Where memories live ‒ outdoors
- Francie Healy
- 53 minutes ago
- 4 min read
A back yard is a back yard is a back yard.
Except when it isn’t. Except when it’s a whole lot more than that: when it’s an outdoor environment that is as perfect for you now as it will be many years from now.
Dave Wildeboer, owner of Wild Ridge Landscapes in Nepean, sees the ultimate outdoor property as a place where you can watch your children grow, welcome family and friends, host birthday and prom parties, weddings and celebrations. He sees it as a place where memories are made throughout life’s milestones and evolutions.
Wild Ridge Landscapes and Lagois Design·Build·Renovate have recently collaborated on a large project, and you might call it the perfect fit of philosophies, process, vision, and craftsmanship. When you talk to Dave Wildeboer, you hear echoes of Lagois president Jacob Kirst.
“There’s a rootedness in our work,” Dave says. “We use a personalized design-first approach to understand how the space is being used now and also how it will be useful for you in five years, in 10 years.”
Jacob Kirst would call that an important aspect of Perfecting the Art of Living®.
Wild Ridge is a high-end design-build landscape firm that creates complete “back yard escapes”. Services include stonework and hardscapes (patios, pool decks, walkways, driveways and retaining walls); custom carpentry (fences, decks, sheds and pergolas); gardens and softscapes (trees, shrubs, perennials and annuals).
Once your property is custom designed and crafted to suit your lifestyle, Wild Ridge offers ongoing lawn and garden maintenance (seasonal yard clean-ups, garden edging, weeding, hedge trimming, and lawn-cutting). If you wish, they will add seasonal planters, window boxes, hanging baskets and displays; and do “touch-ups” for further enhancement, such as more plants, soil and mulch.
The company looks after you in winter, too, with snow and ice management.
Dave has been in the business for a good part of his life, but not all of it. He was once a high school teacher. He joined his brother and his landscaping business in Orangevillle in 2003, and eight years later, in 2011, he and his wife decided to start Wild Ridge Landscapes in Ottawa. But even before that, as a child, he was in touch with the outdoors. He grew up working on a tree farm.
“I was a Christmas tree pruner,” he said, “and we did sales in Christmas trees.” He paid his way through university doing landscaping.
Now he has a management and accounting team, and a team of 40 to 60 skilled professionals (depending on the season). “They’re incredible,” Dave says. “We’ve worked hard to select the best. They carry the weight of what we do here.”
Homeowners who use Wild Ridge Landscapes are people who “value a design-first approach,” he says. “They understand the value in thinking through the space, ensuring that decisions are made with good design principles.”
He adds: “They are people who are interested in creating something with lasting value and not something that is solving an immediate problem.” He says they are deeply interested in the environment and the impact it will have on next generations ‒ “a long-lasting understanding of what landscape space is all about.”
Wild Ridge is a Fusion-certified company (Landscape Ontario), so they are dedicated to the management of surface and rainwater.
The design process starts with an in-depth, approximately two-hour consultation, usually generated by referral or word of mouth. A Wild Ridge designer visits you at home. They walk through the entire space with you, talk about what it needs to be for you, its potential, and how it can be achieved.
“We look at your sight lines,” Dave says. “We start looking through your window into your yard and think about the extension of your living space. We talk about the transition from one space to another, how to create intimacy and scale.”
It goes deeper than that. They explore the ways you might envision your life, starting perhaps with younger children, then teenagers, then kids going off to university, then grandchildren, then simply relaxing outdoors in the evening with a glass of wine; and, some day, aging in place.
“We love those types of conversations,” Dave says.
Many homeowners have a pool incorporated into their design and outdoor kitchens.
“We want to create spaces that are completely usable as often and as early in the spring and late into the season,” Dave says. And that leads to more conversations about heat and fire and fall coziness outdoors.
The consultation conversation leads to a discussion about budgeting. That leads to a design proposal with working drawings.
There are things that will be unforeseen, and City of Ottawa licensing requirements, and sometimes a waiting time if a homeowner has had a new addition or a new infill build, when settlement will be an issue for the first year.
“It’s an entirely holistic approach to understanding outside spaces,” Dave explains. “It’s about extending your living into the outdoors, about what’s going to work, about how to design and build that well.”
It’s clearly the business he’s meant to have.
“I love being part of people’s enjoyment of the outdoors,” he says, “creating spaces people love to be in.”
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