A Nursery Owner’s Take on the Ultimate Home Garden
For the owner of a Phoenix nursery, an Arcadia home was the perfect canvas for a lush, carefully curated garden.
By Nora Burba Trulsson | Photography by Chris Loomis
Eddie Smith Sr. loves a good project.
He enjoys the plotting, planning and directing, seeing an idea come to fruition. “I need to keep busy,” he says with a laugh. “When there’s nothing left to do, it’s not good. I’ll start changing everything out.”
When Eddie and his wife, Debbie, bought a newly built home in Arcadia several years ago, he cast his eye toward the landscape. While the garden around the abode was just fine, “just fine” wasn’t good enough for Eddie—he and Debbie own The Plant Stand, the South Mountain nursery they opened in 1994, now run by son Eddie Smith Jr. “We’re in the nursery business,” says Eddie Sr. “We had to personalize this place.”
To help with the project, Eddie called in two friends—landscape contractor Dustin Moss and landscape designer/contractor Mike Karmo. “Eddie would describe what he wanted, and the three of us would put our heads together to come up with a plan,” explains Karmo, who came out of retirement to aid with the garden refresh.
To start, Karmo and Moss assessed what existed in the front and backyard of the two-story, whitewashed brick home, designed in a traditional architectural style. “The house is symmetrical and formal, so the garden needed to reflect that,” says Karmo, “We kept the hardscape, but when it came to the plants, there were just a few trees, shrubs and a lawn. Eddie wanted denser plantings.”
The landscape renovation started with the addition of a low garden wall and metal gates to delineate the front yard, as well as neatly clipped hedges that reiterate the formal lines of the home’s architecture. Ash trees and crape myrtles trained as trees were planted to soften the home’s facade, while densely spaced ficus hedges provide privacy from neighbors on either side. “The front yard is north-facing and has a lot of shade, so you can’t get a lot of color from blooms,” Karmo notes. “We got ‘color’ by using variations of green plants that added definition to the beds.”
In back, the pool, patio and freestanding brick fireplace were in place, but existing and new planting beds were augmented with colorful annuals, sago palms, yuccas, purple hearts and more. A series of French pots hold more annuals and Little Ollie (Olea europaea ‘Montra’) patio trees. A golf lover, Eddie installed a putting green at the back of the property and, more recently, added a pickleball court for Debbie, a fan of the popular sport. A row of neatly clipped ficus trees screens the sports areas from the rest of the landscape.
One major change Eddie oversaw was the removal of lawns, which he replaced with artificial turf, in the front and back. “Especially with the new turf, this landscape is really streamlined,” Eddie points out. “It’s simple, and there’s not a lot of maintenance.”
The updated landscape is lusher and denser, drawing Eddie and Debbie out into the garden as part of their living space—though Eddie is always on the search for a plant to replace or a tree to clip. “We like a nice, finished look,” says Eddie. “That’s our business, and that’s what we do.”
SOURCES
- Builder: Brimley Development, Phoenix, brimdev.com.
- Original landscape designer: Jeremy McVicars, Refined Gardens, Scottsdale, refinedgardens.com.
- New landscape installation and design: Dustin Moss, A To Z Tree & Turf, Glendale, atoztreeandturf.com with Mike Karmo (retired).
- Plants and pots: The Plant Stand of Arizona, Phoenix, plantstandaz.shop.
- Outdoor furniture: On The Veranda, Phoenix, ontheveranda.net.
