Places We Go : Landscaping Supplies

Last week, we started our new front yard makeover. A you can see, I let the grass go this winter as I truly wanted to hire the landscape architect of my dreams (a first for me!) to create a little front yard. Turns out, spring is not the time to try to line up an architect. The "after" photos on one website were Pinterest-ready and made me drool. That architect returned my call to say she was taking projects for 2022. Oops. So it's down to a do-it-yourself project, involving two field trips I took last week.

Our gardener can buy at a wholesale nursery so I had my first adventure to Devil Mountain Nursery in San Ramon, CA. Started in 1995, this nursery is not open to the public. I'd done my homework, researching plants that promise to be drought resistant, deer resistant and gopher resistant.

Once inside the gate, my mouth was watering just at the plants in the front office.

A line of professionals waiting to buy any of the 18,000 plant SKUs.

"My" plants on the the map but it doesn't show how big this place is!

There 9 areas for plants that need shade.

Every single plant is on a drip.

We followed the map and picked out the plants.

I bought four different plants - all evergreen, drought resistant, gopher and deer resistant (fingers crossed). Here's what I got : 12 blue fescue (festuca glauca, beyond blue), 8 heavenly bamboo (nandina lemon lime), 10 atlas fescue (festuca mairel) and 2 New Zealand flax (phormium dark delight). 32 plants for $525 was a really good deal. These will join established butterfly iris, New Zealand flax and cypress trees. Hope this works!

My second field trip last week was to Bee Green Recycling & Supply in Oakland. Well, two hot trips. If I was a five-year-old boy, I would have been mesmerized by the trucks lined up with tree material to feed into a giant shredder making mulch. As a woman of a certain age, I was dripping behind my mask by the time it was over.

I brought home samples of rock for 40' x 4' bed running along the sidewalk. Twice.

California Gold is 3/4," a granite, turned out to be the closest to the actual rock around the sides of our yard, as yet undeveloped. We need 1-1/2 cubic yards and will need to be compacted. Can't wait to see how this goes. In the meantime, that's it for my field trips. Two places I'd never heard of before last Thursday. Next week, I hope to show you the finished project.

PS. Yesterday, it turns out, we are 8 plants short so I'm off to a retail nursery this morning. Guessing a landscape architect would have known how many plants to buy. Wish me luck!

top photo : drone shot by Jim Thompson ~ thank you, Jim!