Your Landscape is Your Outdoor Home
Money spent on well-integrated landscaping and stone work pays you back in unimaginable ways. Thoughtful landscaping and stonework provide not only attractive plantings and usable space, but also dependable drainage, structural retention, improved habitat, privacy, access, higher equity, and even fresh food.
Good landscaping shouldn't require harsh regimens of chemical fertilizers, insecticides. and herbicides. Landscapes should be in harmony with native ecosystems, and while periodic maintenance is essential, we don’t think your landscape should demand expensive weekly oversight.
We Do All the Work In-House
We offer complete design services, earthwork and materials handling, as well the finest dry-laid stone work in the Southeast. We perform all of our own earthwork, tree care, soils conditioning and invasive vegetation removal.
A Well-Designed Landscape Plan For Your Home
When a well-designed landscape plan is incorporated into home construction from the outset, the entire project proceeds more smoothly. Homeowners want landscaping to compliment and improve the feel and function of their home, and they want it to be manageable. This begins with education and design, and ends with flawless execution and accountability.
Make Your Home One With Its Surroundings
Our goal is an intimate and attractive landscape with simple maintenance, structural durability, and a sense of seasonal evolution with a focus on native materials.
A Good Landscape Plan Doesn't Need to be Expensive
We welcome jobs of all sizes and offer a service-based approach low on design costs and high on execution. We are happy to assist with your irrigation and lighting needs as well.
A Retaining Wall is No Place to Make Mistakes.
Consider that a wall failure usually entails three times the cost of a correctly installed wall – it assumes the cost of the original wall, the cost of demolition and clean-up, and the cost of the new wall. We've never had a failure of any kind and take great pride in the correct execution and durability of our walls.
Each year our company devotes over 30 percent of our excavation workload to costly mitigation projects, many of these retaining wall failures. Soils and weather in our mountain region are notoriously volatile, while permitting requirements are insufficient to ensure performance and longevity. Additionally, contractors usually know more about home construction than structural retention and often cut corners to soften budgetary overruns.
For many homeowners in our region, some type of retaining wall is imperative to the structural integrity, drainage, access, and function of their home. For correct retaining wall design, the interplay of many issues such as costs, performance, aesthetics, and resale value all come to bear in a way that can seem overwhelming. Add required engineering, permitting, and often-rigid HOA guidelines and you have the recipe for serious confusion.
Let us help you navigate the choices.
We can design and build the retaining wall that best suits your home and lifestyle from component walls (MSE or Mechanically Stabilized Earth), to boulder creations. We can help you make sense of the available options in a manner that fits your needs and maximizes your budget.
Poured Concrete Retaining Wall
Retaining Wall Collapse
Demolition & Cleanup
New Wall Footing
Freshly Poured Wall
Compaction & Drainage
Finished Product
Stone Walls
There is nothing as satisfying as creating something beautiful and enduring. Stone walls are hard work, demanding physical fitness, knowledge of craft, and specialized tools. Each stone must be shaped quickly and fitted in accordance with time-honored walling techniques. Each wall is a unique accomplishment.
We consider our stone walls to be our legacy and are dedicated to expanding awareness of the tradition. There are very few companies offering correctly constructed dry laid stone work in the country. We are lucky enough to live and work in a region with abundant quality stone, and are dedicated to being one of the best.
Dry Laid Stone Walls
Dry laid stone walls are among the most enduring and attractive man-made features of the Appalachian mountains. Early settlers, and native inhabitants before, used local stone to fence livestock, terrace gardens, and build homes, wells and spring houses. These venerable traditions were passed down over many generations.
We believe dry stack stone work is still among the most sensible improvement strategies available. Our dry stacked walls connect function and rustic elegance.
Incorporating natural materials such as boulders, field stone, timbers, and native plantings into traditional masonry practices creates dramatic social, sacred and gardening spaces while providing permanent solutions to soil retention and drainage issues.
Boulder Walls
V&V Land Management offers visually stunning structural and decorative boulder creations. From simple entrance arrangements to massive structural retaining walls and staircases, we use local materials in the service of ancient craft to dramatically improve the beauty and function of your home or business.
Most local boulder work is of marginal or poor quality. Many boulder walls lack appropriate footings, drainage, backfill, or other necessary construction fundamentals such as broken joints, correct “hearting,” and appropriate battering. Each year boulder walls that should have lasted for centuries fail as a result of inadequate craft.
Failed Walls are Expensive to Fix
Most failed walls were providing necessary structural retention, drainage and/or landscaping and can be costly to demolish and rebuild to appropriate standards. It is imperative that homeowners and builders alike understand what makes a boulder wall both attractive and durable before choosing a masonry provider. Having an excavator and a large quantity of stone is not enough! As a rule, if your prospective contractor cannot demonstrate or discuss correct methods for splitting large stone they are probably a poor choice.
We want you to visit our projects
We will take time to educate you regarding correct wall engineering and craft. We will help you choose from among the region's outstanding array of native materials. We will help you design a boulder creation that truly fits your home or business. You will find our communication, professionalism and technical skill unmatched in the field. Above all, you will end up with a durable and unique stone creation.
Native plants are a big deal.
Why? Because, thanks to the introduction of invasive plants, from grasses to trees, shrubs to flowers, our native ecosystems increasingly bear less and less resemblance to those that surrounded our forebears in the Southern Appalachians. Many of us think of kudzu, Privet, or Bittersweet when we think of destructive invasive plants. Few of us realize that much of what is sold at local nurseries is invasive and should not be planted.
The Appalachian mountains are home to one of the highest densities of individually recognized species of plants and animals in the world, as well as many that have yet to be discovered. These species are intimately woven into our cultural heritage and even our very genetic makeup, as science has recently discovered – native plants for healing and food, grasses for forage, trees for building materials etc.
Additionally, native plants sustain unique ecological niches, the disruption of which creates a cascade of negative repercussions that often escape our attention until the damage is done. Tragic and irretrievable habitat destruction and species loss continues unabated as the result of the spread of invasive plants. At V&V, we believe education is the fulcrum for shifting the balance towards a renewal of our native ecosystems. We would love the opportunity to work with you and your property.
Let us work with you to create a native ecosystem, not merely a landscape. You will learn a tremendous amount, you will spend less, lower your maintenance burden and contribute to our region’s biological diversity. We would love to discuss our ongoing experiments with native grasses, ferns, and other adventures in landscaping.
Stone Patios & Walkways
Stone patios and walkways are perhaps the most beautiful, enduring, and functional landscape features you can add to your home. Our region is rich in high quality native stone, offering nearly endless design possibilities. We specialize in a variety of traditional techniques including mortared and dry-laid “flat work”, stone paver style patios, and giant slab placement.
Stone patios and walkways add utility and recreational space to your home.
From simple grilling pads and garden paths to dramatic outdoor dining rooms and pool scapes, stone flat work sets your home apart. Thoughtful patio and walkway designs serve multiple functions as well, improving access, privacy, drainage and landscaping.
Patios require almost no maintenance other than an occasional sweeping – we recommend natural stone not be treated or sealed in any way. Each V&V installation weathers and evolves in a completely unique fashion according to stone type, location, surroundings, and use.
Water Features are More Than Just Landscaping
Rock and water designs are one-of-a-kind creations. Following the tenets of our unique stewardship philosophy (Integrated Land Management), each design and installation seeks to employ the available resources and attributes of your property. Slope, aspect, light, water, rock, soil, and native vegetation are integrated and enhanced through thoughtful design to achieve dramatic outcomes.
These durable creations add disproportionately to the value of your home. They provide abundant habitat for native plants, birds, butterflies, reptiles and small mammals. Often our rock and water features have valuable structural functions as well, multi-tasking as terraced gardens, drainage features or slope reinforcements. We perform all of our own design, planning and site preparation to ensure absolutely consistent quality and accountability throughout.