About PINE HOUSE
At Pine House Edible Gardens we design, install and maintain beautiful, productive edible landscapes that provide bountiful harvests of organic fruits, vegetables, herbs and cutting flowers. Our gardens create space for beauty, peace and connection in our client’s lives. As part of our maintenance services, we harvest and process garden-grown food and flowers, as well as teach our clients the skills to do so themselves.
As a multi-racial, queer inclusive, Black-owned company and women-lead team, we stand for more than just healthy food and beautiful landscapes—we support making gardens accessible to all through our equity pricing program and Black Sanctuary Gardens project.
We believe an edible garden can be a transformative space to grow and cultivate the world we want for ourselves and for our communities.
Learn more about our services here; to contact us click here.
Our Team
Leslie Bennett, Owner & Founding Principal
Leslie Bennett is a landscape designer and writer based in Oakland, California, who creates gardens that help to nourish us and tell the story of who we are. She is the founder and owner of Pine House Edible Gardens (www.PineHouseEdibleGarden.com) an Oakland-based landscape design/build firm that creates culturally grounded gardens that provide as much visual inspiration as they do organic harvests of food, flowers and medicinal herbs.
Leslie is also the founder of the Black Sanctuary Gardens project and is co-author of Garden Wonderland (Ten Speed Press, 2024) and The Beautiful Edible Garden (Ten Speed Press, 2013). She is included on the Elle Decor A-List for 2023 and the two years preceding, was named a Top 50 Black Trailblazer by Oprah in 2022, and is a recipient of the American Horticultural Society’s Landscape Design Award.
Leslie's work as a principal at Pine House entails guiding the overall vision for the firm’s work and working collaboratively with the Pine House design and maintenance teams to create and care for aesthetic edible gardens and productive outdoor spaces around the SF Bay Area.
Leslie and the Pine House team’s work have been featured in Architectural Digest, Elle Decor, Martha Stewart Living, OprahDaily.com, Better Homes & Gardens, Sunset Magazine, Garden Design, C Magazine, American Gardener, New York Times, Los Angeles Times, San Francisco Chronicle and Gardenista.com.
Raised in the Bay Area, Leslie holds degrees from Harvard University, Columbia Law School, and University College London in the fields of environmental justice, land use law, cultural property and preservation. She lives and gardens in Oakland with her two children.
Holly Kuljian, Principal & Landscape Architect
Holly Kuljian is an Oakland and Santa Barbara, CA based landscape architect who designs gardens that are oriented to engage and create an immersive human experience. A Bay Area resident since 2007, Holly grew up in Santa Barbara (where her obsession with Agaves began) and holds a degree from Cal Poly San Luis Obispo in Landscape Architecture.
Holly is a principal at Pine House Edible Gardens, an Oakland, CA based landscape design/build firm that creates aesthetic edible gardens and productive outdoor spaces. With a background in large scale public spaces and landscapes that support interactive childrens’ play, Holly’s interest in how people interact with their environment and reside in harmony with the landscape translates across any size or type of space. Holly has found that the common thread of a successful garden is the degree to which people want to interact with the space, bonding us to nature by sensing its beauty. Holly’s intention with her work is about changing minds, including her own, about what’s possible in a garden space: “Looking forward, I feel called to help change the perception of what a beautiful garden looks like—it’s crucial that awe inspiring landscapes that aren’t water intensive are featured centrally in the new canon of great gardens.”
Holly’s work has been featured in Architectural Digest, Martha Stewart Living and Better Homes & Gardens magazines.
Lonna Lopez, Garden Designer
Jessica Comerford, Garden Designer & Maintenance Program Manager
Anna Oznowicz, Garden Designer
Rhan Aladjem, Lead Gardener and Ornamental Maintenance Advisor
Corazon Villota, Office Manager
MAINTENANCE TEAM : Corey Sanford, Haley Robertson-Kosman, Mera Freeman-Gerlac, Aaron Moss, and Maria Hurwitz
Pine House Philosophy
The work we do at Pine House Edible Gardens is built on the belief that the human impulse to be in relationship with land and with each other can be met in a beautiful, productive garden.
We also believe that every person deserves access to these relationships and the space to cultivate them.
Gardens are healing, restorative, nurturing spaces where we can become better attuned to ourselves, increase our resiliency, connect more with the traditions and cultures that define us, and work to actively create the world we want to live in.
For those of us privileged to have access to land, we can use the great benefits we receive from the garden to fuel our work to create a more just and equitable world.
When you work with Pine House to create your own garden, you are also contributing to our efforts to increase access to gardens for most vulnerable groups, especially Black women and Black communities. Our equity pricing model helps to make valuable resources available to all.
Working together, we can celebrate our collective relationship with plants and nature, support access to gardens for vulnerable and BIPOC communities, while enjoying all that the garden brings to our daily lives.