Services

Start with your feet on the ground. Let's walk together, touch grass, drink from the spring. The plums are ripe, gotta taste. Listen: katydid, crickets, peepers, wind. Keep your eyes open for ghosts (ruins, remnants, stories) and look in the archives. Send soil to the lab, but also make sure you taste it! Scientific and bodily ways of knowing can co-exist and compliment. The land is rich with story.

From experience we make drawings, reports, maps, lists. This is a process we want to undertake with you. This is where we start, from this reading and listening we are in a much better position to propose changes to the land that are careful, creative, and considered.

Deliverable

Drawn survey + report, experience.

Season

Any

Paper and screen are only tools for planning our moves. The thing itself is the making of a place. At the end of the day, what we care about is creating places that are good for our clients and the wider biotic communites with whom they share their homes. To this end, we convene a tight team of clients, gardeners, and builders to form places more alive and particular than any rendering could ever be. Place arises ultimately from on-the-ground labor, and we want to be there for that beautiful transformation, not just pushing papers.

Deliverable

Deeply beautiful and cared for places

Season

The heat of summer and the cold of winter for design The shoulder seasons for implementation

Swales, check dams, sediment traps and re-graded banks. When the rains come, we hit the road, visiting your land to see how it behaves in the inundation. We are anticipating the increased storm intensities wrought by the changing climate and prepare the ground to receive the great gift (and potential hazard) of high water.

Deliverable

Earthworks, ponds, swales.

Season

Observe when wet, reshape when dry.

Plants are kin. We have common ancestors and we have co-evoloved over deep-time, providing for each other with generosity. We relate to plants through this framework, demonizing none. We collaborate closely with nurseries and plant-knowledge holders to relate to these kin with care and humility.

Deliverable

Planting plan, install, pruning, scything, harvesting.

Season

Fall / early spring

Between a highly-controlled parterre and "wilderness" is a vast world of collaborative potential between human communities and the broader communities of life that sustain each other. Instead of trying to eradicate the Wineberry (Rubus phoenicolasius) a so called "invasive", we scythe openings and boundaries: path for Box Turtle, Black Bear, and Deer. And then we feast. We can work with you to develop strategies that are low-intensity and high-impact: strategies that appreciate the abundance of life and the limits of our own control.

Deliverable

Tending plan + seasonal visits

Season

Ongoing

The map is not the territory: the map is a tool for asking better questions of the lands where we practice design. We utilize techniques both tactile and technical to synthesize ecological and cultural readings of the land. Drone photogrammetry, ground-based LiDAR, hand-drawing, clay-sculpture, CNC-fabrication: these are just a few of the tools we use to fashion devices for better understanding the surface of this planet we call home. FAA Part 107 certified.

Deliverable

Photogrammetry, point-cloud, and gaussian splat models. CNC-routed models. Printed sheets. Hand drawings.

Season

Leaf on or leaf off, ideally both.

The survey-to-drawing pipeline we built ourselves, set up so another practice can run it themselves: capture, processing, 3D modeling, file structure, and a record that keeps it all findable later. Our goal is structured documentation and design processes that keep the design from getting too locked in too early and a client-portal that keeps client's engaged in the design process.

Deliverable

Set-up, documentation, custom software modules

Season

Any, but winter is best

Reading place, moving sticks, laying stone, sowing a meadow, flying a survey. We have taught workshops for folks ages 4 to 94, for landscape professionals and those just wanting to get their hands dirty. Nothing beats being together on the land, learning from each other, from the plants, from the ground.

Deliverable

A single 2 hour workshop up to a multi-day series

Season

Spring and fall