Our team
Melissa Rainer
PRINCIPAL
Claudia West
PRINCIPAL
Thomas Rainer
PRINCIPAL
Emilie Carter
SENIOR ASSOCIATE
Built around plants
We are a small studio of landscape architects and horticulturists specializing in plant-driven design. We approach plants as the central medium of design, bringing together horticulture, ecology, soils, construction, and long-term management from the beginning of every project. Our work grows from deep experience with plants, soils, ecological systems, and the practical realities of making complex landscapes succeed. We stay intentionally small so that every client works directly with experienced designers who remain closely involved in the thinking, decisions, and details of the project.
We travel widely to see plants in the wild, visit gardens, meet growers, and compare notes with designers we admire. No trip is entirely safe from a botanical detour. We are lucky to call many of the people who have shaped contemporary planting design colleagues and friends. Those relationships keep us curious, questioning, and continually learning. Our work has helped shape a broader conversation about contemporary planting design through books, teaching, lectures, and built work. That legacy continues in the growing community of designers and horticulturists who are carrying these ideas into new places, scales, and forms.
We believe the process of making landscapes is as important as design.
A little obsessive
We visit growers, track plants through production, botanize at every opportunity, and spend far too much time debating the difference between two nearly identical grasses. We think carefully about how plants touch, repeat, spread, age, and change through the seasons. Over time, we have developed our own approach to planting—using small propagules, close spacing, and carefully timed installation to create plantings that knit together with remarkable speed. How a planting goes into the ground matters as much as the design itself. Plant layout can still involve moving the same pot six inches, moving it back, and then deciding the first location was probably right. This level of attention may be slightly excessive, but it is also where much of the character and precision of the work comes from.
The work becomes most real in the field. We collaborate closely with contractors, crews, growers, gardeners, and clients through soil preparation, sourcing, layout, installation, establishment, and ongoing care. Every site reveals conditions that no drawing can fully anticipate, and the best solutions often emerge through shared observation and adjustment. We try to listen, stay useful, and give the people caring for the landscape the knowledge and confidence to guide it forward. These relationships shape the work as much as we do, and they continue to teach us how living landscapes actually succeed.
