PLACE · THE GROUND WE WORK
The ground a drawing begins from.
Dallas/Fort Worth sits at the seam of two ecoregions. The Blackland Prairie to the east carries calcareous clay over Cretaceous chalk; the Eastern Cross Timbers to the west carries sandy loam over Woodbine sandstone. USDA zones 8a and 8b meet through the northern edge of the metro. The Trinity River drains the whole of it in four forks. These are not background facts. They are the first inputs to a working drawing, and they disagree with one another often enough that a planting plan defensible for a lot in Lakewood will quietly fail on a lot in Prosper if nobody reads the ground first.
This section is regional reference material, not a destination brochure. The seven pages below were written to be read in sequence — by the homeowner trying to understand the site under the house, by the contractor wanting to know why the palette breaks the way it does across the metro, and by the designer who treats place-narrative as load-bearing rather than ornamental.
Why the section exists.
Most DFW landscape firms publish a service list. This section publishes the reading the service list should have come out of. The two ecoregion pages (Blackland Prairie, Cross Timbers) name the substrate the region was already making of itself before any house went on it; the water page describes the hydrologic regime every lot sits inside whether the drawing acknowledges it or not; the USDA-zone page sets the temperature envelope, with an unvarnished read on what the 2021 freeze event taught about treating a zone designation as a guarantee; the native-palettes page is the working reference the other six pages add up to; and the landscape-history page is the editorial frame — the arc of DFW residential landscape practice from pre-settlement ecology through the current native-revival moment.
Place-narrative is the discipline that runs underneath the whole section, and underneath the whole practice. The drawing set produced in the design phase inherits the reading these pages document; the construction work carried out in the build phase executes against it. Place is not a separate vertical. It is the argument that makes the rest of the practice cohere.
A READING PATH · SIX PAGES
The order below is the order the pages were written to be read. Read straight through and the region starts to come into focus as one substrate with one climate and a tangled argument between them.
01
Blackland Prairie
The eastern ecoregion: calcareous clay over Cretaceous chalk, shrink-swell through the seasons, and the native canopy the ground was already composing before the plow arrived.
02
Cross Timbers
The western ecoregion: sandy loam over Woodbine sandstone, post oak as the canopy species, and a different horticultural language than the ground a few miles east.
03
DFW Water
Trinity watershed, rainfall timing, summer evaporation, and the drought-contingency frameworks a DFW landscape design has to answer to from the first drawing.
04
USDA Zones 8a & 8b
The plant-hardiness envelope the region sits inside, the 2023 revision, and what Uri taught about reading a zone designation as advisory rather than guarantee.
05
Native Palettes
Working plant lists by ecoregion, with Latin binomials and post-Uri removals documented. The practical reference that carries a drawing set into specification.
06
Landscape History
The arc of DFW landscape practice — pre-settlement prairie-and-oak mosaic, mid-century residential plantings, the native-revival turn, and the post-Uri recalibration.