Bay Maples Wild California Gardens

Updating my review to two: They have a new person who returned my emails and is working on a refund. Sounds like things are turning around and I’m hopeful they will be in a better place to work with people. ++ on returning my email and being ok with a refund of the consultation — that’s a great turn around.

I was exhausted looking for someone to redo our front yard after we let our grass die. So many people just didn’t respond! Not only did Alan respond, but he and his team quickly came out. Susan, the designer, created an amazing design with all of my «wants»: edible natives, a low water theme that complimented our existing tree, curves not linear design and veggie beds that weren’t your typical wood boxes. The team was in and out in 6 days! They worked incredibly hard to have my yard done before Thanksgiving for my family party. It was incredible how fast they got it done. I really appreciated it. The result is stunning. It really is a very peaceful place. Where we never used our front yard lawn. We find ourselves out in the front, wandering along the paths, looking at the plants. My neighbors have all come over and commented on how beautiful it is. Alan and his team have been great answering any and all of my follow up questions. I would sincerely recommend him to anyone.

We moved into a house that had been neglected for close to 30 years. The backyard had a broken down rabbit hutch, some very diseased cactus, a few privets, a lot of crabgrass. Alan and crew removed all this garbage and replaced it with California native plants. It’s a beautiful wonderland, a sanctuary where once was a garbage pit.
Bay Maples helped guide us through the sprinkler-​removal rebate program. That paid for a third of the job right there. I haven’t watered my yard more than once a week, even through this awful drought. Now that it’s raining I don’t have to water at all.
Alan still responds to any questions I have about pruning or upkeep two years after the job was completed. This is a great local business that does great work while contributing to our local environment. Five stars!

We chose Bay Maples after seeing another garden they had done. We liked the reuse of materials like old driveway concrete for pavers, old garage doors for raised beds, and Alan’s extensive knowledge of native plants. He had a lot of different ideas for ways to make creative use of our limited yard space.
Super nice guy, knowledgeable about what he does. He was even happy to have us help out with manual labor so we could save a little money here and there. Unfortunately, positives stop there. He was really bad on the business end of things — the bid and invoices of services were super vague, and we weren’t able to get any kind of detailed breakdown of what we were paying for (I actually think Alan didn’t know what his costs were).
After our initial meetings we felt pressured to start the project before we were ready, to get it done in time for an upcoming garden show. In hindsight I see that our project was squeezed in to offset the exorbitant costs of the coinciding garden show. Sadly our garden took a back seat and it shows.
There was minimal daily oversight by Alan and there was no one left in charge of overseeing the work, so work was done out of order and we had to ask multiple times for things to be corrected. It was sometimes days before we would hear back from Alan even after we had called, emailed and texted. While Alan was out running errands or doing other things, his guys would stand around and wait for him to get back once a task was finished, instead of having a good idea of everything that was supposed to be done that day.
We had to fight with him to come back and cap off the sprinklers they had just covered over with dirt (to our surprise when we tested them out!). We ended up arguing about the irrigation work because it wasn’t in the bid (were we supposed to catch that?). When the drip irrigation for the trees and shrubs was finally installed, what we got was tiny rings of drip tubing around each one — not more than 12″ in diameter. When things started to die it was close to 6 months before replacements showed up and they were never planted. We had to pay another company to plant them (they also amended the soil, which I don’t recall Bay Maples doing).
Quality of workmanship was sub par. We had to spend a lot of time and money to redo the irrigation ourselves because it was done hastily and with lots of cut corners. The berry trellis that was installed just fell apart last week (it turns out they sunk an untreated piece of lumber 6 inches into the ground that rotted and broke under the weight of the plans). So more than a year later we’re still having to pay to fix their work.
We spent well over 20k on the project and there were details and odds & ends that weren’t finished. We ended up having to do the remaining work ourselves. Despite numerous calls, emails, and texts all we heard was dead silence. We put a lot of money and energy into working with Bay Maples, and it was frustrating to be treated the way we were. We did get an email apology about a year later that was too little too late.