Beautiful, Waterwise Home Gardens
Voted “Best Landscape Design Services” in Best of the East Bay by Diablo Magazine editors and readers in 2023 & 2024
As leaders in waterwise plants and sustainable landscape design, the Ruth Bancroft Garden and Nursery’s design team creates beautiful, welcoming gardens that are also climate-resilient.
Whether you’re refreshing your landscape to improve curb appeal, planning for fire prevention, or undertaking a complete redesign, our design team tailors each project to your site, goals, and style.
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Portfolio
Designing the Lush Dry Garden
Create a Climate-Resilient, Low-Water Paradise
by Cricket Riley, Alice Kitajima, and Kier Holmes
This book builds on Ruth Bancroft’s groundbreaking and eclectic design methods, incorporating plants that require little to no water, and encouraging richly textured layers of climate-adaptive flowers, shrubs, trees, and succulents such as aloes, agaves, yuccas, and echeverias in a maximalist style so lush you wouldn’t even know you were in a desert climate.
Meet the Team
Kate
Design Services Manager
Garden making and growing professionally in the Bay Area for over fifteen years, Kate has learned, plants are powerful. As a designer, she believes that beauty and resilience go hand in hand, working with clients to realize their low water garden aspirations. Before coming to Ruth Bancroft Garden, Kate was the Horticulture Manager at Filoli gardens in Woodside and studied Landscape Architecture at Merritt College.
Molly
Associate Landscape Designer
Since college, Molly has been interested in fostering connections between people and their natural environments. Molly's interest in horticulture blossomed when she was farming in Latin America for one year. Upon returning to the United States, she pursued a Master's degree in Landscape Architecture and Environmental Planning from UC Berkeley. Since receiving her degree, she has worked in residential and restoration landscape architecture firms in the Bay Area. When she is not designing, she enjoys spending time with her family, painting, hiking and gardening.
Quick Design Questions – Answered!
On the first Wednesday of every month from 9:30AM – 12:30PM, one of our Landscape Designers will be in the Nursery to help you with your quick design questions. Need to replace a plant or two? Have a couple of pots you want to fill? Want to know more about our Landscape Design services?
View Upcoming Drop-in Opportunities
Stop by!
1552 Bancroft Road
Walnut Creek, CA 94598
East Bay: Our general service area encompasses the area within a 22 mile radius of the Garden which is roughly north to Highway #4, south to Highway #580, west to Oakland and east to Antioch.
San Francisco and Marin: Additional hourly travel-time fees may be added to design work done in these areas.
Sites outside a 10 mile radius of service areas will incur additional travel charges.
The Nursery is stocked with water wise plants and natives. Our Nursery staff is also extremely knowledgeable and more than happy to answer any questions you have about whether or not a particular plant will thrive in your yard. If you’re looking for a plant that we don’t currently have in-stock, or want to make a large order of plants for your water wise garden, it is best to email the nursery at Nursery@ruthbancroftgarden.org
