Full Landscaping Services Calgary

Decks get built in cedar, pressure treated, or composite. Each material has a different look, different cost, different maintenance reality. Composite costs more up front and pays back in years six through fifteen when cedar starts to need sanding and oiling. Cedar wins on warmth and smell. Pressure treated is the budget pick, and a good pressure treated deck stained every few years lasts twenty years easily.

Patio work is mostly paving stones on a properly built base. Concrete pours happen when the design calls for it, sure. But pavers win in Calgary nine times out of ten. Freeze thaw movement cracks concrete slabs in a way it never cracks individual paving stones. Bad cracks in poured concrete stay bad. A heaved paver, on the other hand, gets lifted, the base under it re leveled, the same stone dropped back into place. Full breakdown of materials and base depths sits on our patio installation page.

Front walks, side paths, driveway aprons, full driveways. Same paver families work across all four. Roman cobble, Holland stone, large format slabs, permeable pavers. Choice of stone matters less than what is underneath. Six inches of compacted aggregate base on a driveway, four on a walkway, geotextile between subsoil and gravel on anything in a soft spot. Get the base wrong and the prettiest paver job in Calgary still fails by year five.

Most of our full service builds end up with paving stone work somewhere on the property. Flagstone path from the driveway to a side gate. Stamped concrete look paver patio off the kitchen door. Fire pit circle laid out in pinwheel pattern. Good design pulls the stones together so the materials read as one cohesive yard, not five disconnected projects bolted on.

A surprising number of Calgary lots have grade problems the original builder ignored. Back yard slopes down to a fence. Water pools against the foundation. Soil washes onto the neighbour’s lawn. Retaining walls fix the grade. Most of our retaining walls come in at three feet or under. Anything over four feet in Calgary triggers a permit and an engineered design. So we terrace a lot of jobs into two shorter walls instead of one tall one. A two foot wall, a four foot bench in between, then another two foot wall. Cheaper, no permit, and the look reads better in our experience.

Allan Block, Roman Stack, Versa Lok, plus natural Rundle stone for the higher end builds are what we use most. The retaining wall page has the full material breakdown. Drainage behind the wall is where most failures actually show up. Perforated drain tile gets installed, clean gravel goes in for backfill, geotextile keeps the fines out of the gravel. Walls that skip the drainage lean inside five years, almost without fail.

Fences in Calgary come up on almost every job because lot lines are tight and the neighbours sit close. Six foot cedar privacy is what most homeowners ask for first. Composite is gaining ground because the colour holds and nobody wants to stain a fence every other year. Where a homeowner wants the property line marked without blocking sight, ornamental aluminum is the call. The fence options page covers the Calgary bylaw rules on height.

Pergolas mostly come in cedar, with composite and aluminum picking up in the last few years. A 12 by 12 cedar pergola over a paver patio is the standard back yard centerpiece on a full landscape build. Attached to the house or freestanding, both work. Freestanding lets you place the pergola where the shade actually falls in July, not where the wall happens to be.

Plant installation gets the least respect on a landscape build and matters the most over time. Hardscape sets the bones. Plants and trees finish the yard within two seasons. Calgary hardy stock is what we put in the ground: Swedish aspen, Schubert chokecherry, Amur maple, Ohio buckeye for trees. Shrub layer mostly comes from Karl Foerster grass, hydrangeas, junipers, dwarf mugo pine. Annual plants vary client by client. Some homeowners want the colour every year, some want pure perennial shrubs so they do not have to think about it.

Sod installation finishes most jobs. Calgary lawns get hammered by chinooks and brittle by August. Soil prep matters more than the turf itself. Four to six inches of topsoil under the sod, turf laid the same day it comes off the truck, deep daily watering for the first three weeks. Skip the soil prep and the lawn looks rough by year two.

Water features have a strong following on full landscape jobs. Bubbling rock fountains are easiest. Pondless waterfalls give the sound without the maintenance of an open pond. Full ponds with fish are still requested, mostly on the larger Bearspaw and Springbank acreages. Pond winterization happens every October. Skip it and the liner cracks.

Landscape lighting gets installed as part of the build because trenching when your yard is open costs a fraction of trenching after the sod is down. LED path lights, uplighting on trees and the front of the house, deck step lights, accent lighting on water features. Irrigation works the same way. Run the lines while the soil is open. Heads get added later as the planting matures.

Commercial services are roughly a third of our calendar. Most homeowners do not know we do commercial at all. Commercial landscaping calgary clients run from small strip mall property managers to multi building strata corporations to retail chains to industrial sites in the SE quadrant. Same fundamentals as residential. Scheduling, contracts, maintenance terms look different.