Outdoor & Garden Design
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Quick Takes With: Corwin Green and Damon Arrington
In this week’s installment of Quick Takes, we present a pair of Brooklyn academics with a flair for garden design, Corwin Green and Damon Arrington, partners in life and business. Corwin teaches communication design and social design at Pratt Institute, School of Visual Arts, and Parsons School of Design. Damon teaches landscape design at Cornell, […]
Brooklyn Backyard Visit: A Fruitful Collab Between an Architect and Landscape Designers
A half a dozen Cor-ten steel planters filled with naturalistic plantings on Brooklyn’s Court Street inspired a homeowner to track down their creator, Verru Design, to work on her townhouse’s backyard. “They were sort of wild and lush, and the client really loved that look,” remembers Damon Arrington, one of the partners behind the Brooklyn-based […]
Quick Takes With: Butter Wakefield
Let us count the many reasons we love Butter Wakefield, the Maryland-born, London-based garden designer who has won numerous prestigious awards for her exuberant projects (twice at the Chelsea Flower Show!). 1) She has no fear of color (her home is as bright and joyful as her gardens). 2) No outdoor space is too tiny […]
A Secret Garden—and Glass Extension—in London’s Tufnell Park
We’ve long admired the work of New York architects Messana O’Rorke. When we inquired about the glass wall extension and surrounding landscaping of their impressive project in London’s Tufnell Park, we were led to the work of landscape designer Joanne Bernstein. As it turns out, the project is Bernstein’s own property and when she took […]
Ask the Experts: The Best Bulbs to Naturalize in Spring
The new book A Year in Bloom has a great premise: Ask some of the world’s top garden people to talk about their favorite bulbs, thus solving one of gardeners’ biggest dilemmas—which of the many, many bulbs out there to plant. And the beautifully packaged results come as a relief, as the trend is mainly […]
Required Reading: ‘The Food Forward Garden,’ A Manual on How to Have Your Beautiful Yard—And Eat ...
Flipping through The Food Forward Garden, the first thing you notice isn’t the fruits and vegetables—and that’s intentional. Landscape designer Christian Douglas has been creating backyard kitchen gardens in Northern California for more than 12 years; in that time he has learned that clients are much more likely to tend and harvest from the garden, […]
10 Ideas to Borrow From Japanese-Inspired Gardens
It’s no coincidence if Japanese gardens remind you of those scene-in-a-shoebox dioramas you made in grade school. A Japanese garden is a miniature world full of abstract shapes–rocks, gravel, and cloud-pruned plants–designed to represent the larger landscape of nature. And Nature. For centuries, Zen Buddhist monks and other Japanese landscaping designers have been trying to provoke deep thoughts, […]
Quick Takes With: Tama Matsuoka Wong
We’ve been writing about Tama Matsuoka Wong for more than a decade—first in 2013 when we joined her for a foraging (and eating) adventure on her 28-acre property in Hunterdon County, NJ, then again in 2017 when she co-authored the cookbook Scraps, Wilt + Weeds with Danish chef Mads Refslund (of Noma fame). And more […]
Garden Visit: At Home with Designer Julie Weiss in Manhattan
After years of living with a shared rooftop garden in lower Manhattan, designer Julie Weiss decided to let the plants win. “I love the wild, overgrown feel,” says Weiss, who was Vanity Fair’s art director from 2004 to 2014. “It’s a contrast to the city.” Weiss, an LA native, lets the garden take on a life […]
Your First Garden: What You Need to Know Before You Plant Bulbs
I’ve always known in theory that if you plant spring-flowering bulbs (such as tulips, daffodils, crocuses, and alliums) you can fill your garden with successive waves of color for three months while you wait for summer. But in my garden, after the spring flowers on the azaleas and rhododendrons fade? Nothing—until June. I eye my […]
10 Things Your Landscape Designer Wishes You Knew About Gravel (But Is Too Polite to Tell You)
My clients are often in love with gravel, or at least with the idea of gravel. But as a landscape designer, I have a love-hate relationship with the paving material. The other day I visited a clients’ newly purchased house—and realized that the sellers had put pea gravel between the entry pavers to “dress it […]
Landscape Design Visit: A Rejuvenated Outdoor Living Space for a Landmark Home in Brooklyn Heights
A couple months ago, I wrote a story for Remodelista about a modernist landmark Brooklyn Heights townhouse restored by Starling Architecture. The post focused on the sophisticated midcentury-style kitchen, but I was equally enamored with the verdant backyard, cleverly laid out as multiple outdoor “rooms.” The goal, says landscape designer Nishiel Patel, the mastermind behind […]
Garden Visit: In Petaluma, a Couple with No Yard Creates a Magical Outdoor Space Just Down the Block
On a quiet side street dotted with older homes and industrial buildings in downtown Petaluma, California, is a secret garden: the unexpected Balinese-inspired “backyard” (you’ll understand why this is in quotes as you read on) of commercial photographers Stephanie Rausser and Lawrence Cowell. The space is thoughtfully named “Alchemy,” for the way it seamlessly combines […]
Landscape Architect Visit: How Stefano Marinaz Uses His London Allotment as a Garden Laboratory
An allotment is the British English term for community garden, but it means more than that: it is a European concept of growing food where space at home might be limited. It has currency in the UK and Italy, where landscape architect Stefano Marinaz grew up, taking stock of his grandfather’s allotment and learning the […]
Landscaping on a Budget: 10 Ways I Saved Money on My Garden Remodel
All week, we’re republishing some of our favorite Garden Visits that have a personal connection to our writers. No public gardens here, no vast estates, no professionally designed landscapes—just the backyards, vegetable patches, and flower beds that remind our writers of home. This story by Gardenista founder Michelle Slatalla is from 2017. Whether it’s a […]