Ventura County Landscaping

Tuscan Landscape Style Guide

Use this design sheet to help you create the perfect Tuscan landscape. You'll get ideas for color, décor, materials, plants and fabric. It is a great starting point for any landscaping project.

Front Yard Dimensions (PDF)

Those fortunate enough to live in Ventura or Oxnard know the mild Pacific coast climate. This is outdoor living country in almost every month of the year with breezes keeping conditions delightfully cool while communities inland are blistering hot. If your home has a great view of the beach, why not expand your outdoor space with a large terrace or patio so there's plenty of room to relax around a spa or grill while taking in the scenery.

The Ventura Botanical Garden is a great place to learn what grows well locally, but this is a fledgling project and a relatively young site. Better examples of great trees and shrubs can be found at the Santa Barbara Botanical Garden further north.

Prosperous Camarillo with its expansive suburbs of contemporary homes blends into high end rural properties in the outskirts. In town you can create a fabulous landscape that suits every member of the family from play structures to swimming pools, and for the parents, a relaxing patio with plenty of shade turns weekends into your own backyard spa days. If you're on acreage, the flow of your site plan should exploit the benefits of well thought out places for outdoor dining and meal prep on those warm summer evenings.

Further inland, residents of Moorpark, Simi Valley and Thousand Oaks are upgrading old tract homes and building new McMansions. If this is your community, note just how much of these projects are dedicated to making the backyard livable in all seasons. Water features cool these spaces; outdoor fireplaces warm them in the winter. Shelter your home with deciduous shade trees that keep things cooler during the summer, but leaves fall to let the winter sun shine in.

This is high fire hazard country, and landscaping should feature low fuel volume plants and avoid uninterrupted avenues of volatile foliage. Be sure to thoroughly protect any old oak trees on the property so that remodeling the yard doesn't interfere with their roots. Above all, be aware that limited water supply in this area demands you use drought resistant species, which may be required for plan check in larger cities like Camarillo.