Water Efficient Gardens

Choosing the right partner for your water-efficient garden is a critical step towards a beautiful, sustainable, and rebate-eligible landscape. At Water Efficient Gardens, we don't just design gardens—we deliver a comprehensive, expert-led service that maximizes your benefits and ensures a thriving, biodiverse space.

Here’s what sets us apart from the competition:

Deep Rebate Knowhow

Navigating local water rebates can be complex, but it’s our specialty. As a designer partner with multiple regional agencies, we have successfully completed numerous rebate-driven projects.

We handle the paperwork and design to meet every requirement, resulting in a 100% success rate for our clients receiving their eligible rebates. We ensure your investment is maximized from day one.

System Approach: A Thriving, Balanced Ecosystem

We approach every garden as a complete, interconnected system. Our primary goal is to achieve aesthetics, water efficiency and biodiversity benefit through holistic design.

In addition to using low-water native plants, we also design rain gardens and greywater reuse systems. We pay close attention to the soil health and the plant community, so they can thrive long-term. When we design a vegetable garden, we strategically add native plants to attract pollinators, which can naturally boost harvest.

Native Plant Expertise & Strong Biodiversity Benefit

Our passion and expertise lie in designing with native plants. We have abundant experience crafting native gardens that thrive in local climates. By featuring a wide selection of regional native plants in every design, we strongly support local biodiversity.

Our gardens are designed to attract and sustain pollinators , making sightings of all kinds of beneficial insects a constant source of enjoyment for property owners.

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Staggered Bloom Time Throughout the Year

Want a garden that provides color and life across all four seasons? That is our expertise. We meticulously select plants with staggered bloom times to ensure there is always something beautiful in your garden, no matter the month. In all our designs, we include a detailed "Month of Bloom" chart , so you can visualize exactly when different plants will overlap and provide continuous interest throughout the year.

Rain Garden Expert

We are one of the leading experts in low-impact development features, having designed close to 100 rain gardens. From initial design to flawless installation, we understand every single detail required to implement a rain garden correctly. This expertise ensures effective stormwater management, improved water quality, and a beautiful, functional landscape element.

Learn how this feature can benefit your property:
What is a rain garden?

Grey Water Reuse Certification

We are officially certified for. laundry machine greywater system design and installation.This certification highlights our commitment to comprehensive water-efficient solutions, allowing us to integrate one of the most effective residential water reuse systems into your landscape design.

Cutting Edge Design Presentation

We bring your vision to life before a single shovel breaks ground. All our final designs are rendered in 3D, providing you with a clear, immersive visualization of your future garden.

Furthermore, using your input and our proprietary technology, we can generate high-quality inspirational garden images to guide more-developed designs, ensuring the final result is exactly what you dreamed of.

Our Impact: Before and After

We are so happy with our yard! We weren’t sure what we wanted at first, but we were drawn to the designer's unique and colorful designs. She has a great eye for mixing different colors and textures of plants, and she designed a completely California native yard that has something in bloom year-round. We have received so many compliments from neighbors since installing our new yard. Having Water Efficient Gardens manage the reimbursement process with the county was also really wonderful. She knows how the department works and submitted everything they requested very quickly. We received our reimbursement with no issues not too long after our yard was complete.

- Megan S.

It was the best decision to work with Shelkie to have it redone with a rain garden that would attract bees and butterflies. She worked with a few plants I had already in place that I did want to keep, and put in native plants that are low maintenance and water sparing. I told her what was important to me and she made the whole process easy and worked to find the best fit. After she created the design, she arranged for a landscaper to carry out her plans, and oversaw the whole project. She also facilitated the process for getting a water rebate.

It has been 3 years now and I still get comments from people passing by about how well done the yard is. It still makes me happy when I look out at the yard, especially when something is in bloom, which Shelkie staggered plants to do for several months of the year. Very reasonable cost for what was done, especially with the water rebate. Wish I had done it sooner!

- Helen C.

We recently converted our lawn to drought tolerant plants. Working with Water Efficient Gardens was easy. They handled the paperwork for the rebates and brought in a contractor to install the plants and irrigation. They created a low-maintenance design with a rain garden. Highly recommend!

- Nancy L.

Working with Shelkie Tao has been a joy start to finish! She crafted us a beautiful, low-maintenance, water-efficient California natives garden in a palette that reflects our tastes and with plants that fit the precise needs of our soil conditions and space. Throughout the process, she was endlessly responsive -- always willing to answer our questions and to share her deep native plants expertise. Her Lawn Replacement Rebate Assistance program made interfacing with Valley Water so easy and we were delighted to have each step of our project quickly approved. It's been three months since installation, and already -- in the middle of winter! -- our garden is growing and blooming and the lovely rain garden feature handled our recent storms beautifully. We've already had monarch caterpillars munching on our milkweeds! We have gotten so many compliments on our front yard's transformation and we've learned so much from Shelkie. She has a passion for California's wonderful native plant heritage that is absolutely infectious! We recommend her with greatest enthusiasm and can't wait to work with her again!

- Elizabeth J.

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Water Efficient Gardens Difference