Awards
ALCC Elite Gold Award 2025: Sustainability
We are thrilled to be awarded another gold award for sustainability. For this project, the homeowners wanted to eliminate all non-functional turf and replace it with plants that were better suited for the Colorado climate. For this project installation, we avoided sending any waste to the landfill; rather, we composted all wasted plant material and recycled the concrete for other projects. The irrigation system from the turf was also modified for the xeric garden rather than replacing the entire system. Now in its early stages of maturity, this garden thrives with only a handful of waterings in the warmest and driest summer days.
ALCC Elite Silver Award 2025: Design-Build
Our task for this garden was to create an English inspired garden in a Colorado context and a small footprint. Additionally, we needed to create an outdoor enclave that screened views from the street. While the footprint is modest, our designers were able to create multiple usable spaces and features such as a bubbling rock, outdoor patio and raised garden beds.
ALCC Elite Bronze Award 2025: Plant Design
As designers we are often asked to tie the landscape in with the home. Where once was beds of rock and Kentucky bluegrass, now are perennials for insects and wildlife. The bubbling granite fountain attracted birds as soon as it was installed. This transformed garden now is a sanctuary for plants, people and wildlife, bringing the Colorado landscape closer and creating an outdoor room that makes sense with the context of the home.
ALCC Elite Gold Award 2023: Sustainability
Truly a mountain home, this project required design and engineering innovation to harmonize the natural beauty of the place with the functionality needed for the built environment. In order to minimize the impact on the existing natural landscape while still creating an enduring retaining wall, we utilized a vegetated MSE wall system not commonly seen in Colorado. We built a wall of biodegradable, soil-filled bags, and hydro-seeded with a diverse seed mix that would blend into the mountain landscape. As the bag material composts into the soil, the living roots of the plants hold the wall in place, creating a wall rated to last 120 years. Best of all, the enduring space offers a gracious invitation to pollinators, birds, and people to come and enjoy.
ALCC Elite Silver Award 2023: Residential Plant Design
A new-build home, this project required a plant palette that would thrive in a variety of conditions, from the intensity of a green roof, to low sheltered meadows. The strong lines of the house are both accentuate and softened with the juxtaposition of the plants. Especially with the green roof, diversity while maintaining continuity was at the forefront of this design, resulting in a vigorous and dynamic landscape.
ALCC Elite Bronze Award 2022: Residential Plant Design
A downtown home, not far from major roads and intersections, this project offers respite from the hustle and bustle of the city with a densely planted perennial garden. Leaning heavily into four seasons of interest, we designed the space temporally, with each species playing its part on queue to create a harmonious garden.
ALCC Elite Gold Award 2021: Residential Plant Design
In a community surrounded by open space at the foot of the rockies, these gardens are exposed to some of the region’s most extreme wind and weather. We chose this colorful palette of hearty perennials, shrubs and trees to capture and reflect the bold romance of the home and natural setting.
ALCC Elite Silver Award 2021: Design/Build
Nestled into the Boulder foothills, this designed landscape serves as a transition between the client’s contemporary house and their Ponderosa forest surroundings. Echoing the perfect angles of the architecture, the lines of the formal landscape reach out to the forest while also drawing it into the space where our clients can entertain guests with their pool, cooking, dining, and fire sitting areas. With grasses as a matrix for the garden, the foliage of the structured space merges with the montane grassland in a way that immerses the user in nature from the comfort of their designed mountain retreat.
ALCC Elite Bronze Award 2021: Landscape Contstruction
A system of trellises, Corten steel planters, and full garden areas create softness and beauty in this downtown community. Billowing grasses, climbing vines, and multi-seasonal perennial blooms add whimsy and nature to the linear structures of the outdoor living space and a water feature employs the full senses of garden users. Spaces for strolling, lounging, swimming, dining, and pets bring this Denver community to life.
Press
Reveal the Wonder of Nature Right at Home: How Tree of Life Helped Shape a Perennial Garden Vision - Colorado Green
Designing With Local Plants Brings Home a Win for Colorado Landscaping Firm - Green Industry Pros