What to Know Before Your First On-Site Consultation
You've booked your consultation — and I couldn't be more excited.
This is where it all begins. Not with blueprints or plant lists, but with a conversation. Your on-site consultation is the very first step in our design process, and it's one of our favorite moments — stepping onto your property for the first time together, hearing how you talk about your land, and starting to see what it could become.
To help us make the most of our time together, here are a few things to think about before we meet.
Start Collecting What Speaks to You
You don’t need to arrive with a finished vision. What helps most is simply gathering images of outdoor spaces that make you feel something. A courtyard you lingered in on vacation. A garden you saved on Pinterest at midnight without really knowing why. A color palette that keeps pulling you in.
Don’t edit yourself. Save what you love, even if you can’t explain it. Maybe it’s the shape of a stone wall, the wildness of a meadow border, the way a gravel path disappeared around a corner and made you want to follow it. These images tell me more about your taste than any checklist could.
I’m not looking for a blueprint. I’m looking for the feeling you want to come home to.
Think About How You Actually Live Outside
This is the practical piece, and it matters as much as the beauty. Take a few minutes to think about how your outdoor space fits into your daily life, and how you wish it did.
Do your mornings start with coffee on the porch? Do your kids need room to run? Are you dreaming of summer dinner parties under string lights, or a quiet reading corner tucked into the garden? Do you wish you had a space to nap outside? Do you have dogs who've claimed a favorite path through the yard?
Think about entertaining spaces, play areas for children, any drainage or erosion concerns, and whether hardscaping like retaining walls might be part of the picture. These details help us design something that's as functional as it is beautiful, a garden that actually works for your life, not just one that photographs well.
Have a Budget Range in Mind
We know this one can feel awkward, but it's genuinely one of the most helpful things you can share with us. A budget range — even a rough one — allows us to design with intention from the start rather than falling in love with a vision that doesn't fit.
Think of it this way: just as you wouldn't tour homes far outside your price range, we don't want to propose materials or features that aren't realistic for your project. Knowing your range means I can be creative within it, not surprised by it later.
For a sense of what to expect, take a look at our guide to Nashville landscaping costs in 2026.
You Don’t Need to Know Your “Garden Style”
This is something I want to gently push back on, because I think it trips people up. A lot of design firms will hand you a menu of styles and ask you to pick one before they even see your land. But that’s not how I work.
Most of my clients don’t fit neatly into one category, and I don’t want them to. Your garden should feel like yours — shaped by your property, your home’s architecture, and the way you want to live in the space. It shouldn’t feel like you ordered it from a catalog.
That said, it can be helpful to know what’s out there so you have language for the things that draw you in. Here are a few directions to browse — not to choose from, but to spark something:
English cottage gardens — lush, romantic, overflowing with color
Japanese-inspired gardens — serene, intentional, grounding
Native pollinator gardens — wild, sustainable, full of life
Xeriscape gardens — low-maintenance, drought-smart, modern
Common Garden Styles
English Garden Style: This style features an emphasis on formal design elements, such as hedges, topiaries, and neatly manicured lawns paired with naturalistic colorful perennials.
Xeriscape Garden Style: A xeriscape garden is designed to conserve water by featuring plants that are native or well-adapted to the local climate and require minimal watering. This style often includes gravel or other hardscape elements to minimize water usage.
Cottage Garden Style: This style is characterized by its abundance of colorful flowers, often arranged in a haphazard, naturalistic manner.
Traditional Southern Garden Style: This style is characterized by evergreen foundational plantings paired with traditional flowering shrubs and low-maintenance ornamental grasses and perennials.
Prairie Garden / Dutch Wave Garden Style: This garden style, also known as the New Perennial movement, originated in the Netherlands in the 1980s and emphasizes the use of naturalistic plantings with a focus on perennials and grasses. The style is characterized by its use of mass plantings, meadow-like arrangements, and an emphasis on texture, movement, and color.
Formal/French Garden Style: This style emerged in the 17th century and is characterized by a highly symmetrical design, with geometric patterns and precise lines. Features include parterres, fountains, and topiary.
Modern Garden Style: A garden design style that emphasizes clean lines, minimalism, and simplicity, often featuring a focus on hardscaping and architectural elements, as well as carefully curated plant selections.
Japanese Garden Style: A traditional style of garden design that incorporates natural elements such as rocks, water, and plants to create a serene and peaceful environment. Common features include water features, bridges, lanterns, and carefully placed plantings.
Pollinator or Butterfly Garden Style: This style is designed to attract butterflies and other pollinators, featuring nectar-rich flowers and host plants that caterpillars feed on.
When we meet, we’ll talk about what resonates and why. That’s where the real design starts — not in a style name, but in the feeling underneath it.
Bring Your Questions
Our consultation is a conversation, not a presentation. Come with whatever's on your mind — about timeline, the design process, installation, maintenance, anything. There are no silly questions, and we'd rather you ask now than wonder later.
A few things clients often ask about:
How long does the full design and installation process take?
What's included in the design fee?
What do installation days actually look like?
Do you provide guidance on maintaining the garden after it's planted?
We'll walk through all of it together.
Don’t Worry About Making It Perfect
I know the instinct is to tidy everything up before someone comes to look at your yard. But I want you to hear this: I’m not coming to judge your property. I’m coming to listen to it.
I’m looking at the bones of your land — where the ground rises and falls, where water wants to move after a Tennessee downpour, how the afternoon light hits your back corner in February versus July. I’m noticing the old crepe myrtle that’s been there longer than you have, the rock wall that’s settling in the most beautiful way, the volunteer redbud that seeded itself in exactly the right spot. These things aren’t problems to clean up. They’re often the starting point for the whole design.
So please don’t stress about the state of things. The overgrown beds, the bare spots, the corner you’ve been ignoring for three years — I want to see all of it. That’s the honest picture, and it’s what I need to do my best work.
What I’m Doing While We Walk
You might be wondering what’s happening on my end during our walk-through. It’s more than measuring and note-taking.
I came to garden design through fine art — I have an MFA, and I spent years training my eye to see composition, balance, light, and movement before I ever applied it to landscape. So when I walk your property, I’m reading it the way I’d read a painting. Where is there visual weight? Where does the eye want to travel? What’s the view from your kitchen window, and what could it be? Where does the space feel expansive, and where does it want to feel enclosed and intimate?
A new build in Wilson County. This is the view I want to see — what are you looking at every morning, and what could it be?
I’m also thinking about things you can’t see yet. How this slope could become a terraced garden. How that awkward side yard could become the most peaceful spot on your property. How the right tree in the right place could change the way your whole house feels from the street.
By the time I leave, your property is already composing itself in my head. I’ll be thinking about it while I’m driving home, while I’m cooking dinner, probably while I’m falling asleep. That’s how my process works — the design starts living in me before it ever hits paper. And by the time I sit down to draw, I’ve already been designing for days.
This is what makes working with a solo designer different from working with a large firm. There’s no handoff, no team meeting where your project becomes a file number. It’s just me, your land, and the vision we’re building together.
This Is the Fun Part
Here’s what I want you to know: this consultation isn’t a test. You don’t need to have all the answers, the perfect Pinterest board, or a firm budget locked in. You just need to show up with your ideas, your questions, and your excitement — and leave the rest to me.
My job is to listen. To ask questions you haven’t thought of yet. To see things in your land that you walk past every day without noticing. And to start translating all of it — your vision, your life, your property’s character — into something real and beautiful and entirely yours.
I can’t wait to see your space and start dreaming with you.
Clare Horne is the founder of The Grass Girl, a fine garden design studio based outside Nashville, Tennessee. She designs residential gardens for clients in Wilson, Williamson, Davidson, Sumner, and Cheatham counties.