From Soil Science
to Landscape Design
Elena Vasquez holds a Master's degree in Soil Science from Texas A&M University, where she spent four years studying Central Texas caliche soil formation, water infiltration patterns, and the rhizosphere ecology of drought-tolerant native species. After graduation, she spent three years doing fieldwork for Austin Water's conservation programmes before founding StoneMoss in 2009.
The frustration that motivated her: every client she visited through the water conservation programme had been sold the same generic plant palette — St. Augustine grass, Asian jasmine, Japanese boxwood — by landscapers who knew what sold easily at nurseries, not what was calibrated to Austin's specific soil chemistry and climate. The result was landscapes that required constant irrigation, heavy fertilisation, and repeated replacement.
StoneMoss was built to do the opposite. Elena wanted every design to begin with a soil test, every plant selection to come from a water budget, and every client to understand exactly why each decision was made. Sixteen years later, that methodology is unchanged.