CASCARA

RESIDENTIAL · VANCOUVER · 2025

Point Grey Canopy Garden

A half-acre lot under mature Douglas firs, replanted as a layered native understory that thrives where lawn kept failing.

Location
Point Grey, Vancouver
Size
0.5 acre
Completed
2025
Scope
Full landscape design & build, three-season establishment care
Overlapping drifts of fern and broad-leaved understory planting in deep shade.

Thirty years of lawn had been losing to the shade of five mature firs. Instead of fighting the canopy, we planted beneath it: sword fern, salal, huckleberry, and vine maple in the drifts they'd choose themselves.

Layered shade planting in drifts — horsetail, fern fronds and broad-leaved perennials reading as one composition.
A weathered timber deck and chair set against the forest edge of the lot.
“Our backyard finally looks like it belongs in British Columbia.” — The owners

A basalt-slab path curves to a cedar reading deck at the quietest corner of the lot. Rain from the roof now feeds a gravel infiltration bed — the garden drinks what the city used to drain.

Vine maple leaves on a red-stemmed branch, their shallow evenly toothed lobes fanning open against a dark understory.
A stone-set rain bed below a timber deck, boulders and moss holding the channel with marginal planting along both edges.
The garden seen from the house at dusk, glasshouse light held in the dark planting.

Planted here

Sword fern · Salal · Evergreen huckleberry · Vine maple · Dull Oregon grape · Western trillium