Garden Design
Coaching + Consultations
Do you have the motivation and interest to create a beautiful outdoor space in your yard, but don’t know where to begin?
In a Garden Coaching Consult, Todd will spend two hours walking your landscape with you and discussing your ideas and questions, from design of spaces to details about plants. Together you can develop a list of action items to help manifest your vision and prioritize them by need and season. Todd will also help you identify the plants already growing on-site and will discuss with you their medicinal and ecological benefits. After this session, you will come away with written notes from your time together and a diagram of your landscape keyed to the topics you and he discussed. After that first session, you come away with a road-map for how to proceed and a diagram of your landscape keyed to the topics you discussed together.
There can be one session or as many as you might need to check in on progress. After the first session, follow ups are prorated into packages to suit your budget and needs. This garden coaching service is perfect for those with a limited budget, or those looking for some direction with a project they have in mind.
“Thank you Todd, this is marvelous. You have helped me appreciate what is already growing, and the ‘vision’ I already had. Although, I didn’t know I had it! I will get on most of this soon, and I look forward to the Spring when you visit us (me and the landscape) again with your wonderful vision and eye and ideas and advice.”
– Garden Coaching client
Site Specific Design
Our front yards and backyards are where we greet the world and seek refuge from it. These spaces enhance our experience of home as we enter and we gather or reflect. All seasons offer wonderful opportunities for being outdoors and experiencing our landscapes in a dynamic way. The front yards and backyards around our homes reflect our personalities, commitments to the earth and broadcast our values to the community. There are many ways your yard can become an expression of who you are and what you believe in. Front yard and backyard designs help you develop your vision more formally than the coaching.
In this collaborative process, Todd walks the landscape with you and listens to what your needs and goals are for your outdoors. After a thorough understanding the site, we can then create a specific design to meet your desired outcomes. This might include stairs, patios, and walls as well as plantings for health and /healing, creating habitat for pollinators, adding more beauty, or screening an undesirable view. We can also help you to source plants suitable for landscape and medicinal/edible use.
The specific plans you will receive at the end of the process are in both digital and paper formats. These plans are helpful for future reference about where certain plants are, and for looking back at what your original intentions were.
Comprehensive Landscape Design
The landscapes we inhabit are part of a larger whole. As parts of this larger system, it is important to understand our relationships to the larger landscape. This understanding informs choices we make to shape our outdoor spaces to enhance habitat, reduce damage from water or to make the landscape healthier. Landscape design is a conversation between designer, homeowner and landscape that produces beauty, health and resilience for all involved.
We collaborate with you to develop a vision for your property. This vision meets your goals and aspirations for the landscape. In this process, you work closely with our designer to understand how your land functions. As a result, you receive a final plan that reflects the beauty and unique nature of your landscape as part of a larger ecological context. With the landscape design process, you come away with a deep understanding of your landscape and a plan in paper and digital format that gives you a way forward to develop parts of it with sensitivity, art and beauty. This plan is a wonderful document to enhance future owner’s understanding of your intentions for the landscape.
With our unique synthesis of design, art, edible plants, and herbal medicine expertise we work with you to create calming and restorative outdoor spaces. These spaces will reflect you and your family’s unique relationship with the landscape and how you choose to be outdoors. Whether it is in a large gathering area or quiet, intimate sanctuaries, we can help with the integration of wood, stone and plant material into places that will become beloved parts of your home.
Medicinal Gardens
Medicinal Gardens are specifically designed to help people and families achieve optimal wellness. Integrating herbalism with landscape design, Todd connects our internal landscapes to external ones. This union gives people a context for their health and roots it in home. Many plants grown ornamentally can be used as medicine. Empowering people to make their own medicine from material outside their door personalizes the healing process. Medicinal Gardens can instill gratitude for the healing power of the remedies. Harvesting plants from home also has the advantage of providing people a known provenance for their herbs. This relationship fosters a deeper connection to the landscape and connects people to age-old cultural traditions of herbalism. As an added benefit, many of the medicinal plants are also native and help to support local ecology and biodiversity.
We design medicinal gardens to support your health needs and goals. Patios, stairs, connecting paths through your gardens, or simply an array of plants that you can harvest for your health can form the basis of a garden. In addition to designing the garden, Todd will share with you sources for organic, non-gmo plant material, as well as ways to create herbal honeys, tea and tinctures, so that you can use what you grow and live in harmony with your land and feel restored in all parts of your being. By integrating these plants into the landscape and giving you an understanding of their different possible uses, we empower you to engage with the landscape on an active, meaningful, and potentially restorative level.
Installation Art
We can create custom art installations using materials from your land or elsewhere to reflect who you are and to highlight the beauty of your garden. Todd has partnered with the Trustees of Reservations and Mass Audubon on art installation projects and received numerous cultural council grants to create meditative, inspiring pieces that bring people joy, serenity and delight.
