Where we work
Landscaping in Portola Valley
San Mateo County, worked from Redwood City.
Your garden in Portola Valley
Help at every stage.
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Landscape Design
We create landscape plans that show the layout, planting, materials, irrigation and lighting for your project.
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Landscape Construction
We build landscapes, including site preparation, drainage, patios, walkways, retaining walls, irrigation, lighting and planting.
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Landscape Maintenance
We look after gardens through the year, ones we built and ones somebody else did, so each stays the garden it was meant to be.
Before design starts
What is different here.
Portola Valley regulates the ground, not only the tree. A site development permit is required before fifty cubic yards of cut or fill, before a fill three feet deep or an excavation four feet deep, before an excavation or fill covering five thousand square feet, and before removing a significant tree or doing anything that would injure one, which expressly includes placing fill inside its dripline. Significant is set species by species and measured fifty-four inches above natural grade, with multiple trunks added together: eleven and a half inches across for coast live, black and valley oak and for bay laurel, seventeen for redwood and Douglas fir, and five for blue oak. Where a permit is granted the dripline is fenced before anything starts, trenching inside it is done by hand, no cut or fill is allowed within four feet of the tree's base, and the town can require a bond against damage. On most properties here the question is not whether a tree needs a permit but whether the earthwork does.
The same everywhere
How a job runs.
Design, build and maintenance are one company here, so the drawing is made by people who will have to build it and the garden is looked after by people who know why it was built that way. See how we take a project from first visit to finished garden.
Portola Valley is one of the towns we work in most, so no travel charge applies. We also work well beyond these towns, with a $100 travel charge once, on the first visit, outside the towns listed.
Let's talk about your garden.
For a new design or garden project, the consultation is $175 and covers the first hour on the property. If the visit runs past the hour, we agree the extra time with you first. For ongoing care, the maintenance walk is $75 so we can see the garden and price the work.
Visits are prepaid. Neither fee is credited toward later work.
Prefer to call? (650) 274-5188