Keep Your Garden Healthy & Beautiful
Cultivation & Management
Managing and maintaining a garden is as essential as implementing a design.
Why spend hundreds or thousands of dollars and then let the weeds take over, the trees and shrubs go wild or get chopped in trying to bring them back to shape?
Let us keep the design you and your landscaper worked so hard to create.
Let us maintain the beauty of your desires.
Let us manage the pruning, the feeding, the mulching, the irrigation to assure that your garden will continue to please you.
Click on any of the pictures below to see a larger version. Move your mouse over the larger picture to see the slideshow navigation buttons.
A long time weekly client
One of the pleasures of having ongoing management jobs is to watch the seasons unfold on all the properties I am privileged to care for.
When I got to this client's yard in Montclair, the fruit trees had been pruned so severely by the former maintenance person, that they were not producing any fruit. I left them alone for a year, then began to prune them gently, and now they are producing abundantly, and more pleasing to look at. Someday, the roses will be protected from deer with a more pleasing fence!
I added these plants for beauty at the patio as well as to shade the roots of the Clematis vine(left) and lessen the deer eating the rose bush(right).
The beginnings of creating beauty at the bottom of the property where there used to be just grasses and weeds to line trim throughout the summer and fall. The blue fescues were rescues from other gardens. The mulch is holding a future area for wild flowers and compost bins.
One way we've been able to add plants at this large property is to use what other clients no longer want or in some cases where plants such as these Rose Campions (Lychnis coronaria) were not able to spread freely being in a small garden, but have plenty of room here to reseed themselves.
Part of the lower yard that had been line-trimmed a few times every summer for fire prevention. It was on a steep slope. This flower-filled drought tolerant and native planted hillside is now a thriving part of the garden. The stepping stones were found in a pile on the property.
Iris and Yarrow are abundant in this yard and make wonderful beds when brought together with ornamental grasses. There is a deer tolerant dwarf lilac near the center.
The wisteria was a weekly maintenance job keeping it from taking over the steps to the deck. A new addition will go under this deck. When construction started we transplanted it into a pot and then to a permanent one near the front door of the addition.
A temporary path during the construction.
The steps to the addition's front door have been poured. To the right is the old vegetable garden, full of raspberries that were transplanted to pther yards.
Another view of the area below the steps.
The stairs are tiled, now need steps to the lower path.
The steps are finished.
We will have to build a new path around the deck that extends out where the old patio was.
This is the old path that needed to be reset anyway, but when construction finishes will be rebuilt.
The path will go around this new deck...
...and connect to where the old path was and will be reset.
This lemon treee had to be pruned back for the new path to be built.
Construction of the addition is done. Now it's our turn!! The patio area turned into a path around the new deck, the pavers that made up the old patio will now be used for the path.
The path around the deck is finished.
Soil from under the house and up at the street where we made a new parking place came down to the bottom of the property to create a flat space for play and sitting.
Extra drain rock from the construction of french drains went to the parking space.
This is where an old tree was taken out and the stump left, also a large lemon tree was removed.
Some of the soil and rocks carved out of the hillside by the road for the parking space, formed this bed where the old stump used to be an eyesore.
Design transformation then regular management
A backyard in South Berkeley needed some beauty to entice its owner out to the backyard. She wanted grass all the way back. I tried to talk her out of it, too much water! So we put in the new BlueLock piping that uses no toxic glue, is very easy to put together, and rotator sprinklers that use much less water and actually cover the grass more efficiently.
We added sod and spread grass seed over what was not growing well since there was no functioning irrigation.
We added fruit trees and a vegetable garden with a little concrete retaining wall between the grass and the vege bed.
We used bricks and concrete pieces found in the yard to make a neat bed by the garage.
Seasonal Changes
Winter Beauty
One winter afternoon end of the work day, I saw this warm golden sun in places in this weekly workplace. I had to take photos of the way it played on the plants, rocks and wood.
....behind the bare hydrangea....
...on the rock succulent wall....
...through the wisteria trunks...
...at the top of the redwood tree.....
...looking up through the redwood tree.....
..the lights had come on...
....through the bamboo....
The sun is still out in the Bay but not in the darkness of the trees.
Even too dark for the flash to not come on.
Bare branches of deciduous trees can be art.
The Fava beans and red clover I planted are to fix nitrogen in the soil while we wait to plant in Spring, adding winter beauty to the vegetable garden.
Weekly clients
My newest maintenance account. A lovely large proerty in the Berkeley hills. What a delight to watch the seasons in a garden! This poor maple tree has been chopped at the top and needs thinning. See the later photos.
The maple has been thinned and ugly stubs cut down to the next leaf nodes or lower to the next branch to re-leader the main branches. And Fall has arrived!
And now winter shows the structure of this focal point Japanese Maple.
A vegetable and flower garden at the lower end of the property. Eager to get it more organized!
Future area for a compost bin next to the vege garden.
Clearing out for the spring planting. Creating definitive beds to keep the walkways in certain places so the planting places will stay airy and plant-friendly!
Monthly clients
This client by the Claremont Hotel loved all her plants, and wanted to save money, while being discouraged about the disorganization and the way her garden looked.
We removed the unhealthy plants, added a few shrubs, the Magnolia and Azara trees, moved her plants to be in the right places for height, sun/shade and voila!
This is a client in Trestle Glen who had her yard landscaped and wasn't happy with all of it. She hired us to take out the plants she didn't like and add ones she does. We put fruit trees and blueberry bushes behind the iron fence to protect them from the deer.
Protected behind the fence are a persimmon on the left and an apricot on the right.
Her daughter did the mural and the painting of the steps, walkway, and retaining walls.
From a messy entrance to the front door...
...to a more pleasing set of plants (yes, the color of the painted walls changed)...
We added plants to go with what was already growing here. We also updated the irrigation to make sure everything gets water.
Much better!
She wanted more stately plants by this auspicious door. I bought pots to go on either side and put drought tolerant plants in them since this gets full hot sun.
The Arizona Cypress do quite well in pots.
Before...
...after
Before....below the front door....
Across from the front door, we dug out some of the grass and added rocks to make a narrow bed to add beauty and dimension to frame the elegant mural with lovely native and drought tolerant plants.
This lemon finally bore fruit after we removed a large bush next to it.
It was important to her to have this looking more private and inviting. We transplanted two trees that weren't doing very well in their location into a bed created by taking out some of the lawn to the side of the patio, adding rocks to border it and soil.
We moved a Pittosporum and Japanese Maple from another part of the property to the edge of the patio. Now it gives a little bit of privacy and will more as they fill out.
An industrial shop
My newest maintenance account. A lovely large proerty in the Berkeley hills. What a delight to watch the seasons in a garden! This poor maple tree has been chopped at the top and needs thinning. See the later photos.
We took out the weeds and added natives and drought tolerant plants as there was no irrigation.
Wish I had before photos!
