Duneline The build

Landscape & garden design · a studio for dry ground

Duneline

We build gardens that belong to dry ground: native grasses, sand-adapted planting, and the patterns the wind has already drawn.

Design Planting plans Long stewardship
Read down

01 — Practice

The desert is not empty.
It is patterned.

Most planting fights the ground it sits on. Ours listens to it first. Before a single grass goes in, we read how water already moves across a site, where the wind combs the sand, and which slopes hold shade at dusk. The garden is drawn from that reading, not laid over it.

We plant with grasses that were here before the fences: species that ask for little water, hold a slope through a dry year, and turn silver, then gold, then rust as the season runs down. A Duneline garden is meant to look most alive in the months a lawn gives up.

02 — What the studio does

  1. 01

    Garden design

    A full plan for a yard, a courtyard, or an acre. We map the water, set the grades, and draw the planting so the whole ground reads as one gesture.

  2. 02

    Planting plans

    Species, spacing, and a season chart, drawn to your soil and your light. Built for a crew to plant from and for you to keep going.

  3. 03

    Grading & water

    Low berms, swales, and basins that keep the rain where it falls. The ground does the irrigation once the shape is right.

  4. 04

    Stewardship

    A garden of native grass is edited, not maintained. We come back through the years to cut, thin, and let the strongest patterns win.

03 — Selected work

An index of gardens

Each garden carries its own planting palette. The seed lines below are the grasses that hold each one together.

04 — Read from above

A garden is a settlement
you look down on.

Seen from a drone, a planted acre draws the same figures a town does: a center, paths worn between the useful places, dense rooms and open ground. We design in plan first, from above, so the pattern is sound before anyone stands inside it.

Figure 04 · a planting plan read as settlement. Rings mark water; dots mark grass; the pale lines are where feet will go.

05 — The working palette

Grasses we build with

A short list, used well. These are the natives the studio returns to, described plainly.

Blue grama
low · blue-green · slope-holdingA short bunchgrass with a seed head like an eyelash. Turns straw-gold and holds a bank through a dry summer.
Sand dropseed
fine · airy · fast on sandA haze of fine stems that catch low light. First to settle loose sand and quiet a wind-blown edge.
Little bluestem
upright · rust · winter colourStands blue in summer and rust-red into winter. The color the studio reaches for when a garden must earn its keep in the cold months.
Fourwing saltbush
grey · woody · alkaline groundA pale, salt-tolerant shrub for hard, bright flats. Structure among the grasses, silver against the sand.
Indian ricegrass
open · beaded · cool-seasonAiry sprays of tiny beads on the wind. Greens early, before the warm grasses wake, then goes to gold.
Sand sagebrush
soft · aromatic · dune-edgeFeathery grey-green that scents the ground after rain. Binds dune faces and softens every hard line near it.