MONTARA — If the job of a good coach is to guide and inspire a team to greatness, the mark of a good "garden coach" is a happy customer with a truly great garden.

That's how Jack McKinnon explains his job to homeowners, who are usually quick to grasp the concept. That's a nice change from several years ago, when the former groundskeeper at Sunset Magazine started marketing his skills as a garden guru to people in need of advice.

"I spent all my time explaining what a landscape consultant was. But when I became a "garden coach," they got it. Seventy-five percent of people would respond, 'I need you!'" said McKinnon before laughing.

For $300, the jovial Pescadero resident will assess a garden's strengths and weaknesses, offer design advice if needed, and suggest ways for a homeowner to save money. Much like a regular coach, he says half the job is psychological — listening to a client describe their needs, lessen their sense of stress with simple suggestions, and encourage their imaginations.

"I teach people how to be their own designer. I try to open up situations to help the client think for themselves, rather than just giving them ideas," said McKinnon, a former board member of the San Mateo Arboretum Society. "For a huge part of it I'm just telling them what I see, what's working, what plants are healthy and which are not."

No case is too hopeless for McKinnon, who sometimes serves clients whose front yards

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are trashed with tools, dilapidated wheelbarrows, broken benches and shrubs that have blocked out the sun.

Sometimes a client doesn't want a whole new garden, just some space, a few bright colors and other intimate touches that create a friendlier place in which to coexist with nature.

When McKinnon visited Eric Schapira and his wife at their Montara home, their garden was "really a mess. A lot of ivy growing into other plants, overgrown plants everywhere," said McKinnon. The couple had a dream of sitting together in their front lawn, but they had to remove heaps of shrubs to do it. They cut down a 120-foot pine tree and installed two deck chairs in its former shadow. They planted a variety of succulents and bright flowers, like geraniums, while clearing weeds that threatened to engulf their wild lilies and nasturtiums.

Next, the couple plans to install a gazebo in the backyard and a fountain out front.

Schapira said McKinnon offered dozens of suggestions based on the concept he and his wife were hoping to achieve.

"He knows every genus of every species of everything in Latin. It kind of blows you away," said Schapira in wonder. "All I know is I want a little purple thing here and a little yellow thing there."

McKinnon gave Schapira a free "tune-up" Thursday, playing doctor to a garden full of patients — some sickly, some healthy and some on the mend. No sooner had he stepped into the front lawn than he focused on a crooked little lemon tree that he said would need to be replanted and nurtured with strong weekly doses of fertilizer. He suggested the time had come to uproot a sickly-looking pine sapling hemmed in by a towering jade plant, and diagnosed a spittle bug infestation in a fuschia tree, while offering a treatment.

It's not the prospect of a picture-perfect garden that thrills McKinnon — he has transformed spaces of every size, from a 30-acre ranch in La Honda to a 3-by-10-foot pocket of backyard. It's the human interaction, something he discovered he loved when he was asked to give tours of the grounds he maintained for 12 years at Sunset Magazine.

"All of a sudden they're asking questions and I'm cracking jokes, and if I couldn't answer something, I'd call them up afterwards on my own time," said McKinnon, who keeps an index card of all the gardens he's ever seen and hopes to see in his shirt pocket at all times. "Pretty soon I was visiting people, giving them advice."

For more information, visit www.jackthegardencoach.com.

Staff writer Julia Scott can be reached at (650) 348-4340 or at julia.scott@bayareanewsgroup.com.