Aguayo Professional Gardener

About Aguayo Professional Gardener

Down toward Richmond Beach the soil turns sandy and the madronas lean out over the bluff, peeling copper bark in the salt wind — the kind of ground that rewards a gardener's hands more than a machine's. That is the register Aguayo Professional Gardener works in: beds weeded down to bare earth, shrubs pruned for shape rather than speed, mulch laid so a border holds its color through a gray winter. The lawn gets its due as well, mown and edged on rotation, string-trimmed clean along stone and fence. Planting season here opens early, when the first dry week of March lets a spade into the ground, and the beds set then are the ones carrying bloom by June. It is slow, attentive work, and the reward is a garden that looks composed from the sidewalk and even better from the kitchen window.