News

Creating a Win-Win HOA Landscape

Jodie Cook Design, in collaboration with Smith Architects, lifted this HOA clubhouse building and landscape into the present by refreshing an outdated building façade with a Spanish Colonial design, and placing priority on a diverse, habitat-rich plant palette! Seventy-five percent of the project's plant palette is...

NatureScape Gardens

We are very proud of NatureScape, the turf-to-native-garden design program we created and manage for Moulton Niguel Water District.  All gardens are designed by Jodie Cook Landscape Design and installed by Tree of Life Nursery.  They feature regionally native plants, watershed-friendly components such as swales,...

Gardens, they’re complicated…

The more you think about gardens the more interesting they become.  The more you know about gardens, the more you notice.  The more you notice, the more you know.  And if you are really into noticing and knowing you realize that other people don't notice the...

Native Grasses

I am crazy about grasses for a few reasons.  One reason is that they are so distinctively different from herbaceous plants.  No rounded leaves, no petals, no branching leaf veins.  They are pure linearity and stand majestically different in a mixed garden.  Some are stiff and upright like this...

Edible Landscaping – Part One

The best thing about being a Master Gardener here in Orange County, CA is that a legion of dedicated scientists and professional horticulturists have agreed to embed a bunch of enthusiastic lay-people with their hard-earned (and expensive) scientific knowledge of horticulture, agriculture, plant diseases, insects...