Environmental Insights

National Landscape Architecture Month brings a renewed focus on the spaces where we live, work, and connect with nature, and the perfect time to consider the impact of a well-designed landscape.

Look around – the vibrant city streets, the calming shade of trees on college campuses, the revitalized downtowns buzzing with life in parks – all testaments to the power of landscape architecture.

At T. Lake Environmental Design, we're landscape architects driven by a powerful vision: creating spaces that leave a lasting impact on communities. We approach every design with this in mind, ensuring it fosters connection with nature, maximizes functionality, and becomes a beautiful, enduring asset for the people who use it.

Ever wondered what happens to that beautiful garden or outdoor space after it's installed? Many landscaping companies can create a stunning look, but not all can ensure it stays that way.

When it comes to landscape and outdoor care, we're often faced with requests for a wide array of services. From towering old trees in need of attention to gutters full of debris needing a cleaning, we’ve been asked to tackle it all.

In today's business world, success is increasingly dependent on collaboration. Whether you're a small business or a large corporation, you need to be able to partner with other organizations to achieve your goals. However, not all partnerships are created equal. In today's fast-paced world, where convenience is king, it can be tempting to choose partners based on their ability to deliver quickly and easily.

Chances are, you've probably passed by quite a few of our projects without even realizing it. Next time you drive by Georgia College & State University in Milledgeville, or drive through Dublin City, take a moment to appreciate the landscape designs that might just be our handiwork!

If you’ve ever been involved with a property or site renovation then the chances are you’ve come across a landscape architect. Landscape architects are the people behind virtually every outdoor space in the human world, from urban parks and town squares to industrial sites and residential complexes. Good landscape architecture strengthens not only the people and communities that occupy the space but the natural ecosystem too. 

In any landscape, sooner or later there comes a time when, well...it’s just time. Time to rip it all out and start over. Whether it’s your grandmother’s half-dead crepe myrtle, the driveway with the lush crop of crabgrass pushing up through the cracks, or that redwood deck that looked so hip in 1988, you kind of just know by looking at it that “the time” has come.

Recently, we were contacted by a nice couple who owns a property in Glenwood, a tiny rural town in south-central Georgia. It had a lovely view of a beautiful pond. They’d owned the home for a while, but now that they were both retired, they were ready to turn it into the home of their dreams.

We’re always excited to welcome new team members, especially when they bring diversity and new skills to our team. This fall, we are extra pumped to introduce the newest and most uniquely talented member of the T.Lake team: our brand new DJI Phantom 4 Pro V2.0 quadcopter drone!

Want to know how to install professional-looking landscape lighting? Sure, I can give you some landscape lighting tips. I’ll post a few of my best below.

But first, bear with me, because I just have to rant about what NOT to do with landscape lighting. It’s actually easy to demonstrate. All you have to do is get in your car and ride around after dark. I can almost guarantee that within a few blocks you’ll have passed case after case of really bad lighting installations.

Like the giant square box runway lights that just blast light at a building as if it were daylight, doing nothing to highlight the architecture or evoke a mood.

Or the residence where somebody bought bullet lights and aimed them at a shrub, and it looks like what Moses saw on Mount Horeb: a single bush all alight with nothing but harsh shadows all around.

Or the facade of a house that has a bright, bright light in one spot right next to a patch of blackness so dark the devil could be hiding there. It’s jarring. When will people learn that you can’t just go buy lights and point them at things and expect it to come out looking good?

Now that I’ve got that off my chest, let’s talk about how to do landscape lighting right.