Why We Plant Trees Before We Plant Plots

Ask most developers when the trees go in and the honest answer is: whenever there's a landscaping budget left over, usually after the roads and the sales office. At every Two Frogs project, native saplings go into the ground twelve to eighteen months before a single plot is marketed, which means for well over a year the only people who see the land are surveyors, not buyers.

The reason is boring and practical. A four-year-old jackfruit tree changes a plot's value more than almost anything else we can build -- shade, root structure that holds topsoil through monsoon, and a visible sign that someone has been tending this ground longer than the sales cycle. At The Orchard House we kept every silver oak and jackfruit tree old enough to matter and planted around them; the community reads as thirty years old because parts of it are.

It also means we can't rush a launch. The Riverbank Plot has been in tree and water-table survey for a year with no plots for sale yet, which occasionally loses us buyers who want to move faster than the land does. We've made peace with that trade.