Understanding Bay Area Planting Zones: A Guide for Homeowners If you've ever bought a plant at a local nursery and noticed a small "zone" number on the tag, you've already been introduced to one of the most useful — and most misunderstood — tools in garden planning. Planting zones tell you [...]
Color in the Landscape: How We Design for Beauty, Mood, and the Bay Area Environment Color is one of the most powerful tools in landscape architecture — and one of the most misunderstood. It’s tempting to treat a garden’s palette as a matter of personal taste: which flowers you love, which shades [...]
Flowering Vines in the Landscape Twining gracefully up a trellis or covering an entire wall, flowering vines in the landscape are the vertical planting element that take foliage to new heights! There are myriad vines that we use in our designs, each with a different purpose in mind. Vines are [...]
Container Planting If you need to create a point of interest, a cooling sense of lush foliage, or a splash of color on your patio or in your garden, container plantings are a perfect solution. The subject of containers is discussed in every garden magazine, with many spectacular examples out there, but [...]
FALL LEAF POTENTIAL This time of year, we are easily reminded why this season is referred to as “Fall.” Fallen leaves are invariably a symbol of Autumn, as well as a yearly chore to remove from one’s yard. But what if we told you that those leaves are more than they [...]
Pollinator Landscaping There has been a lot more attention paid in recent years to the importance of pollinators and what we can do as designers, gardeners, and homeowners to protect them. Pollinators are crucial to human quality of life on earth, so we happen to care a lot about their well-being! [...]
COLOR IN THE GARDEN Color is an incredibly powerful element in any form of design. When we plan a landscape of any style, it is one of the first things on our minds! Of course color preferences are not the same for everyone, as liking or disliking different colors varies from person [...]
Edible Landscapes - Getting Started It’s starting to feel like summer, and around here we are all excited about what that means for gardens. Not only do we love to see flowers in all their spring splendor, we also love thinking about what we can enjoy eating from our gardens, and how we can [...]
Flower-Cutting Gardens A garden can serve many purposes. It can be a place of beauty and contemplative relaxation, a draw for birds, butterflies, and other wildlife, and a productive space for growing food and flowers. With Valentine's Day around the corner, we couldn’t help but write about flowers, the time-honored traditional [...]
Roses In The Landscape As Landscape Architects, the plants we incorporate into our designed spaces are as integral to the experience as our built structures. We love many plants for their beauty, durability, and long-term performance in the garden, and of course we share our clients’ favorites, among them the [...]
