Inspired Design

This Berkeley Hills Garden is a work in progress.
The design worked with the existing retaining walls and hot tub enclosure with the goal of creating a usable patio and play space for the home owners growing family.

Existing raised beds were faced and capped with Mangaris, a south american hardwood.  

Here you see the steps leading up to the hot tub enclosure are no longer closed off from the remaining patio space.

Check back in a few weeks to see the completed project.

Material Girl

This garden redesign project in El Cerrito makes the most of all the wonderful landscape materials we have available to us.

Here you see the materials used in the garden: Steel containers on the deck and patio, south american hardwood deck, concrete stepping stones and landing, decomposed granite patio and cedar veggie box and hot tub.

The challenge in working with so many materials is blending them together so they look and feel coherent in the garden space.

The concrete stepping stones lead to the cedar hot tub.  In the distance is a mounded planting space with a dg path leading to a seating area.  The plants chosen for the mound are meant to draw birds, bees and butterflies that can be enjoyed from the small seating area in the corner.

A number of small trees were added to provide year round interest in the garden.

A succulent bowl inserted in the mound.

The small courtyard outside the home office offers a nice respite from the work to do inside.  

Kensington Cottage Charm

We designed and installed this garden on The Arlington in Kensington about a year ago. The homeowner is a real estate agent and wanted his house and garden to have some major drama and curb appeal. The home is kind of a storybook/Tudor style, painted a sage green with brick front porch and entryway. We added some large flagstone slabs for the path in a pink color to match the brick, and put in a raised bed along the inside of the fence out of dry-stacked moss rock to give the planting height so it would be more visible. The house style and size of the garden really called for planting that was informal, small-scale and cozy and also really colorful. This "cottage-style" usually implies lots of maintenance-heavy flowering annuals and perennials planted closely together. But the resident neighborhood deer had to be considered when selecting our plants because the fence around the front garden was so low they could jump right over. So we opted for yucky-tasting but showy Mediterranean flowering perennials such as salvias, agastache, thymes, in addition to some Austalian/New Zealand aromatic or furry-textured plants that deer leave alone, like kangaroo paws and leucodendron. The low-growing silver plant with orange/red flowers is arctosis. The mass of silver foliage is artemesia. The dark purple foliage we added in for color and contrast without having the maintenance of dead-heading flowers. The street trees are crepe myrtles.