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104 gardens and counting! That is how many garden's we have built in the 12508n zip code as part of our focused Beacon Refugia project Cumulatively 42 acres (and growing), all paid for by our wonderful environmentalist clients!
Do you want to access our team’s knowledge base without engaging our team in a full planning and installation process? If so, then our Garden Coaching services may be for you.
There is a saying in the permaculture world: “Create the conditions for x to happen.” Create those conditions and x will thrive.
So in creating the conditions for backyard vegetables to happen, part of it is simply getting the plants. In this blog post, I’m going to discuss a few ways for you to get good-quality plants to grow in your garden, including starting your own from seeds.
Tucked away at the end of a forest road in New York’s Putnam Valley sits Indian Lake. A resident living alongside the ancient glacially-formed lake invited One Nature to improve their property.
The purpose of our invitation was to help our client hide some less-appealing, but important concrete walls, open the space and enhance the soft-scaping. We did this by demolishing a section of the standing wall, building a curved stone retaining wall, and incorporating a custom wooden panel fence into a new freestanding border wall along the northern property line. In addition, a line of five Maple trees were added along the border, and several small plantings filled in the hardscaping.
Snags are a critical functional component of our ecosystem that is often missing from the secondary growth forests that dominate the Hudson Valley. In the absence of these dead trees with hollow knot holes and empty trunks many species lack the ecological niche that they depend on for nesting and shelter.
Habitat structures can form a bridge between the forests of the past and the forests of now. Bat houses, screech boxes, and snag analogs provide a way to ensure that the nonhuman residents of our forests persist. They are a way to revive sylvan ghosts, and cradle the species that they carried for the time being, until hulking snags are part of our forests once again.
As temperatures begin to rise in spring and into summer so too do our desires to seek water and cool off. From embedded mountain lakes to boardwalk-dotted marshes, each town in the Hudson Valley has its own hydrous haven nearby. If you’ve ever spent time in the New Paltz or Kingston area at the base of the Catskills you may be familiar with one or more of the many rivers, creeks, lakes and waterfalls located there. Historically, the area was a key component of the Delaware and Hudson Canal in the 1800s and provides drinking water to NYC some 100 miles to the south today. While folks in the city get to drink the water, those of us a short distance up north get to play in it - and that is exactly what one of our clients intended to do!
If you’re going to plant a tree, why not plant one that feeds us and feeds the beneficial insects? Who doesn’t want backyard grown peaches, apples, pears, plums, and cherries?
Growing fruit trees is an awesome idea. Do it. But you must be prepared to put some time in with your trees. Fruit trees are not “plant and walk away” plants, at least not in the Eastern United States. If you do that and expect yields of unblemished fruit you’ll be disappointed. But if you do a few things to help your trees along, they can be deliciously rewarding.
In the spring of 2019, One Nature was contracted by a couple in Putnam Valley to design and construct a trail which would connect a secondary driveway on the property through the woods to their beautiful lakeside property. As trail enthusiasts, the homeowners hoped to maintain the history of the land which once hosted some of the earliest renditions of the Appalachian Trail some decades ago (see image below). It was also in the clients’ interests to construct this trail for their family, for the future generations who would follow this path alongside a tranquil creek into the heart of the woods -- a haven for exploration and imagination.
In the summer of 2019, One Nature LLC was contracted to design a landscape for a residential property on Spruce Street in Beacon, NY. The residents expressed a desire for the property to feel more unified, for the spaces to be more usable, and a request to implement erosion control solutions on the steep slopes. The property owners shared with us that the property had been pieced together over time through residential land trades and purchases, creating a modular layout that felt somewhat disconnected. While the property was quite sizable, the challenge lied in weaving together each module of the property and incorporating them into one whole functional landscape.
The model making process drives our site analysis on our many projects. In our studio, we combine drone photography, geospatial mapping, field collected data, and topographic surveys to quickly create scaled plans of existing conditions. This process is greatly influenced by the work of the late Scottish designer Ian McHarg, who wrote the highly influential book “Design With Nature”. McHarg and his team of assistants famously would work on large mylar sheets to create scaled maps of soils, habitats, topographic relief, and other environmental features. These semi-transparent sheets would then be layered to create a combined map of a landscape.
At a busy corner in Newburgh you can see a striking cedar fence, with young trees growing alongside it. If you look closer, you can see that the fence actually weaves in front and behind the peaks of a large earthen berm, which is dotted with plants and elevates the garden above the sloping streetside. Beyond the fence you can see the fruits of native shrubs such as blueberries and blackberries, while vegetables grow alongside in raised agricultural beds. The fence, the trees, the berms, and the edible plant life are all part of a solution, a solution to the noisiness and visual clutter that crops up in urban environments.
The newly completed woodland trail and fishing access point are the latest installation in a five year project at Mianus River Park, CT. Following recommendations from the Mianus River Park Ecological Master Plan which we developed in 2013, our team set out to design a better entrance to the park that would enhance the user experience while protecting the local environment. In the past, high visitation rates and excessive foot traffic have caused ongoing shoreline erosion, sedimentation of the riverbanks, and loss of understory vegetation.
In Stamford, Connecticut, community members and local environmental stakeholders expressed concerns over the degradation and pollution of Cummings Pond, which has been altered over recent decades by urban development and sediment deposition. In response, our team has provided research-driven consultation and ecologically-principled recommendations that take into account the larger context of the pond.
Green Street Park is a well loved community park, just over a mile from our studio in Beacon. In response to requests from community members and the City, we partnered with Hudson Land Design Engineering to work alongside Beacon Park and Recreation in designing several new features for the park. These new features are tailored to community input and will provide an improved experience for parkgoers of all ages.
Native wildflowers are beautiful, but they’re more than just that. In our planting design at an on-the-market house, the wildflowers we planted provide a number of functions. Tall Echinacea paradoxa (Yellow Coneflower) stalks provide privacy for the front of the home, along with a flash of color. Wildflowers growing along a bioswale that curves around the house help to direct and absorb stormwater, while providing a nice visual edge to the garden. Additionally, the edge of the property is lined with native shrub species. Together, the planted species provide key habitat for local pollinators, and other plants and animals indirectly.
New York City spends billions of dollars to protect its drinking water system, arguably the City's largest capital asset. Since 2016, One Nature has propagated plants for riparian stream corridor restoration project in the New York City's West-of-Hudson Reservoir system. These plants, grown with no chemical herbicides or pesticides, are critical to ensuring that the forests around the reservoirs are healthy enough to filter pollutants from the drinking water. Seeds are collected from the Catskill Mountains, started by our partners at the NYC Greenbelt Center in Staten Island, and grown-to-size in our plant nursery. At least 5,000 trees are delivered each fall to partner Soil and Water Conservation districts for installation.
In 2014, One Nature was commissioned to rethink a private residence in Beacon, NY. The new landscape features a tiny low-mow lawn, wild harvested trees, shrubs, and herbaceous material, three stormwater gardens, a privacy fence, and a reclaimed bluestone entryway.
In 2014, One Nature partnered with Green Teen volunteers to transform a vacant lot in Beacon, NY into a temporary pop-up park. All across the world, real estate speculation causes land in dense urban areas to lay vacant, sometimes for decades. This project creates a temporary landscape so that the land can be ecologically and socially productive until such time that development occurs.
Vassar research intern Elise Chessman wrote this brief summary of her work mapping ecological function at Safe Harbors Green in Newburgh, NY. One Nature designed and built the park in 2016 and now, one year later, we went back to evaluate how successful (or not!) our work was at regenerating local ecosystem functions.
Read about our Vassar research intern Anna Beeman's work to evaluate the macro impacts of Safe Harbors Green, a park One Nature Design/Built in Newburgh, NY. Over the course of several months, Anna performed extensive research and outreach that quantified the environmental social, and ecumenic impact of the park... so far.
Thanks to a grant from the DEC, we are working with the Environmental Cooperative at Vassar Barns, Susan Blickstein AICP/PP, PhD, and the LRC Group to develop a campus-wide green infrastructure strategy.
We started working with Camp Rockaway several years ago to develop a landscape vision for a private ecotopic campground within the City of New York. Just last week they opened up their first beach tents at Fort Tilden!
"Quinn is the principal and founder of One Nature, an environmental design firm whose main office is down an alley off the west end of Main Street in Beacon. Its native-plant nursery is down another alley nearby. No matter which alley you go down, the mission is the same: Creating spaces in which nature and culture can interact in a way that benefits both."
Our team was proud to work with the Brooklyn Greenway Initiative to convert two stretches of urban landscape, nearly a half mile, into thriving native plant habitats as part of a large-scale community revitalization initiative.
One Nature was invited to design a plan for restoring a severely impacted section of Bushkill Creek and the client, Ulster County, agreed to a state-of-the-art bioengineered design to restore a 6-acre section of river and banks. The Bushkill Creek Restoration Project was completed in the fall of 2016.
A comprehensive overview of New York's native willow species.
With temperatures plummeting and the year near its conclusion, there is still plenty for the team at One Nature to be excited about, particularly the recent completion of a staircase and accompanying grove of trees at a residence here in our...