Golden Gate Palms and Exotics

Gary was very helpful! Be patient, they are very busy, but eventually they will get back to you.

We love working with Gary! He’s got a great eye and creative vision for yard projects, and has sold us a number of palms over the years. I only miss that his HGTV show, Superscapes, is no longer airing – it was pretty inspiring. He comes highly recommended by us.

Gary the owner charged me a decent amount to come out and consult, the fee being refundable to tree purchase. Fair enough, he’s in Livermore, I’m in San Jose, he could spend 100% of his time on long drives for every single interested prospect. He came out and spent a good amount of time looking at my two queen palms, one of which was sick and the other reasonably healthy.
Gary gave me a complete diagnosis of both trees and the possibility of remove/​replace of the sick tree. I learned alot about how to care for these trees, I wish the original landscape installer had told me half of these things. Gary took lots of pics, looked carefully at the trunk shape, frond shape, etc… He went back and found a good match and installed it this morning. Took like two hours from arrival to departure, and left very little mess, no landscape or lighting damage.
Replacement tree is much greener than my other current healthy tree. Gary went over the feeding and care of these, which was much more detailed than the scant directions I got the first time.
Basically if you’re going to invest lots of money in these trees, understand how to care for them. Gary goes into extensive detail on that, for which I’m grateful. He also provided a bag of special palm fertilizer which I could not seem to acquire from anywhere else.
So far, the first day of the new tree, the whole experience has been great.
I think the price was fair, from what I remember of the first tree purchase/​install, quite fair all told.

We recently put in a pool at our house, and wanted to do a tropical garden around it. We spent a lot of time and money (on multiple landscape architects), unsuccessfully trying to figure out what to do — until I found Gary. The problem with landscape architects is that they can specify all sorts of exotic tropical plants — but it doesn’t help if you can’t find those plants, or they won’t grow in your backyard. With Gary, it’s the perfect situation — he’s incredibly knowledgeable (I believe he used to do a lot of landscape designs), and he has AFAICT the biggest inventory of palms and tropical plants in the Bay Area. Plus he knows what grows around here — and where to place them in your garden.
For a large landscape project, where you’re willing to pay for some of his time, his service can’t be beat. I spent time with him in his nursery, a couple of hours on the phone, and then ultimately he came down to my place with a truckload of plants and we just placed them everywhere to see what we liked before planting. Ultimately, despite spending a decent amount of money, I feel like it was a great value… And now we have our tropical paradise!

Gary, the owner, guided me carefully and thoughtfully through the process of picking out and installing palms. He called me consistently through the installation to make sure we were doing everything correctly. All his personnel were prompt and professional. The palms that we got are going to make our inner courtyard fantastic. Thanks to Gary and his whole gang.

Diseased plants, No Return policy, Bad Customer Service
I had negative experience with this nursery. Briefly, half of the plants that I bought turned out to be sick, the owner refused to exchange the trees when contacted within a week, and I was charged more than already high price that I was asked to pay at the nursery. More details are below.
I came across Golden Gate Palms and Exotics while searching for avocado trees information online. They have a really nice website, and claimed to have a number of hard to find exotic trees. Although on a pricey side, I purchased 4 trees from them that I was not able to easily find elsewhere.
Out of these 4 trees, 2 trees turned out to be diseased. Sir Prize avocado ($ 125) did not look good, but I trusted the owner when he told that this is the way this variety looks in spring. Not so — it died to the ground pretty fast, and now after 5 month it has just a few new leaves on. I have 7 more avocados from other nurseries which are happy and growing.
Another tree, Pindo palm ($ 125) developed brown spots on lower leaves within a week of purchasing. Again, the owner claimed that the leaves were just old. It turned out to be a fungus, and the palm lost the majority of its leaves. This is the only palm out of nine that we planted that has a problem.
The owner refused to exchange/​refund the trees when I contacted him within a week, claiming no return policy and stating that I should have checked better what I am buying rather than relying on his and his assistant’s words. To add to the injury, the owner called a couple of days earlier to charge more, because his assistant forgot to charge extra for the credit card use.
To summarize, I had very unpleasant experience, and after 5 month I have two barely surviving trees to remind me about it.