Landscaping in Highland Village, TX

A town built on a clock

Highland Village incorporated in 1963, but the population tells the real story: 516 in 1970, 3,246 in 1980, 7,027 in 1990, 12,173 in 2000, and 15,899 by 2020. The bulk of the housing stock is 1980s to 2000s construction, and much of it arrived in concentrated pushes rather than steadily.

The clearest example is Highland Shores — more than 1,800 homes developed from a single build wave beginning in 1985 on the south shore of Lewisville Lake.

Why that matters more than it sounds

A neighbourhood built over three or four decades ages gradually. A neighbourhood of 1,800 homes built within a few years of each other ages in waves.

That is the defining landscaping fact about Highland Village, and it shows up in two ways:

Irrigation failures cluster. Systems installed within a few years of each other reach end of life within a few years of each other. When several neighbours all suddenly need sprinkler work in the same season, it is not coincidence — it is a cohort. Valve diaphragms, solenoids and controllers are the usual casualties.

Landscaping matures together. Thirty-plus years on, the original planting across a whole neighbourhood hits the same point at once: shrubs well past their intended size, trees that have never had structural pruning, bed lines swallowed by growth, and turf that has been thinning slowly enough that nobody noticed the year it started.

This is a renovation town more than a new-install town, and that is a genuinely different job.

Renovation, not demolition

The instinct with tired thirty-year-old landscaping is to take it all out. That is usually the expensive answer and frequently the wrong one.

Mature material that was well chosen originally is worth real money and cannot be bought back — a thirty-year-old tree is not something you install. The work is usually:

• Structural pruning on trees that have never had it, scheduled around oak wilt season
• Hard renovation pruning or selective removal of shrubs that have outgrown their position
• Re-establishing bed lines that disappeared under expansion
• Refreshing the planting in the gaps that opens up
• Turf recovery where declining light from maturing canopy has thinned the lawn

Knowing what to keep is most of the skill.

Grading near the lake

Highland Village sits on the south shore of Lewisville Lake, and the lake-adjacent portions carry more slope variation than the flat inland parts of the service area. That brings grading and erosion into the conversation on those lots — the same set of considerations that applies to lake-adjacent Flower Mound.

Underneath it is the same Denton County clay as everywhere else: slow to absorb, quick to pool.

Watering, and the supplier question

Parts of Highland Village are served by Cross Timbers Water Supply Corporation, currently at Stage 2 Yellow: no outside watering between 6am and 7pm, with days assigned by address — odd on Monday, Wednesday, Friday and even on Tuesday, Thursday, Saturday.

Because the town is not served by a single arrangement across the board, the reliable move is to check the supplier name on your own water bill rather than assume your neighbour’s rules are yours. It is a small thing that has real consequences if you install new landscaping under the wrong assumption.

One more local note

Highland Village has been recognised for years as one of the safest cities in Texas. Not a landscaping fact — but it is part of why properties here are held long-term and maintained to a visible standard, which is exactly the context in which renovation work pays for itself.