, Boerne, TX 78006
travislandscapingtx@gmail.com
