The Art of a well designed landscape

Bear Creek Landscapes & Design The fine art of a well-designed landscape  By Jason Zasky  “The day I was born, my parents were outside landscaping their first house, and my mom’s water broke while they were digging in the dirt,” says Jason Daughrity, 43, founder of Bear Creek Landscapes & Design in Columbia. So “it’s kind of like it was destined” that he would one day own a landscaping and design business.   Daughrity started on that path early. When he was 10 years old, he was mowing neighbor’s yards with a push mower, and when he was in junior high school, he was employing friends to help him mow lawns. Then, by the time he was in high school at Columbia Academy, he and his brother were making an annual income befitting a successful college graduate. Nor did he stop working while getting his business/finance degree at Middle Tennessee State University.  Fast forward to today, and his landscaping and design business—located across from Spring Hill High School on Cayer Lane in Columbia—has nearly 30 employees, including three full-time estimators, multiple landscape designers, and a horticulturist who has been working alongside him for the past 18 years.   “We do full-on residential and commercial design work,” explains Daughrity, handling everything from installation of lawns and irrigation systems to designing swimming pools and installation of outdoor fireplaces and outdoor lighting. “Our wheelhouse is to take a property from nothing, especially new construction, or taking an older home and installing everything from start to finish,” he adds.   Then the company typically goes on to maintain everything it installed, offering a landscape maintenance plan or lawn & landscape maintenance plan for a monthly fee.   “We will mow a lawn every week and keep it treated, aerated, and seeded. We weed five times a year and trim three times a year, and whether it’s residential or commercial, you get one to two mulches per year.”  According to Daughrity, business is better than ever, noting that the pandemic world has been very good to construction, landscaping, and pool companies.   “People aren’t traveling; they are staying at home and putting money into their backyards,” he notes, the Daughrity family being no exception, having recently installed their own swimming pool.  Daughrity says the company does work all over the Nashville metropolitan area, but the vast majority of the business is in Nashville and Brentwood, with Columbia, Spring Hill, Franklin, and other nearby communities making up a sizeable share of the accounts.   “We have a huge foothold in the music business,” he adds, ranging from recording studios in East Nashville to the estates of star recording artists in Leiper’s Fork.  As for getting started with Bear Creek Landscaping & Design, Daughrity says the process begins with getting a free estimate.   “I’m still a little bit old-school, as I’m the one that comes out and does the free consultation,” he says, having already noted that his passion is on the design side of the business. Typically, estimates are broken out into different parts, where the front landscaping might be one part, trees another, and irrigation a third part.   “I tell people the estimate is a starting point. I never like to know the budget or how much someone is wanting to spend. I like to know what they are wanting,” he explains. “Then we can upsize, we can downsize, we can prioritize within the budget and pretty much always come around to giving you the majority of what you want for the price you’re wanting to spend,” he relates.  One area where there is flexibility is with plants.   “You can have a $20 plant, but something else might be $60, and something else might be $200. A lot of times, that’s your flexibility,” offers Daughrity, who says he has contacts for trees and plants all over the southeast and buys from North and South Carolina, as well as Alabama and Florida.   Meanwhile, one other growing portion of the business is remedying water issues for people who have recently purchased homes in the area.  “When buying a pre-owned house, most people focus on walls and structure and don’t look under the crawlspace or consider where water is falling off the roof,” says Daughrity, who also encourages people who are buying brand-new homes to familiarize themselves with any existing Homeowner Association (HOA) rules, including what you are allowed to do and what you are required to do.  And don’t overlook the value of Bear Creek’s lawn and landscape maintenance plans. With one of those, your property “always looks brand-new,” concludes Daughrity. “You don’t wake up in five years and wonder why you have to spend $10,000 to tear out shrubs that are overgrown.”  CONTACT: Bear Creek Landscapes & Design 2509 Cayer Lane, Ste. D Columbia, TN 38401 931-840-0030