She hired as office manager Hinda Teague Hill, an author and former schoolteacher, who helped Bashford promote her business by publishing articles on landscape design.

She later hired a trained landscape architect with engineering skills, Beatrice M. Williams, to help work on the large gardens that were coming into vogue.

[1] Bashford's combination of artistic talent and business skill made her one of the most respected southern California landscape architects and kept her in demand throughout her 25-year career.

[1] Although Bashford's aesthetic as a landscape designer was influenced by European models, on the whole she leaned away from traditional landscaping—she disliked foundation plantings, for example—and towards a more informal style that emphasized simplicity and human scale.

[1][4][5] She was a proponent of massing flowers by color to create abstract compositions, and a number of her designs featured the flower-bordered walkways, patios, low tiled fountains and benches, fruit trees, and use of large potted plants as accents than are now staples of southern California residential landscaping.

[1] As a contemporary writer observed admiringly of her work, Bashford's "desire and aim has been to make gardens and home settings comply with the California spirit... she is first and last a real artist.

[2] In 1937, Bashford and Barlow's work was included in the San Francisco Museum of Art's "Contemporary Landscape Architecture and Its Sources," the first exhibition on this subject in a major U.S.

[4] In 2013, the KenCott Manor garden Bashford designed for Kenyon and Patricia Reynolds in 1928 was under consideration for the National Register of Historic Places.