Stage Road Gardens; A Sustainable approach to Garden Design & Consulting

“Sustainable North Berwick” sent questions to Stage Road Gardens to learn more about their operation. Owner & Designer Brieghan Gardner took time to answer and discuss.

Join "Sustainable North Berwick" on Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/share/g/1PMn6RijLV/

Follow Stage Road Gardens on Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/stageroadgardens

Check out their website: https://stageroadgardens.com/

Introduction:

Back in August of 2023 I reached out to Brieghan after coming across her company, Stage Road Gardens, on Facebook. My business, Ajna Stonescapes, was just months old at the time. I was excited to connect with another business owner in my industry who prioritized sustainability and shared many similar values. I'm so thankful that Brieghan did meet with me, and I continue to be appreciative that she has remained such a wonderful resource to bounce ideas off and to collaborate with on some shared projects. Heading into the 2025 landscaping season, Stage Road Gardens and Ajna Stonescapes are creating a new referral partnership program that will hopefully bring more project opportunities to work together on.

Brieghan and Stage Road Gardens are not what I would consider local to North Berwick per se, especially not since moving their headquarters even further away, however they are a small business with exemplary care and knowledge for sustainability. The hand drawn designs and consulting services are extraordinarily thorough and thoughtful and can be provided for clients in our community! For the purposes of our Sustainable North Berwick group, I wanted to share this blog interview to promote that these excellent resources are available for our area. Also, to give a shout out and some back-story on Brieghan and the work being done by Stage Road Gardens.

I’d like to share one more thing in this introduction before getting to the interview. My strategy in all of this, from the Sustainable North Berwick Facebook group to this blog series with local and sustainable businesses, and with my company Ajna Stonescapes, is to develop a cohesive network of sustainable resources for our community. Within my market niche, which provides sustainable residential hardscaping services, we aim to partner with organizations and independent businesses that share our core values so that we can one day present clients with a completely seamless start-to-finish sustainable landscape product. The goal here is holistic land management, tackling integrated sustainability from the initial budgeting, planning, and concept phase through the design, excavation, hauling & disposal, grading, drainage, hardscaping, softscaping, irrigation, fine gardening, soil regeneration, pest management, and continued maintenance. And everything else in between. It is far more effective to achieve sustainability goals by starting at the beginning, than our current reactionary approach. In the same way it is generally more effective to start and maintain a healthy lifestyle than it is to treat and cure poor health related issues in later life.

So far, this sustainable contractor network includes garden design and consulting services by Stage Road Gardens, fine gardening services by Sundance Home and Garden (hopefully to be featured in this blog series down the road), and hardscaping by Ajna Stonescapes. Next blog post will hopefully feature Eric from Lally Luck Farm here in North Berwick on regenerative soil methods and much more! We want to keep connecting organizations, businesses, people, services, and resources that are sustainable and local until it becomes easier and easier to utilize. If you know of contractors looking to collaborate on a holistic approach to sustainability, please reach out and let me know!

Now for the interview. Thank you Brieghan for taking the time to answer my questions, and thanks everyone for reading!

Questions & Answers:

Your mom was an avid gardener and so you grew up with an early appreciation for working in the soil. Looking back on that, what things stand out to you today as the most formative parts of that experience? My father was an excellent timber framer, and I have fond memories as a kid being immersed in that artisan experience, observing everything from craftsmanship, technique, appreciating quality, to understanding how to adapt to different materials and tools. I'm wondering if gardening as a child instilled similar values, or perhaps quite different ones, and if maybe there are unique lessons and perspectives to be gained from a childhood of gardening specifically? 

I think as a kid, I was happy and excited when my mom was happy and excited, and my mom was happy and excited about seasonal firsts, especially spring firsts: first robins, first frogs’ eggs in the pond, first peepers, first crocus… I remember understanding early on that these were momentous occasions, things to celebrate. In spring she would be starting seeds in every sunny window in the house, and that was a fascinating process to me as a kid, and, well, right now I have about 300 seedlings under lights in my office and a bunch more on the kitchen counters, on top of the dog’s crate… It wasn’t just the plants and the gardens, though, she was always trying to rescue orphaned baby mice or wounded birds, or taking us hiking or to explore tide pools. I think nature was what fascinated and inspired her, and it’s always been what fascinates and inspires me, so to whatever extent that’s a result of my genetics or my upbringing, it’s probably mostly her doing.

You worked as an educator for several years, which I sort of perceive that profession to either be incredibly fulfilling or incredibly stressful, or both. And I might be way off on that, but I am curious whether it pushed or pulled you closer to starting your own business. On your website bio you explained that while you were an educator you also spent the summers and weekends at farmers’ markets and expanding your own gardens. Was it during all that, or maybe sometime preceding it, when you first considered starting a full-time business? Or did the idea come after? Has it been an easy transition? Do you miss the time spent as an educator?

Yeah, it was very much both (incredibly fulfilling and incredibly stressful). I taught first and second grade for the last decade or so of my teaching career. I loved it and I think I was good at it, and I do miss being around the kids and inspiring and being inspired by them, but the work was endless, and I could easily work sixty-plus hours a week most weeks of the year and still feel like I hadn’t done enough. I taught at an arts-focused school that gave me a ton of creative freedom and was a truly kind and nurturing place for both kids and teachers, so it was a great fit for me and as good an experience in many ways as I think one could have teaching, but it was still utterly exhausting. Anyway, after teaching in one way or another from my early twenties into my early forties, I decided I didn’t want to anymore. But I wasn’t sure what to do instead. I worked at a farm for a growing season and into the early winter, then went back in late winter to one of the nurseries where I’d worked a lot of summers when I was teaching. My plan was to help them out in the greenhouse for the start of the season just to pay the bills while I looked for a “real job”, some sort of new career-level gig that I could do instead of teaching. But then as the season got rolling, all the landscapers and professional gardeners were coming in talking about how they were booked out for a year or two. (This was during early Covid days, so everyone was suddenly home and wanting to do landscaping stuff.) I had fantasized in my twenties and thirties about someday starting my own gardening business or nursery, and probably should have done it then, but honestly was too intimidated by the business side of starting a business, by just figuring out how to do it all officially and legally, pay taxes on it, etc. It sounds so stupid to me now that I let that stop me, but I did.

Anyway, in April of 2022, I decided I was going to go for it. And by then, I had made a wonderful friend who knew how to do all the “businessy” stuff and helped me through all the parts that were hard for me so I could make a living doing what I loved. I had started using the Stage Road Gardens name when I was selling plants at farmers’ markets in previous summers, because I lived on Stage Road, and, well, that’s where I was growing the plants, and I liked that name, so I just made it official with the state and kept it. I live on a different road in a different town now, but I’m sticking with the name. I think when I first started the business I was helped a lot by the fact that I’d been living in the same small town (Nottingham, NH) for about sixteen years, gardening on a very visible, well-traveled corner in the center of town, which was just where my little house happened to be, selling at and for a while managing the local farmers’ market, and everyone in town already knew me and knew my gardens and what I was about, so it was really easy to connect with my first clients. And I had long-standing relationships with some of the best nurseries in the area, knew their inventories and of course people there who were helpful business connections, and so forth.

What is the general history, or background, of Stage Road Gardens? What was the inspiration, when was it founded, core services being offered, market niche...?

I think I answered most of this question in previous answers. The part I haven’t answered, I guess, is to describe the evolution of things a bit. When I first started, in the spring of 2022, I was doing maybe 80% hands-on garden work and 20% consulting and design, and now it’s the opposite. About 80% of the work I do is garden design and consulting, and 20% is hands-on work. Most of that 20% is planting the designs I draw. I still do a little bit of maintenance work too, but I limit that to clients who live close to me and who I really enjoy working with. It’s not what I initially envisioned when I started the business, but in a way, it makes perfect sense. In college and grad school I mostly studied art and writing, and dreamed for a while about somehow making a living as an artist or a writer, but, like most people with such aspirations, I became a teacher instead. Now I’m writing about plants and drawing maps of gardens professionally. So, it’s literally a self-made dream job that combines all the things I love. And I still get to teach. Teaching adults about gardening and plants is different from teaching children how to read and subtract and tie their shoes, but it’s rewarding in a different way. And I make my own schedule, which is life-changing.

I will pull this quote for those who haven't checked out your website:

"I lived on one small plot of land in Nottingham, NH for nineteen years and gradually transformed the lawns and even part of the driveway into a network of mixed ornamental and food gardens that work in harmony with the local ecosystem. My property came to serve as wildlife habitat, a beautiful refuge for people and pollinators alike, and a supplementary food source for me, my friends and family, and the community."

That is really amazing and inspiring. What is, or has been, your favorite part of the process in transforming that small plot of land? Give me one small thing, maybe something you could see or feel every day, and give me one big thing, something that is more conceptual. 

A small thing: I planted a couple of river birches in the front and side yards, and a family of cardinals took a liking to them and started nesting there and came back every year for a decade or more. They were still nesting there last summer and probably will again this year, even though I’ve moved on. There are plants growing under their current tree, like pokeweed, that the birds planted, not me. They made fascinating and lovely neighbors.

A big thing: I met with some new clients the other day, right down the street from the house I just moved into in Lebanon. They’re an older couple who’ve lived in the same place a long time. Their yard is deeply shaded, a forest understory, essentially. They told me that when they moved into the house in 1988, the front yard was all just lawn, no trees at all, and the forest in the back was just an overgrown field with some saplings in it. The first year they lived there, they bought 150 pine seedlings, just little bare root slips less than a foot long, and planted them all around the front and side of the house. The second year, they said, there were fifty, and each year after that, for a while, fewer trees, until the ones that were going to make it won out and established themselves. They planted other trees over the years. It's a mature forest now. They’ve literally changed the landscape around them in their lifetimes and created a new microecosystem. Whether we do it consciously or not, we’re all doing that, or able to do that on some level, when we work in our gardens. I think that’s important to recognize because it obviously makes a case for doing it consciously and with long-term impacts in mind.

Can you share a story of one of your favorite client experiences, maybe a project that you are most proud of and why?

There was this one garden in Epping where the couple who hired me wanted to expand and replant an old perennial bed. They had some preferences and a couple of plants they wanted to keep, but for the most part it was a blank slate, and they just gave me full creative license to do my thing and make it beautiful for them. I designed and planted it for them last spring and it was exciting to see that vision come to life. I can’t wait to watch it evolve this spring and in the years to come. I also especially love working with clients who are interested in learning about permaculture and how to grow food sustainably on a small scale, or create integrated food, pollinator, and ornamental gardens. That’s kind of a personal passion of mine. In between fantasizing about being a poet or artist and becoming a garden designer, I insisted for about a decade that I was going to farm. But I didn’t have land or money to buy land, so I figured out how to do my own version of farming in my spare time on the quarter acre around my house. I love sharing strategies for growing food with limited space and resources. Everyone who wants to can at least grow some of their own food, and it’s an incredibly satisfying thing to do.

As the business owner and operator, you pretty much do everything I'd imagine. From digging to design, mulching to marketing. What is your favorite task, or what do you enjoy doing the most? Task you are least fond of?

Yeah, Stage Road Gardens is a one-woman business, so I literally do everything. I love talking with people about plants and ecology, and I love the artistic component of garden design, both in terms of the vision for the completed garden and how it will mature and change over the years, and the actual drawing work. I love getting my hands dirty and planting and caring for gardens a bit each spring and fall, but I’m also glad I’m not doing just that full time. What I do is a really satisfying mix. I can choose the better days, weather-wise, to get the outside work like planting and pruning done, and then work on designs, writing up consult notes, or other “desk work” on the rainy or really cold days. I guess my least favorite part is the accounting-type stuff. I spend a lot of time filling in spreadsheets. But I don’t really mind that work; it’s just not the most inspiring part of what I do.

How has Stage Road Gardens performed so far? Has it met your expectations regarding sales and client growth? Any major triumphs, successes, or victories that you can share? Any obstacles, failures, or major disappointments?

When I started the business, I didn’t really have anything to lose and just wanted to try doing things my way for a change. I didn’t really have any specific expectations or know what would come of it. It’s gone better than I could have hoped. I guess in some ways I wish I had started it when I was much younger, but in the time it took me to find that direction, I spent decades of summers and weekends working in the horticultural industry, reading about plants and permaculture, learning by trial and error to grow my own food, learning all the things I needed to know to be good at what I do now. So, I’m just happy to be finally doing it, and to be able to get by with only doing work that I love, and only on my own terms. I know not everyone gets to do that. I feel incredibly lucky that it all worked out this way.

Any big plans or strategies being rolled out for 2025? Is there a 5-year vision for Stage Road Gardens? Do you feel things are on the optimal track, or are there things you'd like to pivot on, develop, or draw back?

I just relocated from Nottingham to Lebanon, NH, so the challenge and goal this year will be to grow the business into something more regional. In addition to expanding the business up here, I’m driving down to the coast every couple of weeks, staying for two or three days, and meeting with as many clients back that way as I can. I start most new client relationships with an on-site consultation, so I can see the space they’re working with and get to know them and their goals for their gardens, and measure and sketch for designs, but then a lot of the actual work I do for people (the writing, planning, and drawing) takes place in my office at home. So, I’m finding that I can serve a pretty large area, which makes it easy to find plenty of people to work with. And it’s a lot of fun driving around seeing gardens and potential gardens all over NH and parts of the neighboring states. I’ve also started offering phone consults for folks who just want some advice/coaching and don’t need me to measure and sketch spaces for a design. Right now, just because of the places I’ve lived, I have lots of new clients lined up in the NH and Southern Maine Seacoast areas, and lots in the Upper Valley region, but not many in between. So, one of my goals for this year is to start advertising and building client relationships in the Sunapee and Concord areas and some of the other places that are kind of naturally on my route from the NH/Vermont border to the NH/Maine border where most of my current work is.

Is there any message you'd like to share regarding past, present, or future clients? 

On demographics, what is your ideal client? Have you been able to successfully reach your target market? What has been the best method for capturing the right attention and converting that into sales?

For a message, just gratitude, I guess. People have been truly wonderful to work with, and I’m so appreciative that so many other people see the value of a thoughtful, carefully planned garden and trust me to help them create one. The client demographic is surprisingly wide. I deal with people who have gardened their whole lives but want someone to compare notes with and bounce ideas off of, people who know a lot about plants but want help with the artistic vision side of things, people who have an artistic vision of their own but don’t know anything about plants or how to make it work in the real world, young people who want to learn to grow their own food and become more self-sufficient, older people who’ve been doing that for fifty years and want to turn their veggie beds into ornamental gardens… One time I had a consult with a guy who wanted to start a perennial cut flower farm. I think to some extent that my client base naturally self-selects for people I’m going to have a good rapport with. Not everyone wants a garden, and among those people, not everyone cares about doing it in an ecologically conscious way. Most people who are invested in those things enough to reach out to me tend to be people I have other things in common with and enjoy working with.

Is there any message, perhaps words of wisdom or cautionary tales, for your competitors? 

I do want to get into competition a bit here. Do you feel like the market is over-saturated with companies offering similar services to yours? Or do you feel there is more room, or that maybe you'd be welcoming more market participants and competition?

What do you think is your competitive advantage in the market and what are some things you'd like to improve to make yourself more competitive?

Advice for other people doing this kind of work? Find clients who are a good match for you to make sure it’s a good experience and positive outcome for everyone. I think I do this partly by being really explicit and open in my advertising and my communication with prospective clients about who I am, what I do (and what I don’t do), my values and how I approach my work, my rates and what clients can expect in terms of costs, what they’ll get for their money, etc. People don’t tend to hire me unless I’m exactly what they’re looking for, so I think they end up really happy with what they get out of the experience almost every time, which of course makes it satisfying for me, too.

As far as competition, I think there’s plenty of room in the market for people to do all kinds of things. It’s helpful to be able to collaborate with other companies that do adjacent work, even if they also do some of the same kinds of work I do. I wish in particular that there were more small, independent gardening businesses (as opposed to big landscaping companies that tend to be more lawn-focused). Those solo or small-business gardeners, in my experience, tend to be the people who really know their plants and know how to care for a garden. I can’t plant all the gardens I design, so I’m always looking to build relationships with professional gardeners who I can trust to do some of that work. It’s also helpful to have people to refer clients to when they just want some maintenance help from someone who knows which ones are the weeds and will treat their gardens with care and love. Working with companies like Ajna, people who are experts at the hardscaping and other parts of the process that I don’t do, but share my values and approach, has also been hugely valuable. I want to find ways to do more of that with Ajna and other great companies I've already started to work with, and also find new collaborators in some of the new areas where I'm working now that my geographical range has grown a bit. I don’t really think competitively. It’s a big market and I do a lot of different things, so there’s always plenty of work to be found. I just try to be flexible and do whatever there’s a demand for at any given time. In the winter and midsummer, I do more consulting, writing, and drawing, and I have more time for marketing work, experimenting with new ideas, continuing to educate myself about plants and ecology and design… In the spring and fall I do more planting and outdoor work. I try to do a lot of consults and measure and sketch for a lot of designs in the late fall so that I have drawing work lined up to carry me through the winter, then I get all those drawings done while there’s snow on the ground and I can’t go and see new gardens.

Your hand-drawn Design Drawings are truly beautiful and give incredibly thoughtful detail (and that attention to detail is equally evident in the consultation write-ups). I can appreciate what goes into that level of artistry. For a client to be able to see your design work from the concept phase, get to hold on to it and keep it, and then to watch the transformation unfold in real life, that is such an awesomely creative experience. Do you have any plans to expand or develop your design work? Would you like to create digital renderings? Is the hand-drawn design model scalable, or is that not currently a consideration?

Thanks! As a child and young adult, I loved fantasy novels. I read the Lord of the Rings series three times. My favorite parts of those books were the maps in the front matter. I was always flipping back and forth to those maps to see where the forests or mountain ranges or rivers in the story were located in relation to everything else. Something about seeing the layout of the fantasy world was just utterly delightful and captivating to me. In some ways, the drawings I do now of garden layouts and planting schemes remind me of those maps. The process of illustrating people’s garden visions and plans for them, and trying to do that in a way that’s pleasing to look at and kind of a work of art in and of itself, as well as a functional planting plan, is a lot of fun for me. I have no real interest in working digitally at this point. I’ve never seen a digitally rendered garden plan that I think compares to a quality hand-drawn design in terms of its visual appeal, character, or authenticity. I think digital garden plans can be perfectly functional, but for me the artistic piece is important, and I think part of what clients appreciate about my work, too. I’m not really concerned with scalability or looking to grow the business beyond myself.

Last business question that I have...

What do you see as the biggest, or best, opportunity to Stage Road Gardens for this year?

Largest threat for this year?

I think being in a new community and expanding my travel range and my client base to serve people here, in my old neck of the woods, and everywhere in between is a huge opportunity. The biggest threat is always the weather. It can make or break a season for me and it’s something I have no control over, so I just have to make it work as best I can, whatever it is, and there’s no reliable way of predicting it year to year. A “typical growing season” or “typical winter” in New England isn’t really a thing anymore, or not something one can count on, which makes it hard to plan for the season(s) ahead.

So, I'm posting this interview to Sustainable North Berwick, a group that promotes local and sustainable within the North Berwick community. 

Stage Road Gardens is now located a bit far from our area, but it does sound like you'll be offering services and continuing to travel to Seacoast NH, parts of Maine and Mass. Is that still the case, and is North Berwick still in your range? Have you done work in this area before?

I’ve done work for a lot of folks around Berwick, North Berwick, York, and Kittery. I’m planning to keep those Southern Maine towns that border NH within my travel range. I might also travel further into Maine for a client who seemed like a good match and wanted a full design drawn up, as opposed to just a consult.

Sustainability is such a broad term, but I feel most people associate it in some way with protecting the environment. Though I believe it could just as well serve discussions regarding consumption, culture, economics and so on. In a perfect world I would love for "Sustainability" to be almost entirely depoliticized and instead be utilized as more of a metric for assessing static quality. That is to say that we can describe an object or thing as something of quality as derived from it being definitively sustainable. But in your sphere of influence, with your profession as a reference point, what kinds of things are you looking for in a small ecosystem to determine if it is sustainable? Are some considerations more important than others, things like; Regional Specificity and Native Plants, Water Conservation, Soil Health, Biodiversity and Ecosystem, or Low-Carbon Landscape Design? Would you agree that landscape or garden design that does not consider sustainability is of lesser quality? 

I think it's all important. I think biodiversity is key and that's the part that my work largely focuses on. I love teaching people about native plants and why they matter, but I try not to be a purist about plant selection unless the client wants me to be. The overarching goal of my work is to support people in working towards growing food or flowers or whatever they want to grow in ways that support rather than fight nature. For some clients, that means converting their entire properties to native plantings, which I'm happy to help them do, but for some, it might just be planting a small pollinator garden that’s not even necessarily all natives in a little nook somewhere. In the end I think almost any garden, as long as it’s not planted with invasives or treated with poisons, is going to be better than a conventional lawn, so I try to meet people where they are and help them make progress in a good direction. I think a landscape or garden design that doesn't consider sustainability is by definition of lesser quality than one that does. Even imagining that the owner of said hypothetical garden doesn't care about their environmental impact, a garden that isn't sustainable won't thrive over time. Gardens that work against nature rather than in harmony with it are high maintenance and high-input. They require a lot of artificial intervention and support (more watering, fertilizer, weed control measures, etc.) Choosing the right plants for the right places goes a long way, and the plants that evolved in a particular region are often going to be the ones that grow there with the least trouble.

In your approach or process how do you weigh the various elements of design? Is there one core guiding theme to your designs, such as beauty, functionality, value, ecological, sustainability, etc.? Or is this always customized to meet the client's needs and wishes? And, do you arrive at any of these core elements through the design or are you integrating these elements throughout the process?

I would say it's all of the above with an emphasis on sustainability, not just in the broader environmental sense, but also in the sense of choosing plants that will work well with one another and with the conditions (soil, light, moisture, etc.) of particular spaces in the shorter term, and over time, in cases where perennials, trees, and shrubs are involved. So, it's customized to the client's needs and wishes but also to the environmental conditions they're working with. It's finding where the client's goals, those conditions, and a desire to benefit the broader ecosystem all overlap.

As you know, my company Ajna Stonescapes offers "Sustainable Hardscaping", which are really three key factors: Sustainable Materials, Permeable Paving, and Drainage Systems. There are other factors too, but most of my clients never associate hardscape installation with the downstream effects on a sustainable ecosystem. I know from experience that poor hardscaping winds up being a major challenge for fine gardening professionals down the line. I'm a big Order of Operations person, and I have found that the topic of sustainable landscaping usually doesn't come up with my residential clients until far too late in the process. Do you find this to be true in your experience? Are there frequent problems that you come across, that if addressed at an earlier stage, could make it easier for fine gardening and ecological landscape design professionals to transition to a sustainable ecosystem? Do you share the belief that a holistic land management framework that integrates ecological, social, and economic sustainability from the concept phase is the ideal approach to residential landscaping?

Absolutely, I always encourage people to get the hardscaping squared away, if that's in the cards, before they get into detailed planting plans. And if I can steer them toward working with a conscientious company like Ajna at that stage, I know that will lead to better outcomes down the line. But sometimes people inherit bad hardscaping choices when they buy homes and just want to make the best of what they have with careful planting choices if a complete landscape overhaul isn't in the budget, so I try to be flexible and do the best I can for people.

How often do you get to discuss Sustainability with your clients? Do you address Sustainability in your consultations as standard practice, or do you let it come up organically, if at all? Are clients finding you and choosing Stage Road Gardens because you prioritize Sustainability? If not, do you take the opportunity to try and bring attention to it or to educate the market at all? Personally, I do not push the topic on potential clients, but I also feel it is a tougher sell for clients that are only focused on hardscape installation. I'm curious if it is an easier reach for a client interested in garden design, softscapes, planting plans, etc. And, if you have identified ways to not only sell with Sustainability, but ways to upsell with it. 

I'd say it's already a focus for about half of the people who reach out to me, and when that's not the case, I do generally ask at the initial consult if ecological impact, pollinator and wildlife habitat, etc. are of interest. But it's one of many considerations I ask about (aesthetic preferences, other uses for the plants they want to grow, maintenance considerations...) I don't like to push it either, but I will steer people away from certain plants (invasives and plants that aren't yet on the official invasives lists but that I think probably ought to be and will be soon) and certain harmful practices, like installing that horrible black plastic weed barrier fabric under the mulch in their garden beds.

You offer a Garden Coaching service, which is fantastic. I am seeing this service pop up more often. I have heard that permaculture is still thriving, but in general more and more folks are getting after it with home gardening projects. Has this been a strong trend? Would you say that the clients who hire you for Garden Coaching are closer to an amateur level, hobbyist, or are pretty darn knowledgeable and seriously looking to maximize their land usage in a healthy, sustainable way?

I have found that the market demographics for Sustainability really overlap with homesteaders and DIY. I think Garden Coaching is a great way to get into that market in a mutually beneficial way. Do you think Garden Coaching has a runway in any other market segments?

The people who reach out to me for help range from total amateurs to expert gardeners. Most are somewhere in between. Some people want help getting started with gardening for the first time, or identifying plants on a property they just bought and learning how to simply care for the gardens they've adopted. Some people have been gardening their whole lives and know exactly how to do it, but just want a new vision and some new ideas. Most people are somewhere in between. A lot of people are interested right now specifically in converting lawns to pollinator/wildlife habitat and, as you say, in getting started with homesteading. Some of my favorite projects are the ones that combine those last two goals.

Greenwashing is a major threat right now in our industry. It is far easier, and more cost effective, for many large companies to pretend to be sustainable than it is to firmly transition themselves towards anything meaningful. So many market incentives and structures basically institutionalize this fraudulent behavior rather than condemn it, and few, if any, are incentivized to just make it more transparent for that matter. 

I have countless examples of greenwashing from my own experiences, but the most recent was discovering Wildyards.com. Often, I will input "Sustainable Landscaping" on Google search or other platforms to see how my business is performing with SERP results. Almost always, one of the top results is Wildyards.com. So, out of curiosity, I dialed the 888 number and sure enough, it is actually just the company Angie (formerly Angie's List). Not only is Angie an awful company, in my opinion, but in no way is the Wildyards.com platform providing customers with sustainable contractors. Quite simply, it is a scam. And worse yet, that valuable top spot (stupidly valuable) on Google could have been occupied by a better business that cares about Sustainability. Large regional landscaping firms use similar strong-armed approaches to SEO/SEM and if they sniff out a keyword trend, like perhaps "Sustainable Landscaping", they will act quickly to obstruct fair competition without much need to change operational practices. There is also a small, local company that comes to mind which has named their business to imply that it provides Ecological Landscaping but does not appear to produce anything that is even remotely close to ecologically friendly landscaping. I contacted the owner, partly because I was impressed with how well his company name was performing in search results for "Sustainable", but he refused to meet with me after I asked about topics regarding anything ecological or sustainable. 

I've tried to work with the Ecological Landscape Association by making an argument for a certification, logo, or seal that is reserved for Sustainable Ecological Landscape Professionals. I urged them to partner with the Northeast Organic Farming Association to accomplish this on a larger scale (ideally national), and it seems like maybe some progress on this has been made, albeit very slow progress. I was in the Craft Beer Industry when it peaked in 2017, and the Brewers Association was instrumental in supporting small and independent brewers who were then coming up against Big Beer. One successful tactic that remains still today is the Independent Craft Brewer Seal. This certification, seal, logo, branding, or what have you, deftly blocked the ability of Big Beer to buy out brands and pretend to be "Craft Beer", and did so by vetting, qualifying, and restricting those who could carry the Independent Craft Brewer Seal on their bottles. This ought to be the road map for small and independent Sustainable Ecological Landscape Professionals. 

I was interested in becoming a Maine Certified Sustainable Landscaper (MCSL) through the Maine Landscape & Nursery Association (MELNA) by essentially just paying a small annual fee, but then I learned through some research that MELNA has lobbied on behalf of the industry to the State of Maine to lessen regulation on Fertilizers, Herbicides, and Pesticides. When I confronted them about it, they either denied it, said that I had confused the content of the document I referenced, or told me that they (the landscape professionals) know best and so they don't really need bureaucrats to instruct them on how to do their job more than what was already on the books. Many large regional landscape firms or brands in the area that people would recognize have heavy influence with MELNA. 

Okay, apologies for the long-winded question here. But have you pursued any certification for sustainability or ecologically friendly practices? Has a client ever asked whether you carry a certification? Would you support a tighter certification process that would promote small and independent ecological, sustainable, or organic landscape providers? Have you experienced examples of greenwashing? Am I making too big of a deal about this, or do you agree that greenwashing is a major threat to sustainable, environmentally friendly initiatives within our industry?

I haven't pursued any kind of certification and probably wouldn't. I don't think anyone's ever asked about it. I think it's pretty clear to everyone who interacts with me what my motivations are and that they're genuine, but I can see how that would be an issue in terms of corporate interests falsely representing themselves to take advantage of people's good intentions. I guess I would give people the same advice in choosing garden and landscape professionals as I would in choosing where to buy their food. If you really care about sustainability in your food sourcing, you don't just go to Walmart and buy the foods with the words "Natural" and "Organic" printed all over the plastic packaging. You visit the local farms, talk to the people growing your food, learn about their agricultural practices... If you care about sustainability in your home landscape and gardens, you don't hire the first company that pops up on Google with "Sustainable" in the name or marketing, you do some research into local companies and talk to the people running them. In my case, Stage Road Gardens is literally just me, so it's not hard to get a sense of the company's values. People can just have a conversation with me about what's important to them and they know that if they hire me, I'm the one who's going to show up and be working for them.

Do you think that sustainable Planting Design, or Garden Design, benefits the community as a whole? Can you explain that relationship?

I think in the obvious sense that plants and other animals and water don't care about our property boundaries, it definitely does. I mean, it benefits the broader, interconnected ecological community, of course. As far as benefitting the human community, I think to the extent that we talk about it and share our reasons for doing what we're doing, it can. Good intentions can be contagious. But I think it's really important, as we talked about before, not to be pushy or preachy about those good intentions. That can have the opposite effect of what's intended, I think, by alienating people from sustainability efforts before they even have a chance to decide whether these are goals they want to pursue. When people asked about my gardens back in Nottingham, I would often talk about why I made the choices I made and the positive impacts I felt they could have beyond my own personal enjoyment and benefit. I think gardens tend to attract attention and draw people in, so a garden can be a starting point for a conversation and an opportunity to teach sustainability when people who haven't really thought about it much just stop by to chat because something in bloom catches their eye.

Okay my last question, and I once heard in a lecture from a guest speaker with the Ecological Landscape Association that suggested that I just avoid this question altogether...

How urgent is the need for Sustainability? For restorative biodiversity efforts, for holistic land management, for ecological landscaping, for regenerative soil methods, for transformational or adaptive design, for attention to water conservation, etc. How dire are the circumstances?

Increasingly I have felt that it may be appropriate, or perhaps the right time, to put my name and brand out there as part of a larger movement towards Sustainability and against Consumerism. There might be some push back, some negative consequences, for pushing my company's brand into the political fray... but is there still time to be idle? What are your thoughts on the timeline that we face today and your outlook for small, independent sustainable ecological landscape professionals?

What is the overall message that you would like your brand to convey regarding Sustainability, if any?

I think it's always urgent and always has been, and that it's too late and maybe also too soon in some ways. I think we all just have to do what we can in our own day-to-day lives and interactions to move the needle in the right direction, or sometimes just to try to slow its movement in the wrong direction. When I worry about the broader trends and outcomes, I don't want to get out of bed in the morning. I guess to some extent, that's what I can offer the people I work with: guidance in how to treat the little patch of Earth they currently control in a way that will nurture the lives, animal and plant and human, in their immediate surroundings, avoid doing damage, and leave their patch of Earth in better shape than they found it, if possible.

Thank you Brieghan! 

And thanks for reading!