"I hired Emily at the recommendation of a dear friend and avid gardener. When my friend told me about Emily's vision and ability to conceptualize her clients' taste, I gave her a call right away. We began with a modest version of my landscaping project. As we entered into the design process, we decided to revamp our front yard and entry way to accomplish the larger purpose of making our 80-year-old home more welcoming and warm. Emily did this and then some. She designed all the landscape and hardscape with only minor tweaks from me. Even though my house is Spanish/ Mediterranean architecture, Emily incorporate my love of English gardens. Her design was brilliant in that it captured my aesthetic, but was exactly what the house was demanding."
--Cassie Gaenger
Landscape Maintenance
Our garden maintenance programs are reflective of your garden's needs, your expectations and your budget. A combination of our timely observations, suggestions for improvement, response to requests, and generally positive dispositions make us special. Some things that are true for all of our client's gardens:
- seasonally-determined, custom fertilizers
- organic pest control
- efficient, well-planned irrigation systems
- building healthy gardens from the soil up, using organic mulch & microbially-active soil ammendments
- selecting plants for seasonal display, based on our plant knowledge of what will really work
- working with a select community of qualified arborists, irrigation specialists, builders, architects, and even window-washers
- staging projects to fit your budget
- keeping notes in your Humanature garden journal to track fertilizing and pest control schedules
Our artful eye and technical expertise set us apart as a holistic landscape maintenance solution.
Landscape Design
Our decade-old sustainable gardening practice in the Bay Area inform all of our designs. We attend classes, tours, groups & workshops year-round in order to satisfy our curiosity for the art and science of garden building. Carefully designing gardens that will be practical to build, as well as having a solid knowlege of budgetary concerns make us a real asset as a design-build company. We are licensed, bonded, and insured landscape contractors, who can also work intelligently with other subcontractors to bring the varied artisanal elements of our designs to fruition. Elements like low-voltage lighting, water features, patios, arbors, and fireplaces are completed with the appropriate technical knowledge to make them subtle, artful, and long-lasting.
The design process is tailored to communicate garden plans through simple perspective sketches and plant lists, all the way to hand-rendered plans and section-elevations to communicate with other contractors. Our design technique reflects your decision-making process, and the scale and budget of the project overall. For all our design clients, a few things are always true:
- Meet for an initial1-hr. visit to walk around your property, take inventory, make notes about your objectives, and answer questions about how we might work together. The cost of the initial consult will be credited toward your project if we go on to work together on either the design and/ or the installation.
- Send you a proposal outlining the design goals in order of importance and probable design costs.
- Take measurements, complete an analysis of your property and then generate a preliminary design plan based on our design interview and the natural site conditions.
- For more complex projects, we then draft a colored, rendered final design. This may include construction details and various perspective drawings and section elevations.