Prospect Heights Garden Build: Setting the Stage

Over the next few weeks, Dumbo-based landscape designer Joanna Pertz, a Park Slope native and Fort Greene resident, will walk us through a current project of hers in Prospect Heights from beginning to end. Feel free to ask questions in the comments section.

A couple of weeks ago I received a wonderful email from a woman in Prospect Heights. She said she was thrilled to have found someone on the web whose work spoke to her aesthetic. She also went to RISD and asked how soon I could come over. It was already March and I knew between the baby she was about to have and the coming spring I needed to get moving.

I always start a design meeting by asking three questions: What do you love about your garden? What do you hate? If you close your eyes and imagine yourself in your ideal garden, what are you doing and what do you see? I close by asking whether there are any plants that must be in this garden. There were two.

In this case, the house has just been renovated…

…It is very modern, very textural, warm and beautiful. It is home to an expecting mother and father and their 6-year-old son who is mad for basketball, as well to an avid gardener living in the garden apartment. The garden is a classic Prospect Heights garden; very long and narrow with low fencing. The garden is 80′ deep and 17′ wide, almost twice as long as most brownstone gardens with a 5′ tall chain link fence.

What’s the existing landscape I have to contend with? A mature multi-stem magnolia draws your eye to the rear of the flat yard and seems to make the garden not as long and narrow, as I would expect. A majestic oak, taller than the house stands on the fence line a third of the way from back and a thorny rose hangs into the garden. Lastly the vegetable garden, bare from winter, fills the open space with its six 10’x 3′ raised planting beds.

Before leaving the garden on my initial visit, I always do a few things: Take note of the sun, the shadows and what microclimates exist; feel the texture of the soil and look at the color and how much moisture it is holding; check the pitch of the garden and the location of the drain; try to take into account the entire block as a landscape, in terms of drainage, invasive plants, pollination and visual impacts good and bad. Finally, I ask my self what does this space want to be? And what is sexy?