Prestige Planting / Cap d’Antibes

Our Client had this villa constructed during the early 2000s. Unfortunately, there were many bad planting mistakes, over planting and a lot of drainage issues. As a result many of the palm trees died due to poor drainage, bad management of pesticides and over watering. We were again faced with a heavy clay based soil on the Cap D’Antibes and needed to install a lot of land drainage. An expensive and costly process as the services were already installed and we needed to run new irrigation and in some cases lighting. On top of this any soil or waste removal needed to be removed in big bags with the use of a grab truck.

Much of the planting was planted in earth inadequate for the root development of the trees and plants selected. Over time the specimens were heavily dependent on irrigation and organic fertilizers. We adopted a quarterly mulching and aeration technique which with the corrective pruning help to rejuvenate many parts of the garden. Planting was slowly replaced with plants requiring less water and more native species such as lavenders, tulbagia, teucrium, nepetas . We tried to phase out box hedging and topary and introduce pittosporium, lantana, jasmium. We had good success with a creeping fig (Ficus pumila) which enhanced the rock features and walls.

The lemon trees were covered in scale when we arrived and with careful cleaning and pruning we managed to reduce the damage. This also applied to the grapefruit and other citrus species.