Landscaping Services in the Houston Heights

There are three City of Houston historic districts in the Heights — West, East and South — and together they cover much of the core of the neighbourhood. Inside them, exterior changes visible from the street are reviewed by the Houston Archaeological and Historical Commission through the Planning Department’s Historic Preservation Office. Back-yard work generally attracts far less scrutiny than front-yard work, fencing and anything at the street. We confirm the district status of your address before design.

Not for a tree in the interior of your own lot. The City of Houston requires a permit only for trees on city property — rights-of-way, medians, parks — or in the setback. Where a permit does apply, it runs through Parks and Recreation Urban Forestry, takes around ten business days, and the permit has to be posted on the property twenty days before removal. New single-family construction carries its own planting requirement: one tree on lots under 5,000 square feet, two on larger lots, with one in the abutting right-of-way.

Because the routine problem in the Heights is not the bayou overtopping, it is the local system. White Oak Bayou is contained in a small storm but overtops between Loop 610 and I-10 in a ten-year event, and the secondary channels only carry two to five year capacity. Undersized storm sewers and ditches produce street flooding independently of the floodplain. On a lot, the answer is designed fall, area drains and a real outfall, and knowing where the water is going to sit while the street catches up.

Carefully, and it is planned before the job is priced. Heights lots are narrow and deep, the houses sit on raised piers, and in the historic west blocks the original platting ran thirty-three feet wide. Sometimes access is down the side; sometimes it is through, with the fence panel out and reinstated. Occasionally the honest answer is that a machine cannot get there and the excavation is done by hand at a different cost. We say which one applies on the first walk.

On private lots, yes, throughout the boulevard blocks. The esplanade itself is maintained by the Houston Heights Association and is not homeowner ground. What matters for a design facing it is that the front of the property reads as part of that streetscape — which, on a boulevard block inside a historic district, is also what the commission will be looking at.

More often than in Memorial or Tanglewood, because the Heights canopy is less continuous and the soil is loamier and drains better in dry conditions. The catch is winter: much of 77008 sits on soils that stay saturated for months from November, and the Gessner-mapped pockets pond frequently from November to May. Turf that looks fine in September can rot out by February. We site lawn where it drains and use planting or turf where it does not.