Happy start of summer! It's currently 73 degrees and partly cloudy here in Sebastopol, California. The buckeye trees are done blooming, and the squash are continuing to grow strong.
Since there hasn't been an email newsletter update in some time, there's a bunch to dig into. Including this little table of contents if you'd like to jump ahead or get a sense of what's below.
1. New Planting Plan and Concierge Call Offerings
2. El Cerrito Hillside Project Preview
3. Garden Tour Video for Bringing Back the Natives
4. Sonoma County Relocation and Garden Report
Oh, and full transparency, there's a chance I might have recently added you to this email list. This would be the case if we've worked together, are friends already / on our way to being friends, or you're a past client from the last five years. Totally cool to unsubscribe, no hard feelings at all. These are pretty infrequent newsletters, around once a season, little less or little more.
New Planting Plan and Concierge Call Offerings
I'm starting to take the first steps toward the longer-term vision of Plantkind by introducing two new offerings that are more accessible to people at different points on their own paths. These are in addition to the current design studio model, focused on full-scale renovations or new builds with involvement throughout the project’s entire lifecycle.
Planting Plans
Custom planting plans designed for your garden, ready to plant with California native species.
For our design studio projects, they can be pretty cohesive, including hardscaping, construction, furniture selections, and exterior finishes for the home. And they all include planting plans. The gardens themselves. What happens if we present the planting plans phase as a standalone offering since the gardens and native plants are at the core of our practice.
There are only so many of these large-scale multi-year project engagements you can do, plus the goal is to create more habitable gardens for the birds, the caterpillars that make up their diets, and the native plants that provide the buffet to munch on. More habitable outdoor spaces for us humans to live.
While a nursery is not around the corner anytime soon (maybe one day), this seems like the next natural step. For select projects in the Bay Area, I'm going to offer an add-on service of plant sourcing, procurement, and delivery. I mean c'mon, plant delivery days are the best days.
Concierge Calls
Collaborative design consultations to explore the potential of your outdoor living space.
Most of my consultations these days are focused on more of a "first date" format where we're getting to know each other to determine if we want to work together for the next year or two renovating your outdoor space. These are fact-finding missions to collect all the information we need to present a scope of work.
For Concierge Calls, they're set up to be collaborative design working sessions. It's pretty exciting to chat with someone and dig into everything together, helping them to problem solve, workshop a bunch of ideas, and leave ready to do their thing. They're set up to be open-ended for whatever your needs are and can be helpful in a variety of scenarios:
Pre-purchase assessment and feasibility exploration during the home buying experience
Brainstorm and troubleshoot your project when going through the do-it-yourself process
Dipping your toe in the water when considering a larger full-scale project
Need a second opinion for projects currently underway
For these calls, the proof-of-concept I've been tracking is a newly formed website called The Expert, which offers interior designers a platform to facilitate hosting this same style of video consultations. Keep hearing good things about what the team over at The Expert is cooking up, and wanted to get a better feel for this format myself.
Of course, referencing these new offerings as accessible is a relative term here, cause in many ways, they can still be a substantial investment. However, compared to the current landscape design projects in the pipeline, with project budgets ranging from $50k to $300k, I'm hoping to provide a bit of value in other ways and a set of different points of entrance into creating outdoor spaces that we all can enjoy.
There's more information on how the planting plans and concierge calls are structured, what's included, and common questions on the website. But mostly wanted to take this moment to share a bit of the thinking behind them.
El Cerrito Hillside Project Preview
Part of my long-term goal is to demystify the process of garden making. I've been sharing behind-the-scenes of the design workflow on Instagram, which you can see in the Design Story Highlight bubble at the top of the profile. But it's kinda like the "cutting room" floor, and I thought it'd be good to share upcoming projects here directly in the newsletter, in a more thoughtful way with some added context behind the project.
Sometimes it can be a bit challenging because of the long timelines our projects move through. By the time the garden is built, plus a couple of years for the plants to grow in, and then photographed. But it’s of course well worth the wait.
For this hillside garden in El Cerrito, we're working to embrace and acknowledge the natural form of the land. Instead of terracing the whole hillside, a light-handed approach presents a more natural feeling and keeps the project within the set budget. We don't need to "correct" the incline or put a superimposed human space over everything. Plus, there's a variety of elements in the backyard that benefit from the hillside, including a climbing structure and slide at the grade of the slope and a swing bench that sits at the top with a pretty incredible view if you make the trek up.
The design work with Anita and Mat has been a fun collaborative process so far, with lots of Notion comments flying back and forth as we worked through all aspects of the spatial planning. Here's the concept statement that I wrote at the start of the project to get a sense of what we were working toward:
A place to immerse yourselves after working from home, where your eyes shift from computer screens to the sunset over the bay. Knowing you can take the path back to the office shed in the morning, to start another day working in the garden. Some veggies and herbs growing here and there to provide sustenance to the family of two, soon to be three. A minimally sculpted hillside, with a multitude of ways to experience the space — wandering up just a bit, or climbing all the way to the top, your choice. A sense of the natural habitat that was here before, with native plants throughout, providing food for the rest of the local ecosystem. With the pizzas soon coming out of the oven, while people snack on the native grapes.
We're currently moving into the construction phase later this summer and fall. This should set us up perfectly for planting just as the rainy season starts, which is the favorite time of year for the California native plants. Stay tuned for more updates, probably over on Instagram with updates on the installation process.
Garden Tour Video for Bringing Back the Natives
When the pandemic started, I reached out to my now dear friend Kathy about helping to bring the annual in-person garden tour online by live streaming through Zoom. We had never met before then but jumped forward to last month when we joined Kathy and some new friends to visit eight gardens in the East Bay, my first time being on the IRL version of Bringing Back the Natives garden tour.
Since the online version also has its perks (reaching more people outside of our geographic area, videos you can revisit in the future, and better accessibility for steep hillside gardens) it has continued alongside the in-person tour.
This year Plantkind shared Amelia's back garden in Rockridge, which was designed and installed in the summer a couple years ago, and the full video can be viewed here on YouTube. And yes, we got a bit emotional with the moths and butterflies at the end.
The process of making the video itself was interesting to go through, and part of me enjoyed how linear it was compared to the spatial design process I'm used to. This project has led to some curiosity and thinking around the medium of video moving forward. It's exhausting at times trying to figure out how to share a garden online, it's kinda contradictory to being with the plants for real, but it seems like video might be the closest you can get.
Relocating to Sonoma County, from the East Bay
This past fall, we relocated to Sonoma County from the East Bay, with lots of room to play around in the garden. Plantkind is still engaging with client projects in the Bay Area and Northern California, with Sebastopol as the new home base.
Here we are currently in the midst of sheet mulching (thanks to Costco for the free cardboard) and spreading lots of arbor mulch (around 15 yards) throughout the gardens. It’s turning out to be more of an experimental trial garden at our home and includes some new plants where I'm seeing their growth patterns for the first time. Grateful for this space and to be able to poke around in the garden whenever.
Since we moved, I've been trying to get out in the garden as a daily practice, even if it's just ten minutes of weeding as the sun is about to set. Now as we move on to slightly bigger projects and hotter days (sweaty), I'm going to experiment with a handful of longer yard work sessions each week.
We're also super lucky to have California Flora Nursery close by. Before moving here, their website was such a solid resource of information, and now to be able to hop in the Tacoma, turn on the KCSM Jazz station, and drive fifteen minutes is lovely. The nursery has been a source for some special plants so far, hanging with new friends and finding inspiration when you need to get off the computer. We've got a shopping list forming of new plants they’re growing, which should be available later this summer, so we'll check back then.