Landscape Design in Long Beach

This city is our home base, and it shows in the work. You can find Root & Branch gardens on 1st Street, Del Mar, Havana, Orange, and Terraine, to name a few.

The reasons vary less than the gardens do — a thirsty lawn, a tired planting, the sense that something better belongs there. One backyard became a rebuilt pool and spa garden edged with tropical planting. Others traded tired, patchy ground for layered plantings that look better in August than a lawn ever does in April. Some were about curb appeal, some were water-wise gardens built from the ground up, and some leaned fully into the dry-summer planting this climate was made for.

When we talk about designing for Long Beach, we’re not speaking hypothetically. We’ve dug in this city’s soil, worked around its parkways and its narrow side yards, and watched our plant palettes mature through its seasons.

The climate we design for

Long Beach sits in USDA hardiness zones 10a and 10b, and in Sunset climate zones 22, 23, and 24 — the bands where the Pacific does most of the work of moderating the weather. Zone 24 is dominated by the ocean: mild winters, cool summers, and air that seldom fully dries out. Zone 23 is ocean-influenced about 85 percent of the time. For a garden, that’s a gift. Rosemary, lavender, olives, salvias, and a long list of California natives thrive here on modest water once established. The same marine influence means we plan for cool, gray stretches too — choosing plants that hold their form and color without a daily dose of hot sun, and siting sun lovers where they’ll actually get the light they need.

Designing to the city’s water rules

Water here comes from Long Beach Utilities, the city’s own municipal water, sewer, and gas utility, which serves Long Beach through more than 90,000 individual water connections. Its water-use rules shape how we design. Under the Level 1 shortage rules in place since 2023, landscape irrigation runs Tuesday, Thursday, and Saturday only, never between 9 a.m. and 4 p.m., no more than ten minutes per station, and not within 48 hours of rain. Runoff onto sidewalks and streets is prohibited outright. So we build irrigation that works with those rules rather than around them: efficient drip zones, hydrozoned plantings that group thirstier plants together, and soils prepared to absorb water instead of shedding it.

Long Beach also has one of the region’s longest-running lawn-to-garden cultures. The city’s conversion program dates to 2010 and requires replacement gardens to reach 65 percent coverage with living California native or California-friendly plants — synthetic turf isn’t an approved option. That standard matches our own philosophy exactly: real plants, living soil, less water. The program currently pays $3.00 per square foot up to 5,000 square feet, plus up to $1,500 toward design.

What’s under your yard

Under the surface, most of Long Beach is built on the floodplain of the Los Angeles and San Gabriel river system. The shallow soils are generally alluvial fan and floodplain materials, with Holocene deposits of alternating gravel, sand, silt, and clay. In practice, that means two yards a few blocks apart can drain very differently. Part of our design process is understanding what your particular soil is doing: where water moves freely, where it lingers, and where a plant that demands sharp drainage will need a mounded bed or amended planting pocket to be happy. Getting this right at the design stage is what separates a garden that thrives for decades from one that limps along.

Gardens that suit the house

Long Beach has 18 officially designated historic districts, and its architecture deserves landscapes that respect it. The Craftsman bungalow is widely considered the signature Long Beach house style, with Craftsman homes from the early 1900s through the 1920s concentrated in Bluff Park, Bluff Heights, Carroll Park, and Rose Park. California Heights, the city’s largest historic district, holds roughly 1,500 homes built mainly in the late 1920s, predominantly Spanish Colonial Revival with Tudor Revival and Craftsman mixed in. These houses were built in an era that loved gardens, and they reward plantings with structure, texture, and warmth. A Spanish Colonial Revival home practically asks for a Mediterranean garden: olives and rosemary, terracotta, gravel paths that let rain soak in rather than shed it, climbing vines on warm stucco. A Craftsman wants layered, naturalistic planting that softens its strong horizontal lines. We design to the house, not to a template.

Every neighborhood, and what we do in them

From Bixby Knolls, bordering the Virginia Country Club in north-central Long Beach, to the East Long Beach neighborhoods surrounding the roughly 400-acre El Dorado East Regional Park, every part of this city has its own character, and we’ve worked across much of it. Whatever your neighborhood, our services are the same three things done well: landscape design tailored to your home and lifestyle, installation oversight with maintenance crew training so the garden is built and cared for to the standard it was designed to, and consulting for homeowners, HOAs, property managers, and landscape companies who want expert guidance.

Belmont Shore

Belmont Shore is one of the neighborhoods we know best: a sought-after coastal community centered on the 2nd Street shopping and dining strip, stretching from the Belmont Pier east to Alamitos Bay. Gardens here live fully inside the ocean’s influence, with mild temperatures year-round and salt in the air. That calls for coastal-tough native and climate-adapted plants that shrug off marine exposure, and for designs that make the most of compact lots. On the Shore, a front garden is part of the streetscape, seen by everyone walking to 2nd Street, so we design these spaces to give something back to the neighborhood: structure, fragrance, and color that hold up in the sea air with very little water.

Naples

Naples is unlike anywhere else in Long Beach: three islands on Alamitos Bay, laced with man-made canals, linked by bridges, and famous for gondola rides and Mediterranean-inspired waterfront homes. It’s hard to imagine a setting better suited to what we do. The architecture here already speaks Mediterranean, and the gardens can answer it: olives, citrus, lavender, and clipped evergreen structure, with terracotta containers and vines softening walls along the canal walks. On lots this close to open water, keeping rain and irrigation on the property matters more than anywhere else in the city. Waterfront and canal-front lots put a premium on salt-tolerant plant selection and on courtyard-scale design that turns small outdoor spaces into genuinely usable rooms. We design Naples gardens to be beautiful from the water, from the bridge, and from your own patio.

Underneath all of it is the same principle: a garden here should keep its own rain. Permeable paths, planting beds that sit low enough to take runoff from a driveway, and soil built up with compost and kept covered with mulch will absorb a winter storm instead of sending it down the gutter toward the river and out to the bay. Living soil then holds that water as a reserve the plants draw on through the dry months, and it filters the oil and fertilizer the runoff was carrying. Good design and good drainage are the same drawing.

Every Long Beach project is grounded in regenerative, water-wise practices, so your landscape stays lush and beautiful while using a fraction of the water a traditional lawn demands. We design, manage the build, and guide the crews who keep it thriving. If you’re ready to turn your Long Beach yard into a garden that fits this place, we’d love to walk it with you.

Every Long Beach project is grounded in regenerative, water-wise practices, so your landscape stays lush and beautiful while using a fraction of the water a traditional lawn demands. We design, manage the build, and guide the crews who keep it thriving.