Planting with Bay Area rain patterns
The San Francisco Bay Area’s rainfall pattern and quantities vary widely from year to year and month to month, creating both opportunities and challenges.
Five reasons to have your landscape professionally designed by a landscape architect
Expand your home into the outdoors and enjoy it year-round. Design fees are usually less than 20% of the overall cost of a project.
Leaving plant litter in place
We recommend leaving all (except large, hazardous, and unsightly) plant litter in place to help establish a sustainable nutrient cycle.
Using native plants to clean up toxic sites
There are several kinds of bioprocesses that use plants to remove soil toxins (Phytoremediation), but a couple stand out as being more valuable to use by landscape architects and garden designers.
Smart Landscape Design & Water Conservation
Recent rains in the San Francisco Bay Area have been a very welcome turn of events in our on-going multi-year drought. While state officials have said these recent rains will help, they still fall short of annual averages, and our need for water conservation continues...
Limiting Fertilizer in Landscape & Garden Design
In the Western U.S., nitrogen deposition (pollution) is the result of emissions from transportation, agricultural production, and industrial activities like electricity production (California State). Dry deposition is of greater magnitude than wet deposition due to...
Applying Compost to Encourage Mycorrhizae Fungi as a Fertilizer Substitute
Mycorrhizae fungi are important symbionts of many plant communities. The symbiosis is considered to be an adaptation of plants to acquire soil nutrients and additional moisture, and of fungi to acquire carbohydrates (Eaton and Ayres). The fungi also fight off...