ABOUT · AWARDS
The record, stated plainly.
The Texas Nursery & Landscape Association has awarded Alterra a Texas Excellence in Landscaping Award every year from 2019 through 2025 — seven consecutive years. Best of Houzz followed in 2026. This page lists the record and what each recognition actually reflects about the work.
What the Texas Excellence in Landscaping Award is.
The Texas Excellence in Landscaping Award is the Texas Nursery & Landscape Association's annual recognition program for residential landscape work in Texas. It is juried by practitioner peers rather than voted by clients or algorithms, which places it in a different category from platform-based designations; entries are evaluated against named craft and horticultural criteria by a panel of working landscape professionals reading submitted documentation and photography. For a DFW-based residential design-build practice, it is the closest thing the region has to a profession-internal quality signal — not because it is the only signal worth reading, but because it is the signal generated by the people who would know what a well-built residential landscape actually looks like from the inside.
Worth stating plainly: awards are a lagging indicator of practice quality, not a leading one. A seven-consecutive-year run with the association confirms a direction; it does not set one. The point of surfacing the record on this page is transparency about what the practice has and has not been recognized for, not a claim that the recognitions themselves are what the practice runs on. The work the recognitions reference was already going to be built the way it was built, award or no award.
Texas Excellence in Landscaping — 2019 through 2025.
2019
The first Texas Excellence in Landscaping Award the practice received. The submitted project — [OPERATOR preserved: project title — 2019] — sat inside the register the practice had been building toward for more than a decade: place-anchored residential design-build at one-Principal-per-client scale. The 2019 recognition was the opening mark on what would become a seven-consecutive-year run with the association.
2020
Second consecutive Texas Excellence in Landscaping Award. Submitted project: [OPERATOR preserved: project title — 2020]. The 2020 recognition arrived during a year in which the working conditions of the design-build trade shifted substantially for reasons outside the practice's control; the work that carried the award had been drawn and largely built before those conditions set in.
2021
Third Texas Excellence in Landscaping Award. Submitted project: [OPERATOR preserved: project title — 2021]. The 2021 recognition is the inflection-year entry: Winter Storm Uri had run through the metro in February of the same year, and the specification discipline the practice has run on since was, in 2021, still being articulated from what the freeze had revealed. The award-submitted work predates that discipline in its fully-formed version.
2022
Fourth consecutive Texas Excellence in Landscaping Award. Submitted project: [OPERATOR preserved: project title — 2022]. The 2022 submission was the first the practice built and documented under the post-Uri specification discipline end-to-end — contracted working palette, revised irrigation-manifold placement, re-detailed mortar and hardscape joints, resilience documentation as part of the handoff rather than retrofitted after the fact.
2023
Fifth Texas Excellence in Landscaping Award. Submitted project: [OPERATOR preserved: project title — 2023]. By 2023 the three-Principal structure was in full effect, and the submitted work reflected the widening of capacity the structure had produced without any drift in register. Each of the three Principals — Jeffery Riddle, Hayden Davenport, and Tyler Bigham — was by this point independently carrying award-register projects end-to-end.
2024
Sixth consecutive Texas Excellence in Landscaping Award. Submitted project: [OPERATOR preserved: project title — 2024]. The 2024 entry landed at a point when the post-Uri discipline had accumulated a three-year plant-performance record across multiple earlier projects, and that record was now informing the Site & Story phase of every new drawing rather than entering the work as a specification constraint alone.
2025
Seventh consecutive Texas Excellence in Landscaping Award. Submitted project: [OPERATOR preserved: project title — 2025]. The 2025 recognition closes the current seven-year run on the same footing it opened. What has changed across the run is the depth of specification evidence the practice now carries and the three-Principal structure it runs on; what has not changed is the register of the work or the award's read on it.
Best of Houzz 2026.
In early 2026 the practice received a Best of Houzz 2026 designation in the [OPERATOR preserved: Design and/or Service category — whichever Houzz awarded] category. The Houzz recognition operates on a distinct axis from the TNLA award: it is client-review-driven, based on the volume and quality of client feedback on the practice's Houzz profile over the prior year, rather than peer-juried against craft-and-horticulture criteria. The two recognitions are complementary rather than redundant — one reads the work from inside the profession, the other reads it from inside the client relationship. See the work itself.
How the practice reads the record.
Awards confirm direction; they do not set it. The register the practice has held for more than two decades — place-anchored residential design-build, one Principal per client, specification discipline tightened by what the work itself teaches — is the thing the recognitions have been reading on. If a year came when the awards stopped arriving, the register would not change. The verification of the Texas Excellence in Landscaping record sits on the Texas Nursery & Landscape Association's public site at tnla.org, where the association's award programs and winner lists are maintained as the primary source of record.