Susan Friedman Landscape Architecture

About Susan Friedman Landscape Architecture

Every San Ramon lot has one view worth keeping and one problem worth solving, and the first walk through the property is where both of them show themselves — where Mount Diablo appears above the fence line, where the western sun turns brutal at four o'clock, where water wants to run in February. Susan Friedman Landscape Architecture designs from there: plans, planting schemes, grading and layout that settle how a garden will be used long before anything goes in the ground. Drawing comes before digging, and the drawing has to account for a valley that soaks in winter and bakes by midsummer. A good plan makes the finished garden feel inevitable, as though the space had been waiting for somebody to notice what it wanted to be. Then it gets built, and paper turns into shade, edges and somewhere to sit.