Driftwood is a small design-build landscape firm in Glen Ellen, California. We design gardens, install them, and we come back twice a year for ten years to keep them honest. We take on six to eight projects a year. We don't subcontract.
Our work is mostly native and California-Mediterranean planting, with hardscape detailing in local stone and reclaimed timber. We do not install lawn. We are not a landscape architecture firm — we draw what we'll build, and we build what we draw.
The principal, Sam Castellanos, has been doing this since 1998 — first at Garden Studio Oakland, then with Hardesty & Voss, then on his own from 2006. The crew is five people, four of whom have been with us for more than eight years.
Planting plans, drainage, grading. We design for what's already there — the trees you don't cut down, the slope you don't fight, the wind that comes off the ridge.
Drystone walls, gravel paths, decomposed-granite terraces, board-formed concrete. All local materials where we can; reclaimed where we can't.
California natives and Mediterranean adapted species. Manzanita, ceanothus, sages, native grasses. We propagate some of our own stock at a small nursery in Kenwood.
A garden is not finished when we leave. We come back twice a year for the first ten years. We do not sell maintenance as a separate product; it's included.
The full portfolio runs to one hundred and eighty-four projects; these three are the ones we've been showing visitors lately. The houses are real, the names are not.
The property burned in 2017 and the family rebuilt the house in 2022. By the time they called us, the land had been bare for five seasons. The goal was a fire-aware garden that didn't look like a fire-aware garden — generous planting near the house in low-flammable natives, a wide gravel access loop the trucks could use, and a far meadow that returns slowly to wildness.
We installed 412 native plants from twelve species, three drystone retaining walls along the western slope, and a single board-formed concrete plinth where the family wanted to sit in the evening. The lawn the architect originally drew was, gently, talked out of the plan.
Sam read the land before he read our wish list. That was the difference. — The Greer family
A small urban-edge lot behind a 1924 farmhouse. The clients wanted a working kitchen garden, a place to eat outside, and a path to the goats. We took the existing concrete patio out and replaced it with reclaimed fieldstone set in decomposed granite — the same stone that was already in the older walls along the property line.
The kitchen garden runs along the south fence: nine raised beds, an olive at each end, a small Meyer lemon by the kitchen door. The path to the goats was the last thing we built. The clients walk it twice a day; that's the path we cared most about.
A small family winery wanted the area around their tasting room — a 1908 stone barn — to feel like it had always been there. We took down two later additions, regraded a steep approach to a gentler hand-laid gravel ramp, and planted a half-acre of native pollinator meadow uphill from the barn so the bees had somewhere to be.
The dressed-stone wall around the tasting terrace was built from the volcanic tuff the original barn was made from — we lifted the existing rubble pile, sorted it, and re-laid every stone. It took twelve weeks for two masons. It would have taken three weeks with a truck of new stone. The winery preferred the twelve weeks.
A garden takes a year to design and build, then ten years for us to come back twice each spring and autumn. We are honest about that timeline from the first call.
A first visit, two to three hours, no fee. We walk the property with you and your family. We don't bring sketches to the first meeting.
Hand-drawn plans, planting schedule, hardscape detail. Two or three reviews with you, in your kitchen, with the plans on paper.
Our five-person crew on site, in order: grading, hardscape, irrigation, planting. We work the weather, not against it.
Spring and autumn, for ten years. Pruning, replanting losses, adjusting irrigation. It's how we know the work worked.
Sam talked us out of every single thing we initially asked for, and we ended up with a garden we love a great deal more than the one we thought we wanted.Robin & Esme GalbraithSebastopol, since 2022
The crew was here for six months. By the end of it our dog had picked favourites. They came back in October as promised, and again last April.Tomás WahlbergGlen Ellen, since 2023
We have had three other landscape firms quote on this project over the years. Driftwood was the only one who began by asking what we wanted to feel like, not what we wanted to look like.The Howell Mountain wineryNapa, since 2025
We take on six to eight projects a year. Right now we are scheduling site walks for autumn 2026 starts. The earliest we can break ground on a new garden is March 2027.
An email with a short note about your property — where it is, roughly how much you've been told a garden might cost, what you're hoping it might one day become — is the right place to start. We'll reply within a week.