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The Studio
A two-acre working yard off Middlefield where every Five Oaks plan is drawn, planted, and pressure-tested before it ever reaches your property.
Five Oaks Landscapes designs, builds, and tends gardens across Menlo Park, Atherton, and Palo Alto — from weekly lawn care to full-scale estate redesigns. Local crew. Native plantings. Twenty-two seasons of dirt under the nails.
Five Oaks began in 2003 with a single truck, five oak saplings, and a handshake agreement on Middlefield Road. Two decades later we're still here — only now there are fourteen of us, a two-acre studio yard, and a quiet reputation for gardens that look better in year five than they did in year one.
Most landscape crews show up with a truckload of nursery stock and a Pinterest board. We don't. Every plant in a Five Oaks garden is propagated, hardened, and trialed in our studio yard off Middlefield — sometimes for a full season — before it ever touches your soil. That's why our gardens establish faster, need less water, and don't die in August.
We're a small firm by design. Fourteen people, one foreman, one designer, and a crew that's been together since the Obama administration. We take on roughly thirty new projects a year and turn down twice that. If we agree to take your garden on, it's because we know we can do right by it for the next decade.
Transparent pricing for the Midpeninsula. These are starting figures — every garden is quoted individually after a site visit, but you won't get a "call for pricing" runaround. Real numbers, real scope, real timeline.
Mow, edge, blow, and a quick once-over of beds. Tuesday or Friday routes across Menlo Park & Atherton. Includes seasonal blade-height adjustments and fertilizer in spring and fall.
Site visit, soil test, full planting plan, hardscape layout, and a 12-month establishment schedule. Includes three revision rounds and a studio propagation pass for hard-to-source species.
Quarterly deep-clean: pruning, mulching, irrigation audit, deadheading, and a written health report on every established planting. Pairs with weekly lawn care or stands alone.
Flagstone paths, decomposed granite, dry-stacked retaining walls, pergolas, and ipe decking. Built by our own masons — no subcontractors, no surprises. Permits handled in-house.
Smart controller retrofit, drip conversion, leak audit, and optional laundry-to-landscape greywater tie-in. Most installs pay for themselves inside two dry seasons.
Lawn-out, natives-in. We kill the turf (sheet mulching, no chemicals), amend the soil, and install a curated palette of California natives propagated in our studio. Rebate paperwork included.
Send us a couple of photos and a rough lot size. We'll tell you honestly whether you need a full design or just a sharper maintenance crew — usually within two business days.
We've refined this over four hundred gardens. It's deliberately slow at the front end so the back end — the actual building — goes fast and stays on budget.
We spend ninety minutes on your property — measuring sun, slope, soil, and existing roots. You get a written read on what's working, what's failing, and what's worth saving. No charge.
A full planting plan, hardscape layout, and fixed-price quote — plus a studio propagation pass for any species we want to test in your microclimate. Two revision rounds included.
Our crew builds it in one continuous push — typically two to four weeks. Then we stay on for a twelve-month establishment period, the window where most gardens quietly fail without help.
A small slice of recent projects across the Midpeninsula. Most clients prefer their gardens stay private — these six gave us permission. Hover any tile for location and scope.
We take on a limited number of new projects each season. The more you can tell us up front — lot size, what's failing, what you want to look at from the kitchen window — the faster we can tell you whether we're the right crew. We answer every serious inquiry within two business days.