Issue date: November 03, 1999
By JANE KNOERLE
Remember the days when homeowners laboriously raked, leveled, and sowed their new front yards with grass seed, dragging hoses morning and night to water the little seedlings?
No more. Today the landscape company truck pulls up, laden with rolls of sod, and, voila! That afternoon you have a lush, emerald green lawn. The same with trees; homeowners no longer plant spindly little trees in five-gallon cans -- they want 20-foot trees and they want them now.
That's fine with Tim Vine, owner and founder of Landsystems, a Redwood City-based firm of landscape architects and contractors. In business since 1981, Mr. Vine employs a staff of 50, including two landscape architects and five designers.
"People want instant landscaping. They don't want to wait, so we use mature plants and trees," he says. Clients, often "dot-com" millionaires, also want complete service, which may include installing patios, driveways, putting greens, swimming pools, tennis courts, spas, and outdoor built-in barbecues. Basketball half-courts are very popular, says Mr. Vine, and that 1960s holdover, the fire pit, is also in demand.
The outdoor kitchen, as featured in the 1999 Sunset model home, is very big now, "complete with wood-fired pizza oven."
"There is also more and more emphasis on the automatic, with water, lighting and security systems all programmed and controlled within the house. Music is another big thing. In one installation, we used (fake) rocks with speakers in them."
A lot has changed since Tim Vine arrived on the Peninsula on his motorbike 18 years ago. A native of London, he came to the United States after graduating from the University of London with a degree in landscape management and horticulture. He credits his love of gardening to his grandmother, "who could grow tomatoes on the coast of Scotland," and to his mother, also an avid gardener.
Arriving in Portland, Oregon, with $100 in his pocket, Mr. Vine opened a nursery, working there until he heeded an elderly mentor's advice to "go south." Visiting a friend in Belmont, he was struck with the smell of eucalyptus and the lush greenery of the Peninsula.
Determined to go into business here, he called on the manager of the Wells Fargo branch in Woodside and asked to borrow $5,000. Although Mr. Vine had no collateral or local references, the bank manager took a chance on him and granted the loan. Mr. Vine then started knocking on doors to drum up business.
As his company has grown, Mr. Vine has seen other changes. "All the towns are so strict now about what you can and can't do. Eighteen years ago you could do about anything (in landscaping) you wanted," he says.
Local homeowners are not into gardening like the English, says Mr. Vine. "In England everybody is his own gardener," he says, adding that Landsystems probably wouldn't be doing such a booming business in his native land.
"Here, clients want low-maintenance because nobody knows how to take care of the garden," he says. Skilled artisans are not as available, as in Europe or Great Britain. Sons and daughters of Japanese or Italian gardeners, who so lovingly tended Atherton or Woodside estates, are now Silicon Valley entrepreneurs.
Local gardening services are mostly "mow and blow." Large gardens require a full-time gardener. "We are actually training two gardeners for a Portola Valley resident," says Mr. Vine.
"Horticultural maintenance is now a big part of our business," says Mr. Vine. "We started the service three years ago because we were fed up with seeing our landscapes destroyed."
Mr. Vine says Landsystems offers maintenance service only for clients whose landscapes the company has installed.
While mature trees and rolling lawns are in demand today, homeowners are receptive to using native plants. "Everybody's forgotten the drought, but the native plant idea stuck. They can look fantastic." Native plants are also largely deer-resistant. There are deer all over Portola Valley and Woodside, and they are now coming into Atherton in the area around the Alameda, according to Mr. Vine.
Buying big means big bucks. On a recent Atherton project, mature trees alone cost over $100,000. Two $500,000 landscaping projects are currently in the works. While those figures are mind-boggling to most of us, if you pay $3 million or $4 million for a house, spending a half-million on landscaping doesn't seem so unusual.
Many of the big trees come from the Los Angeles area, where there is even more instant planting, says Mr. Vine. Redwoods and live oak trees are popular locally because they provide instant screening and are native to the area. Palm trees are trucked in to provide a Mediterranean look.
The trees are either field-grown and trucked in huge burlap balls or in wooden boxes. A 20-foot tree has to be installed with a crane, which adds to the project's expense.
With a 20-foot redwood costing about $6,000, what if it dies? Fortunately, that hardly ever happens, says Mr. Vine. "We give the client a regime to follow, but he usually has us take care of it. It's very important to install breather pipes (so air can get to the roots), fertilize, and water properly."
There are trends in gardening, as in home decor. "Many of our clients have been to Europe and they'll come back and say, 'I want a white garden like Sissinghurst or a garden like I saw in Florence.'" The problem is adapting these ideas to a California climate. "Californians want something going on in the garden all year long. In England we cut the garden down to sticks in the winter," says Mr. Vine.
The English garden trend has abated locally. "That was a Martha Stewart phase," says Mr. Vine, "but an English garden is very high-maintenance. We try to use designs best suited to California."
A hands-on gardener, happiest with a pair of pruning shears in his back pocket, Mr. Vine transformed the garden at his former home in Ladera to a bit of Britain. "It went from ivy, juniper and oleander to a lot of herbaceous (perennial) plants." Now he's making the master plan for his new home in Portola Valley, which includes "two acres of wild, neglected garden."
Whether he's at work or home, a love of gardening still clings to this transplanted British Vine.
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