Serving the Santa Cruz and Monterey Bay area
Landscape Design for the Monterey, Watsonville, and Santa Cruz Area
Our Landscape Design team at K&D was created to provide clients with thriving California gardens. We believe that beautiful gardens begin with good design and appropriate horticulture and come to life through quality installations. We use environmentally friendly design principles along with California native and water saving Mediterranean plants to add value and enjoyment to your home.
Our design team collaborates closely with our residential installation team to provide a seamless experience and a high quality product. Our goal is to give our clients a garden that is unique, manageable, functional and thriving.
Meet Our Landscape Designer
Growing up in the Santa Cruz mountains, Liz Ryan fell in love with the unique ecology of California’s coastal regions. Long days exploring the redwood forest on the edge of her neighborhood helped her develop a deep appreciation for how our surroundings enhance our experience of home. After earning her BA in Environmental Studies, Liz applied her passion for design and ecology in various jobs including installing and maintaining gardens and leading habitat restoration projects. It wasn’t long before Liz decided to set out on her own, bringing her beautiful and water wise designs to homeowners in Santa Cruz county and beyond. When the opportunity came to serve a larger clientele with K&D, Liz jumped at the chance. She is excited to join this team of experienced landscape professionals, enhancing clients’ experience of home through well designed and beautifully installed gardens.
Liz lives in Santa Cruz with her husband and two children. She enjoys going on adventures with friends and family (especially if there is an ocean or lake involved), staying active, hiking with her pup, gardening and traveling.
Cutting-Edge 3D Rendering Services
At K&D Landscaping, we understand that visualizing your dream landscape can be challenging. That’s why we offer state-of-the-art 3D rendering services as a part of our landscape design process. With these services, you can see a realistic representation of your project before any physical work begins. Our 3D renderings allow you to explore different design options, materials, and plantings, ensuring that the final landscape perfectly matches your vision. This immersive experience not only enhances the design process but also ensures complete satisfaction with the end result. Embrace the future of landscape design with our 3D rendering services and watch your landscaping dreams turn into reality.
“Liz Ryan designed a beautiful and functional space for our hot tub, with outdoor shower, flagstone patio and surrounding beds with many edible plants. We will be using recovered water from the shower to irrigate the area, as well as our adjacent vegetable garden beds next Summer.
We loved the work she did for us so much that we have hired her to design the landscape for the rest of our property.”
– Mark Firestone
“Liz was a wonderful designer to work with in every way. She listened attentively to our wish list and the problems that needed solving and translated those into an elegant design for our backyard. She brought new ideas and worked in the existing elements we wanted to keep. Her design was thorough enough for us to get an accurate bid for construction and she was professional and responsive to our requests for changes or revisions. She also collaborated well with our contractors to see the design implemented as imagined. She has a great eye for detail too! Our yard came out beautiful and we are now able to enjoy it day and night and all year round! We were very pleased with our experience and product and would work with her again!”
– Debra Sloss
“We are so thrilled to have had the privilege of working with Liz on the renovation of our front and side yards. After renovating most of the interior of our home, it was time to update the yards. The space was an unusable jungle and dirt pile that we wanted to transform into usable outdoor living space for our family and pup. Liz designed the space to fit our needs just perfectly! She provides a very comprehensive service from initial meeting / brainstorming, to preparing a beautiful, practical and well thought out design, to final plant selection, coordination and placement. We are in the final phases of install and can’t wait to enjoy the beautiful space Liz designed for us. She has incredible plant and landscape knowledge, is very thorough in understanding her clients’ visions and needs and is a true professional. We highly recommend Liz Ryan!”
– Marie Sousa
“The design Liz created for us transformed our unwieldy dirt pile of a backyard into a beautiful, peaceful oasis! Liz was very easy to work with and was able to take all of the various and sometimes conflicting ideas that our family members had and was able to create a water wise, drought tolerant, tranquil garden that we all love! She has our deepest appreciation and highest recommendation!”
– Jen Field
“Liz was wonderful to work with. She listened to what we wanted yet put her own stamp on the design all while following the mid-century style of our house. She often thought outside of the box and came up with innovative ideas that I’ve rarely seen. She was easy to talk with, warm and professional. Cannot sing her praises enough.”
– Jackie Olin
“We highly recommend Liz. She transformed what was a boring and mostly unusable backyard into a beautiful, functional space. Several years later and we still love the space she created and use it almost daily – it is our outside room. Liz is great to work with and she walked us through the process from start to finish.”
– Nathan York