About — Your Business

Letter from the founder

What I want a garden to do.

I started this practice in 2012 because the gardens I was being asked to draw at the previous firm were not the gardens I wanted to walk in. They were beautiful in May and dead in November. They cost a fortune to keep alive in August. They had no birds in them. The plants on the plan were the plants the wholesaler had a truck of that week.

The studio's bias is toward natives, toward year-round structure over peak-summer drama, toward stone that was already on the property over slabs trucked in from somewhere else. We think a garden should be a place you eat dinner in October. We think the soil should be more interesting in year ten than it is on installation day. We think the meadow you took out the lawn for should keep adding species without us.

If that's the kind of garden you want, the simplest first step is a site visit. We won't draw anything from a satellite photo.

— E. Holcomb, Founding Principal

— Studio history

A short chronology.

2012

Studio opens

E. Holcomb opens the practice in a converted garage on SE Stark Street. First three projects are all under half an acre, all in Portland.

2015

First meadow restoration

A four-acre meadow project for a former hayfield in the Willamette Valley. The studio still maintains it; in 2025 it had eighty-seven catalogued species.

2018

Move to the carriage house

The studio moves to a converted carriage house on NE 28th. The garden out front becomes the test bed for every regional plant we end up specifying.

2021

Northern California expansion

First projects below the Oregon line — Berkeley, Sebastopol, Healdsburg. The chaparral-edge meadow palette is developed for the Bay Area dry-summer climate.

2024

Native plant nursery partnership

The studio partners with a Willamette Valley grower to bring 80% of the meadow seed mix in-house. Provenance now traceable to within thirty miles for most species.

2026

One hundred and twelve gardens

The studio finishes its 112th project and reaches a steady team of nine. We continue to take on no more than six new gardens per calendar year.

— What we keep coming back to

Three things the studio argues for.

Native first.

We aim for 70% native plants by mass on every property. Not because of any single benefit but because every ecological argument we care about — water, pollinators, soil, birds — gets easier the more native a property goes.

ii.

Year-round structure.

A garden that only looks alive in May is a hobby. We design for late October first and let the spring drama settle in around it. This is why so many of our gardens read as "quiet" until you've stood in them through a full season.

iii.

The build is the design.

We coordinate every install. We are not the firm that hands you a beautiful set of drawings and disappears. The garden is in our hands until the end of year one — and most of our long-term clients keep us on tenancy after that.

The nine of us.

Nine, with one apprentice and one elderly studio dog. We do not plan to grow much beyond this.