Restorative Landscaping

Light Dark Landscape provides landscape design, installation, maintenance, restoration, and project management services in the greater Minneapolis – St. Paul area. We work at the nexus of landscaping and restoration.

In 2013, we founded Light Dark Landscape to combine the principles of sustainability, beauty, and restoration in the landscape. Light Dark Landscape’s design goals are to create naturalized systems, minimize environmental impacts, protect our water, provide year-round interest for both humans and creatures, all while meeting the practical built and visual needs of our clients. We believe landscapes should engage all or your senses.

While we specialize and excel in our native planting plans for naturalized environments, we are full scale comprehensive designers. Our designs range in size and scale and can address the needs for specific locations within a site or work on the comprehensive planning for an entire landscape. Light Dark designs each project to fit the unique challenges and needs of the site—solving water management and quality issues, creating competitive native plant-palettes suited to the soil and sunlight available, providing educational opportunities, all while utilizing materials that cohere with existing structures and natural surroundings. We aim to push creative boundaries with innovative approaches and solutions that address the cultural  and historical context of the site, connect and complement the existing built environment as well as the surrounding natural and native landscape.

Sustainable & Innovative

Sustainability is a gradient, and through innovative designs and techniques we meet our clients’ goals without compromising complex environmental concerns. Our fundamentals:

  • Buy from local growers when possible.
  • Know our growers’ practices, preferring organic or neonicotinoid-free.
  • Use plants that minimize water use.
  • Design to utilize on-site water capture.
  • Increase biodiversity — bees! butterflies! creatures!
  • Never use toxic fertilizers, pesticides, or other chemicals.
  • Incorporate recycled materials in design.
  • Plant native and edible species.
  • Avoid heavy machines to reduce compaction when possible.

© Light Dark Landscape, LLC. – Minneapolis, MN