Robin Marroquin
Expansive mediterranean courtyard garden in San Diego with natural stone pavers.

Cutting garden
This is an example of an expansive mediterranean backyard full sun formal garden for spring in San Diego with a garden path and concrete pavers.

Expansive mediterranean backyard partial sun formal garden in Orange County with a container garden and natural stone pavers.

View of gardens from south terrace of house photography by Bill Sumner
Design ideas for an expansive mediterranean garden in Miami.

Photo of an expansive mediterranean garden in Atlanta.

Custom Cedar Walk Through Arched Arbor with French styled Gates. Pewaukee, WI.
Design ideas for an expansive mediterranean garden in Milwaukee.

Inspiration for an expansive mediterranean backyard garden in San Luis Obispo.

photo by Jim Pyle
Photo of an expansive mediterranean sloped full sun garden for spring in Sacramento.

custom Spanish fountain basin with moroccan tile, golden trumpet tree, pea gravel and stone pavers
Photo of an expansive mediterranean backyard full sun formal garden for summer in San Diego with a water feature and gravel.

Design ideas for an expansive mediterranean backyard formal garden in Santa Barbara with a water feature and natural stone pavers.

Doric columnar dining pavilion with heated furnishings for year round use. Photographer: Matthew Millman
Photo of an expansive mediterranean side yard shaded formal garden in San Francisco with concrete pavers.

Spectacular red granite boulders through out the rough landscape, harsh winds, intense heat and sometimes, even snow, were all horticultural challenges and inspirations on this beautiful Mediterranean seaside property. Nicholas Walker and his team worked in conjunction with his brother Malcolm to create a stunning series of Belgian Blue Stone terraces and pathways to connect the diverse sections of the property and integrate the indoor and outdoor living experience. They designed a sheltered cactus oasis, organic culinary garden and an intimate Ipe observation deck as virtual rooms linked by the elegant stone pathways and framed by the sea.

Vista del complesso
This is an example of an expansive mediterranean garden in Florence.

We were contacted by the owner of a Houston, Texas home who asked us to design a series of gardens and landscaping features that would compliment and expand the Mediterranean theme of his house into the surrounding landscape. This house sat on a very large lot of several acres in a secluded Memorial Drive neighborhood located near the 610 Loop. The home featured a symmetrical, linear appearance in spite of its two-story build, and our client wanted a landscape and garden design that would follow these same principles of self-contained regularity and subtle linear motion. Creating a Mediterranean theme in a Houston, Texas garden and landscape is a bit more complex that it might appear at face value. The southern coast of Europe—particularly in Italy and Greece—is a mountainous area where homes and gardens are built on steep angles and sharp vertical rises. Gardens and fields are often built in terraces that climb the mountains due to the limited planting area and rough, rocky terrain. Limestone is the predominant rock type in Italy and Greece and has become iconic of this part of the world in our collective consciousness. Mediterranean homes and gardens are historically famous for their white stucco walls, olive groves, and carefully sculptured greenery embedded in a rugged limestone backdrop. The challenge lay in taking an essentially three-dimensional landscaping style and transfering it to a Houston property. As we all know, this part of Texas is very flat, so a hillside garden is out of the question in the literal sense. However, using a combination of symmetrical forms and linear progressions, along with some innovative garden materials, we were able to mimic several aspects of seaside European terrain. The key to doing this was to establish a combination of circular forms and linear patterns in the multiple garden elements we designed. French and Italian gardens place a heavy emphasis on order and symmetry, and both tend to utilize right angles to establish form. We planted a variety of low level growth around the house and rear swimming pool patio to emphasize its walls and corners. We then added three keynote forms to the landscape to create a Houston equivalent of a Mediterranean garden. The first of these forms was a knot garden centered on the front door, located just in front of the home’s motorcourt. We planted boxwoods in three circular rows that looked like terraces on a hillside. In the center of the knot garden we planted Loropatalum, punctuated with a lone Crinum lily as the center piece. The rich purple of the Loropatalum draws catches the eye, and the vertical dimension added by the lily draws it upward to the front entrance of the house. Moving then to one side of the house, we transformed a substantial portion of the yard into a parterre garden that centered on a large glass room that extended from the west wing of the house. This garden was populated by low-growth rose bushes whose amenability to constant trimming makes them an ideal plant material for parterre gardens, and whose colorful blooms a made them stand out from multiple vantage points throughout this Houston neighborhood. The garden borders were made from of boxwood hedges, and the central pathways were made using European limestone gravel that mimics the color of the limestone cliffs of the Aegean and Adriatic Seas. We then completed the design by adding dwarf yaupon, a small shrub that bears a curious resemblance to clouds, all along the borders of the gravel walkways. This helped create the impression that the garden was located on a hilltop near the sea, and that the clouds were rolling across the shoreline. One of the most appealing attributes of this Houston, Texas property is its superb location. The back of the yard borders a 50-foot ravine carved out of the earth by a major tributary of Buffalo Bayou. This seemed to us a natural destination spot for garden guests to visit after strolling around the west wing of the home to the pool. To encourage them to do so, we planted an alley of crepe myrtles leading from the pool area all the way back to the woods along the ravine. We then built a walkway out of limestone aggregate blocks that started at the parterre garden, ran alongside the house to the pool, then ran straight out through the alley of trees to the scenic overlook of the forest and stream below. For more the 20 years Exterior Worlds has specialized in servicing many of Houston's fine neighborhoods.

Cannes
Photo of an expansive mediterranean driveway in Nice with natural stone pavers and a container garden.

at the side rear near the 4 car garage, we designed a stable house reminiscent of the old days... and we made it the pool house. we used the same field stone on the pool house as on the decorative wall separating it from the driveway

Design- Harry Thompson, Torrey Pines Landscape Co., Inc A San Diego Home and Garden 2014 award winner Maintenance- Torrey Pines Landscape Co., Inc, A CLCA award winner Photo-Martin Mann

Michael Roe
Expansive mediterranean front yard partial sun driveway in Portland with a garden path and natural stone pavers.

This vibrant low-water plant grouping consists of Euphorbia characias with its chartruese flowers, Leucadendron Summer Red (Cone Flower) and a variegated Phormium. This colorful grouping hugs the sloped area alongside the lower patio area in this Northern California hillside landscape sanctuary. Sonoma fieldstone retaining walls are planted with succulents and a row of Bamboo creates a screen above. Design and Photo: © Eileen Kelly, Dig Your Garden Landscape Design http://www.digyourgarden.com