Native Plants
Old World Stonework
Wildflower Meadows
Edible Landscapes
Butterfly, Bee, & Bird Gardens
Green Garden Care
Local Materials
Resource Conservation
Sustainable Community Partnerships
Ecological design takes its cues from nature’s patterns and principles to create beautiful, low maintenance and affordable landscapes. By learning from nature’s efficiencies we create productive gardens and healthy landscapes that are worry free and require no fertilizer or chemicals. We work with residential & commercial clients large and small. Call or email to set up an appointment.
We love using native plants because we feel there is nothing so tough or as beautiful. Native plants are incredibly drought tolerant and handle the rigors of our unique environment better than other plants. They hold up against temperature changes and require no maintenance beside a modest amount of mulch.
The native plants of the Shenandoah Valley and surrounding mountains are amazing and endlessly fascinating. We love to introduce our clients to this vast treasure trove that has for so long been largely unavailable in nurseries. As native plants have caught on over the last ten years, there are greater and greater numbers of native trees, native shrubs, and native perennials and grasses that we are proud to be able to offer for any landscape need. The seasonal changes they bring are lovely to behold and provide a ready habitat for songbirds, butterflies and pollinators. This low maintenance approach to your landscape is a truly delightful solution.
Contact us to discuss the native plant communities appropriate for your landscape. We have great lists for the different biomes in our area and colorful pictures to help you get to know your native plants best suited to your landscape.
When we build a stone wall or patio we know it will be around for a very, very long time. This is why we guarantee all our dry-set stone walls and stone patios, walks, and steps for life. And what is more beautiful than using our native limestone or sandstone in a wall or patio, walk or steps? Please check out the work we’ve been doing for a combined 35+ years by clicking on portfolio in the menu.
We refer to our work as old world stonework because we’ve been working in the old world tradition of setting our patios, walks and steps and building our stone walls without mortar since 1993. We do this because properly built stone projects last longer without mortar. Because dry set stonework flexes with the freeze and thaw and allows water to pass through freely, cracks that inevitably develop in mortared stonework are a non-issue in our work. 
And because of this and because our inexpensive environmentally-friendly crushed gravel foundations are solid, our dry set stone walls, patios, or walks are virtually maintenance free.
Building in this time-honored tradition is not only more sustainable, but can take less time and cost less as well. For these reasons and because we have beautiful local stone so readily available it is a very good solution to almost every hardscape need.
For more examples of what is possible with no mortar please check out the Drystone Conservancy. Their conservancy is doing great work training stonemasons in this lost art of old world stone masonry. Through their expertise, we’ve fine-tuned a few details in our approach to dry stone walls. Visit them at www.drystone.org and see the amazing work our friend Neil Rippingale and his team have been doing for a good number of years now.
There are few things that inspire as much as a native wildflower meadow that provides habitat for our native butterflies, pollinators, insects and birds. There is great initiative in the Shenandoah Valley to restore habitat for the bobwhite quail. We are excited to see how much interest people have in returning a portion of their land back to native grasslands or wildflower meadows.
We restored our first native Shenandoah Valley wildflower meadow in 2001 and were amazed to see how quickly the many native flowers and grasses took hold and settled in. While it was a very small first meadow, what was almost more surprising was how many pollinators and butterflies came to enjoy their native habitat and feed from the abundant nectar. Just one year after we seeded the meadow, while working nearby at the edge of a natural water garden, I heard the loud drone of a low flying dragonfly in hot pursuit of a hummingbird. The colonization of wildlife was well underway. After these raucous summer adventurers settled down I was surprised again to see that, by late winter, the birds had come to enjoy virtually every seed from every dried flower head in that meadow.
The way a native meadow changes from April through January is dramatic. The progression of blooms doesn’t stop until late November when the glory of the native grasses move to center stage with their tawny colors that glow brightly after a fall rain. Snow and ice create lovely sculptures with the wheat colored grasses and remaining perennial seed heads.
In addition to planting native wildflower meadows we also help clients restore native woodlands and savannas by using the appropriate native plant communities to wherever our client’s project is located in the Shenandoah Valley or surrounding mountains. We can also help you restore your streams and wetlands by collaborating with our partners and good friends at Ecosystem Services, who are local experts in designing stream and wetland restoration projects. Call us to learn more about how we can help you restore the native plant communities appropriate to your needs whether it is a small urban lot or large farm.
Whether you want just a few attractive edible plants or fruit-bearing trees and shrubs intermixed within your existing landscape or a large produce garden, we can help you start raising food in a way that will fit within most any budget or landscape.
Integrating vegetables and fruit, and even nuts into the landscape can be seamless and lovely. If starting small is the right approach for you, a window box right outside your kitchen window to grow a few herbs can be a way to get going. Or, a few deep containers on your back porch will be all that’s needed to grow tomatoes, herbs, or greens. If the containers are in full sun most of the day, just be sure they get enough water.
Perhaps you feel like trying something different and want to add produce into your existing landscape, planting a large drift of Rainbow Chard, can give you color and greens for a good part of the year. One of our clients planted strawberries of the variety that turns brilliant crimson in fall. Growing right next to the native meadow and ornamental garden we planted for them, I was impressed with how effective this worked as an ornamental groundcover. The berries were excellent too!
Chives make a stunning drift when in bloom (see in our Portfolio what we were asked to do in 95’ for Joshua Wilton House) and make a delicious topping to any salad or a great sour cream-based dressing when blended. Planting a serviceberry tree in a tight spot to shade a patio not only will bring white blooms and fall color, but provides berries that you can eat straight from the tree if you can get them before the birds do. My sister has one that shades their patio and became a perfect climbing tree for my nieces. An arbor with grape vines growing over a patio is another option for natural shade and can make the harvest much more convenient.
If you want to invest a little more effort, we can help you design an herb and vegetable garden within small planting beds in a dry stone patio just outside your kitchen door. This can blend with any landscape and house and can be formal and traditional, more naturalistic, or can even be planted using modern clean lines for the contemporary house. Or, if you are interested in a full-scale food-production garden, we can help you plan out crop rotation, cover crop options, compost systems, water conservation, raised bed designs, companion plantings. We can help you learn how to use marigolds to deter nematodes and show you how you can harvest your lawn and landscape clippings, and even your cardboard, to beautifully mulch your produce beds.
We can help you with these and other vegetable and fruit growing efficiencies to make gardening a joy and not a job. There are endless options for saving money and space and creating a real wonderland of beauty and bounty. We can help you plan all of this. Raising your own vegetables and fruit at whatever scale can provide endless satisfaction…and nutrition!
Because we specialize in native plants, all our diverse landscapes attract butterflies, bees, and birds. But, if you have a special interest in creating a real enticement for butterflies or bees or birds, we can design your gardens to be an even more attractive habitat to a greater array of winged visitors. We do this in a number of ways: by increasing the diversity of plant species; by introducing moving water into the landscape; by increasing the number of berries and seeds for birds and the number of flowering plants to attract butterflies and bees, (especially the aster family and flowers with umbel-shaped blooms). The Shenandoah Valley is a unique migratory fly-way and providing food and a haven for birds and butterflies to rest and replenish is an experience you can enjoy with the right kind of planning.
But, a butterfly, bee, and bird garden is not only beautiful and fascinating. It is a workhorse for you garden and landscape. Butterflies, bees, and birds help to create a more productive garden and a low-maintenance landscape. This happens in a couple of ways. When you draw butterflies and bees into your landscape you are attracting pollinators whose presence equals good flower set and fruit production.
This pollinator garden will also provide habitat for beneficial insects that prey upon more troublesome insects that a gardener likes to call pests. Attracting birds (and even bats) to your garden and landscape will also help you control harmful insect, or pest, populations. Working in this way with nature is foundational in what gardeners refer to as Integrated Pest Management, or IPM. All of these efforts are non-toxic and don’t cost any money once you plant your butterfly, bee, and bird gardens. Maintaining your garden in this way can be effortless and beautiful, as well as educational.
Green Garden Care harnesses nature’s power to do your gardening work for you. One of the best ways to create this kind of low-maintenance garden and lawn is to replace the use of petrochemical fertilizers, pesticides, herbicides, and fungicides with a practice of “farming” microscopic plant and animal life in the soil.
The beneficial micro-organism populations in the soil are a gardener’s best friend because they harvest nutrients and water for plants. Encouraging these is the easiest way to develop a vigorous, hardy, and worry-free landscape. Carbon is key because it is the food source for soil microbes. Also present in a healthy soil are mycorrhizal fungi populations. These are a nutrient and water, and some even say, communications, network that virtually all plants in the world rely on to grow strong and resilient. Promoting these populations, (and even inoculating your soil with these spores when dealing with very sterile soil), goes a very long way in growing a healthy garden, landscape, and lawn.
In addition to providing enough carbon in your soil the other key issue to cultivating soil health is an uncompacted and uninterrupted soil horizon. Compacted soil, or hardpan, and soil horizon interruptions, (such as a buried layer of gravel), have become an epidemic in landscapes because of the increasing use of heavy machinery during construction. Because almost all garden and landscape plants need good drainage and because plants don’t like to grow through hardpan or gravel horizons it can pay to dig a few test holes around a home or building to check for such problems if you think they may exist. There are cost-effective ways to remedy most issues that may surface.
When these soil “farming” techniques and remedies are coupled with proper placement, density, and diversity of native and edible plants, and when Integrated Pest Management is incorporated, a low-maintenance and worry-free garden is well-within reach.
Using local materials is often more suitable for the specific task. For example, the durability of the heartwood from our local eastern red cedar for fence or arbor posts is unmatched. Red Cedar stands up to the weather and insects better than other wood. Some would argue that our native 
Yellow or Black Locust ties for first. These native trees also happen to grow easily along hedge rows and in pastures and in this way can be grown and harvested in a sustainable way when compared to their western red cedar or treated pine counterparts found in most hardware and lumber stores.
When we use local materials, not only do we help support our local economy, but we limit the amount of shipping required to transport materials. And limiting the shipping and handling saves money.
A third value exists in using local materials and that is the value of the face-to-face relationship we have with the people harvesting, milling, or growing the wood or stone or plants. Our local vendors and suppliers are very interested in supplying exceptional quality and so make excellent partners in determining the best material for the application. These trusting relationships are everything to us and give our clients a real confidence knowing they’ll be taken care of by local business owners who care about what they do and the community they serve.
The ecological landscapes we design conserve our natural resources. By using native plants and planting them where they will thrive, by harvesting and using rainwater from roofs, by harvesting the carbon from yards and gardens to create compost or mulch, and by only having as much lawn as one will really use, we help to 
conserve water, fuels, materials, and time. By designing appropriately placed deciduous shade trees and vines so that they cool a house in the summer and warm it in the winter when the leaves fall and the winter sun can shine through windows and heat house walls, heating and cooling bills are reduced.
By designing gardens and landscapes so that plants are growing closely enough to out-compete weeds while providing shade for cool roots we can limit our need for as much mulch. Doing this makes happier plants, which in turn lowers maintenance and conserves both time and money.
Finally, as living soil is the bedrock of all successful gardens, growing microorganism populations through the addition of organic matter in the soil and by recycling the carbon in the landscape by allowing last year’s perennial leaves to “self-mulch” the soils beneficial microscopic life flourishes. Furthermore, by cultivating a density of plants so that the soil is shaded, and again, by using native plants suitable to the micro-climate, the need for petro-chemical fertilizers, insecticides, and fungicides and are eliminated. Doing all these things not only prevents precious topsoil from becoming dead and sterile, but as we discover that a living landscape’s success comes from working with nature we reduce the national demand for toxic chemical production.
We recognize that the work we do is inseparable from the community around us. What we do impacts our community and the health and well-being of our community, in turn, supports us…a socio-economic ecosystem. This is why we seek collaborations with both local practitioners in the field we work within as well as interested community members.
We are interested in this kind of cooperation and collaboration because we believe this creates stronger projects. We also believe that cooperation, and not competition, is the key to our success as not only a company, but as a local community. We are committed to learning how to do this and are grateful for the many role models we have who emulate this humble approach for us.
These strong working relationships make for a stronger community. Partnering with individuals and organizations, while sometimes more complex, in the end is more fun and rewarding!
