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Photo of a mid-sized mediterranean backyard full sun formal garden for spring in Orange County with with pond and gravel.

Ravenscourt Landscaping & Design LLC
Photo of a small mediterranean backyard partial sun xeriscape in Houston with a water feature and gravel.

This is a California xeriscape succulent garden. Clients wanted color and texture with drought-resistant plant materials. They enjoy garden sculptures, so we included a Buddha and a Roman bust planted with succulents. The previous owners of the property left behind some old San Francisco cobblestones, which we incorporated into the new design, using them as garden steps. We built low, raised beds out of stone, also existing on the property, and used containers along steps and against existing concrete walls to soften the hard surfaces.

Low water consumption gravel garden in the Tramantana mountains in Mallorca.
Mid-sized mediterranean backyard full sun garden in London with a garden path and gravel for summer.

Design Consultant Jeff Doubét is the author of Creating Spanish Style Homes: Before & After – Techniques – Designs – Insights. The 240 page “Design Consultation in a Book” is now available. Please visit SantaBarbaraHomeDesigner.com for more info. Jeff Doubét specializes in Santa Barbara style home and landscape designs. To learn more info about the variety of custom design services I offer, please visit SantaBarbaraHomeDesigner.com Jeff Doubét is the Founder of Santa Barbara Home Design - a design studio based in Santa Barbara, California USA.

Photo of a large mediterranean front yard full sun garden for summer in Houston with gravel and with flowerbed.

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.

This drought-tolerant garden was the solution to a homeowner who missed her native Arizona. Stately agaves, swaths of sedum, and elegant aeonium are tied together with Decomposed Granite (DG) for a desert feel.

Garden makeovers by Shirley Bovshow in Los Angeles. Homeowner wanted a natural style garden with Mediterranean and native California plants. An avid hiker, the homeowner now has her own decomposed granite "trail." Photo by Shirley Bovshow, http://EdenMakersBlog.com

Because the sunniest place to grow vegetables is in the front yard, custom Cor-ten steel planters were designed as an attractive sculptural element, their graceful curves complementing the organic flow of the landscape. Informal gravel provides stable footing to walk and work, while remaining permeable to rain. Dwarf citrus grow in pots, and foundation plantings of Ribes sanguineum and Phormium 'Guardsman', and Ficus pumila vine anchor the home. Photo © Jude Parkinson-Morgan.

Inspiration for a large mediterranean front yard full sun xeriscape for summer with with flowerbed and gravel.

Situato in collina, vicino i Castelli Romani, questo giardino offre la possibilità di rivivere le sensazioni, i profumi e i colori della macchia mediterranea. Il planting design da me studiato vuole restituire la sensazione più naturale possibile, attirando allo stempo lo sguardo del fruitore con disegni geometrici sapientemente inseriti. 4 mesi di progettazione, 1 anno di realizzazione, è tra i miei lavori più meritevoli e complessi.

Gravel Driveway approach to Tuscan Villa Courtyard
Photo of a large mediterranean front yard shaded driveway in New York with gravel.

Delores Arabian
Design ideas for a mediterranean backyard full sun garden in San Francisco with gravel.

This beautiful property is located in the hills above of Montecito with 360 degree of views onto the Channel Islands and the surrounding mountains. Inspired by the Japanese landscape design principal of the borrowed landscape the gardens on this property serves as a kind of picture frame from which to view the natural beauty of its surroundings. This 15-year-old costume-built home was crafted with all the style and workmanship ship found in Villa or Château in the Mediterranean. Unfortunately, the garden design was not as well thought out as the house was. Most of this property receives baking sun, drying winds and is in an extremely high fire danger area. Do to these factors many of the plants on the property were unsuitable for their location. The original planting scheme was also lifeless and colorless. Poor landscape maintenance had left many of the plants on the property sick and dying. We came in to revive this landscape, breathing new life into it. Creating a drought tolerant and fire wise landscape was of utmost importance to these clients. Staying true to the more formal landscape styles found in Southern Europe we also want to create an opportunity to design seamlessly blend with its natural surroundings. We did that by incorporating a lot of California native plants. This vast property also contains an avocado orchard and a vineyard. By adding California native plants the property is inviting in native birds and insects that help keep pollinate the orchard and vineyard and keep pest problems at bay. Because these clients enjoy harvesting from their land we added elements of edible landscaping to this project. We filled pottery and planter beds with fruit trees, culinary and medicinal herbs as well as flowers that can be used in cut flower arrangements. Lastly, we went through carefully pruning diseased plants, treating pest problems an improving the soil. Now the landscape is not only more beautiful it is more protected against fire, is more water wise and integrate into its surrounds with a wholistic approach.

Anigozanthos create a Mediterranean screen around natural stone fire pit in the company of senecio, agave, sticks on fire Euphorbia
Design ideas for a mediterranean backyard xeriscape in San Luis Obispo with a fire feature and gravel.

Jennifer Cheung
Inspiration for a large mediterranean front yard full sun driveway in Los Angeles with a water feature and gravel.

Steel edible garden beds
Inspiration for a large mediterranean backyard partial sun garden in Portland with a vegetable garden and gravel.