Orange Johnson House
Historic- Location
- Worthington, Ohio
- Property
- Historic
- Scope
- Retaining and seat walls, Plantings and landscape lighting
A dry-laid stone wall and a new street-front planting bed for one of Worthington's oldest surviving houses.
Working in front of a historic building means the landscape has to stay in its place. The brief was to hold the raised ground along the street frontage and give the house a planted edge, without introducing anything that would read as modern against early nineteenth-century brick.
The wall is laid in a rough coursed stone with a flat cap, low enough to sit under the sight line of the ground floor windows. It follows the pavement rather than the property line, so the geometry stays honest to the street.
Behind it, the bed is planted for seasonal color that can be changed out without disturbing the structure. Boxwood gives it a frame through the winter; the annual planting does the work in summer, when the house takes most of its visitors.
