About Cornucopia Sustainable Designs

Cornucopia Sustainable Designs specializes in helping frustrated do-it-yourself homeowners attain attractive, environmentally sustainable designer gardens with CA native plants and/or edibles that save money, water, time, energy, and resources.


Principal’s Bio

Wendy Talaro is the principal designer and consultant behind Cornucopia Sustainable Designs and she has the capacity to retrofit conventional gardens and landscapes for sustainability. The main geographic focus of her work as a designer is Southern California. Cornucopia Sustainable Designs specializes in using both CA natives and/or edibles in garden design and applied ecological principles so that beauty, productivity, low water usage, and relatively low/easy maintenance are the results. Well-considered design and restored soils in turn helps plants thrive and stay healthy. In essence, as a designer Wendy practices a kind of ecological homeopathy, using the tools of nature to heal nature.

As a facilitator and co-presenter, she teaches applied systems thinking through Urban/Suburban Ecological Literacy workshops while using gardening and landscaping as the context. Urban/Suburban Ecoliteracy is a grassroots community based social enterprise initiative developed to counteract our collective alienation from nature and paralysis in the face of environmental problems that appear too large to solve. Each workshop is place centered and place-based but the general principles of Urban/Suburban Ecoliteracy that she teaches are applicable wherever these developed environments exist.


Education and Background

As an undergraduate, Wendy started out as a biology major before pursuing environmental studies. She had entertained hopes of pursuing veterinary medicine at UC Davis but the realistic prospect of burying her arm up to her shoulder in the rear end of a cow just didn’t do anything for her, to say nothing about how the poor cow would feel about that experience too. More to the point, although she did not specifically know what she was going to do with an environmental studies degree, the scope of positive impact seemed greater than what she could accomplish as a veterinarian.

Many years later, she had forgotten enough of the pain of being an undergraduate to pursue a master’s degree. Not many schools were offering coursework in sustainable agriculture and after visiting a few potential schools, she chose New College of California to study ecological agriculture. Her master’s thesis was titled “Coastal Southern California Edible Forest Gardening: Plant Species and Cultivar List”. She plans to make the thesis the starting point for a book on the same subject. It’s just a question of somehow making soil science and plant taxonomy palatable and easy to understand, if that’s possible. (Although at this point, she may well write about applied ecoliteracy instead. Its more relevant to a broader audience.)

She currently volunteers as a garden designer and consultant for a few Los Angeles Unified School District elementary schools through the Los Angeles County Master Gardeners and Children’s Nature Institute.


Design Philosophy

Unfortunately, most homeowners, garden designers, and even landscape architects treat plants as though they were arranging furniture in a house. Though designing in cooperation with nature would seem to be an obvious and logical choice, it is actually very rare in practice in the landscape trade. This is because aesthetic preferences and tastes, not ecology or geography, have been allowed to drive design.The needs of the plants are distant considerations, which is why many conventional designs will fail or just plain look ugly at worst. Even in best case scenarios, the plants survive but are then subjected to rough treatment and improper horticultural maintenance techniques that distort and deform their natural growth habits. Ultimately these practices cost the plants their health and their lives; unhealthy and mistreated plants never look good. Trees, for instance, become susceptible to disease and are rendered hazardous through the practice of topping.

Poorly considered shortsighted design and ignorant landscape management and maintenance practices end up costing property owners and property managers a lot of money. Continuing to use trees as an example, trees are rendered physically hazardous and/or become legal liabilities, in addition to being eyesores after topping or poor placement. If a tree can’t be fixed by an arborist (costs money), then the tree ends up being removed (costs more money) and the landscaping has to be redone in part or as a whole (costs even more money). Trees often ‘anchor’ a landscape design visually and their presence or absence can make or break the overall effect. All that money could have been preemptively saved with design that takes the long view. For instance, instead of choosing a tree species that becomes 30 to 40 feet tall at maturity and placing that tree under utility wires, the selection of a shorter tree species or a tall shrub species would reduce maintenance costs and negate the need for constant topping.

Working with nature through ecological design instead of inadvertently against nature through conventional garden/landscape design ends up saving a lot of money in the long run in addition to benefiting nature as well. The most obvious savings can be reaped through climate appropriate plant selection. Other practices that mimic nature reduce your maintenance, watering, and artificial fertilizer needs. Strategic garden design, good garden hygiene, and mulching can minimize your fire hazard risk. Focusing on feeding your soil rather than your edible plants yields better quality produce.

Doing better by nature, your gardens/landscapes, and by your pocketbook simultaneously is all a matter of shifting your perspective and thinking differently about the manifestations and patterns of nature that surround you daily in obvious and not-so-obvious ways. Through ecological design, time, money, water, and effort are saved by doing things right the first time instead of having to spend time, money, water, and effort to fix things after the fact.


How Cornucopia Sustainable Designs Works with Clients

Cornucopia Sustainable Designs specializes in helping do-it-yourself homeowners and others who need the right amount of professional guidance to achieve beautiful, environmentally sustainable results. We specialize in working with a dual plant palette of CA natives and edibles suitable for Southern or Northern California. The principal designer of Cornucopia Sustainable Designs first schedules an in-person appointment during daylight hours (we have to see patterns of sunlight and shade) so that we can discuss your desires, landscape challenges, and objectives – what you want is very important to us. We will also ask you about your budget for the landscaping or gardening project. Our services are tailored to fit what you want and need that will fit within your budget in order to help you achieve success in your garden and enjoy long-term beauty and enjoyment as a result.

Site analysis and assessment is also part of an initial consultation. Cornucopia Sustainable Designs looks at your soil type, patterns of sunlight and shade, and the types of plants that are already in your garden or landscape and  their relative health, among other characteristics. What we strive to do is to match what the garden / landscape site provides with what the plants need. Our garden designs are always tailored for you and your garden / landscape site. We firmly believe that you and your garden deserve much better than one-size-fits-all cookie cutter design.

We provide garden/landscape design services, consultations, and horticultural best-practices one-on-one coaching, presentations, and workshops throughout Los Angeles, Orange, Ventura, and San Diego counties. Initial consultations are $90/hour. There is a round trip surcharge of $0.55/mile for appointments outside of Los Angeles County. Design fees depend upon the complexity of design and the square footage of area(s) in question.

Should you decide to proceed to the plant palette selection and/or design phase after the initial consultation, a quote will be issued. A 50% deposit is required to start work. Measurements taken during the initial consultation are used to generate the garden/landscape design plan to scale and a follow up meeting will be set to discuss the garden design, the plant selections and their placements. Cornucopia Sustainable Designs also offers retail vendor research and recommendations if you don’t want the headache of having to having to look for nurseries on your own. The balance and final payment is due just before your garden site is flagged so that you know exactly where your new plants will go. If you paid to receive a copy of the design, a non-editable digital file will be e-mailed to you after the flagging and the final payment has been received.

Cornucopia Sustainable Designs makes a long-term commitment to its designs and stands by their quality. This is unprecedented for the landscape trade – we offer a guarantee for the lifespan of our garden design. The guarantee stands if and only if our care and maintenance recommendations are followed to a T: if a plant species choice fails to thrive in the garden or the landscape after establishment (1 – 3 years after planting), Cornucopia Sustainable Designs will go back to the drawing board to identify a replacement species at no additional charge and make sourcing recommendations if you want them. Of course, we cannot be held responsible for what your maintenance gardener does or doesn’t do, client negligence, Acts of God, fires, earthquakes, floods, or other disasters (natural and otherwise) that we have no control or influence over.

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