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Landscape Designer Career & Pay: How to Start Garden Design with Dean Riddle
00:22:27
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- [00:04]
A
I've watched the weather change tremendously. I really have. There was not a freezing, there wasn't a frost, there wasn't a killing frost, a hard frost. The entire month of May. That's a change. That is very much a change.
- [00:17]
B
Hi, welcome back to How Much Can I Make? I'm excited to have you. I'm your host, Mira Vuzeri. Today I'm talking with Dean Riddle, a highly accomplished landscape designer and gardener whose work has made significant mark in the garden world. His designs have been featured in major publications including the New York Times, the Garden Illustrated, showing both his creative vision and deep expertise. And his gardens are fabulous. I had the chance to see a few of them over the years, and they are really special. We get into what it takes to build a career in landscape design, how he approaches work, how he works with clients, short seasons and global warming. Very interesting. So let's turn to Dean. Dean, I'm really glad to have you on. And let's dive right in and tell us, how do you approach a garden design project?
- [01:09]
A
This really starts with the client and the place, the house. And a lot of people are clueless about what they want, but it's always nice if someone has a starting point. The first thing I do when I meet a client is I'm getting, like, some feel for the chemistry between us, right? And I'm looking around the. The house, the setting, obviously, what the light situation is and that kind of thing. And I start thinking about how, if I live there, how I would want the garden to relate to the house. The style of the house, the doorways, the windows. Those are really the things that I think about first before I get caught. Because plants are. I hate to say they're secondary, but when you're designing, when it comes to the spatial considerations are first. I try to do a lot of listening. Although I'm a talker, I. I like to get at something about the. The smallest thing that they can come out with. Just one quick example of a client that I worked with for a number of years. They wound up selling the house eventually, but she and I worked on the garden for 14 years. And the day I met her, I knew she's either crazy or she's made of the right stuff. She turned out to be made of the right stuff. And she had a little. She had a tear sheet, a tiny little picture from a magazine of a hillside flower garden. And it was a pretty straightforward task. I saw what she loved. It was a starting point. It showed me something of, oh, she wants a big she wants a big mass of flowers and a way through it. That would be the path through.
- [02:32]
B
Okay, so you had the spark and then what, you designed it on paper?
- [02:37]
A
No, in this case, nothing much went on paper. Actually my partner at the time did help me with a sketch. I worked with the landscape architect and that's happened many times over the years, but it really wasn't necessary there. She was quite willing to just start in a really basic way together. And I'm very hands on in my work. Sure. By that I oversee and run the install with my team of men who I subcontract with and other subcontractors. But what I mean is I don't just hand off a design and go off and hope for the best until I see it next time.
- [03:07]
B
So what is the difference between a landscape architect and a landscape designer, which is what you are.
- [03:12]
A
All landscape architects are essentially landscape designers as well. But not all landscape designers are landscape architects, which is a. That's an accredited, I guess is the word, field profession.
- [03:24]
B
But landscape designer doesn't have to have any kind of credential, just mainly good intention, good ideas, knowledge of the field.
- [03:32]
A
Plenty of landscape designers have draftsmen and they have CAD skills and that and they don't go through the whole process of becoming certified landscape architects. I came to design in my own way, the long way around in a sense, I didn't know. When I was a young man and got into horticulture and went to school, I thought I wanted to be in production horticulture. I thought I wanted to.
- [03:50]
B
What did you study? What did you study?
- [03:52]
A
I studied ornamental horticulture at a small school in North Carolina. And now I followed that with a student year in the uk and when I got back from the UK after my student year, a former teacher who had really been a mentor and became a good friend over the years, he had left the school and gone to Nantucket Island. He had gone to work as a head gardener on a small estate and he asked me to come for the summer and be his assistant. But one of my jobs was caring for a little picket fenced flower garden and cutting garden. And then I was also involved in the vegetable garden, which was a big fenced garden down on the lower piece of the property. And there was something about being in these well designed contained spaces made me think, oh, this is what it's about is spatial design. And that was the turning point for me.
- [04:35]
B
When was the first time you had a garden?
- [04:38]
A
My first real taste of gardening was when I was a little boy and I asked my parents if I could make a flower bed around the lamppost by the street. And I planted this whole, like all these petunias. And they didn't do terribly well, but it planted a seed, so to speak. And then I did other little things in the yard. And I was always drawn to plants and nature. And the neighbor lady next door, she grew flowers and she used to let me weed and work in the garden and water. When I was very young, say 10 or so when she. I was drawn to her that I noticed people arranging plants to create a picture. She had these little brick edged beds with candy tuft and sweet williams and blue irises. And so I can just remember as a child just engaging with those plants. So by the time I was actually pursuing it, I realized like I was already a goner. I had been a plant lover forever. In high school I got very interested in houseplants and I started having house plants all over the house. And my mom, that's not funny.
- [05:31]
B
How do you find your clients?
- [05:32]
A
My very first client in Woodstock was a really dear friend I had gotten to know in the mid-80s when I moved there. And she told me about a little house she had bought in Woodstock and that if I ever wanted to come and help her start a garden. And I liked the idea of the Catskill Mountains, which I had never been to, and it was a starting place. And then that led to another client and another. And then the second year I was there in 91, I found this charming little cottage about half an hour from Woodstock, and I planted myself and a garden there and was there for 20 years. And that was a real turning point. And when I came to make my own first garden, I never imagined it would be this little 22 by 30 foot plastic plot. It was a labor of love. I just poured myself into that little plot and straight away it attracted attention. I invited a photographer friend to come from the city, just a close friend who had never photographed gardens. And together we sent it out to some magazines, one of them being Gardens Illustrated, which had just got up and running. So I was very lucky early on that they picked up the garden and published it and asked me to write the piece.
- [06:34]
B
Ooh.
- [06:34]
A
And the editor. I'd always known I was a pretty good writer and I'd always been encouraged by teachers, but I'd never been published. And that was my first published piece. And that opened doors.
- [06:42]
B
What percentage is a physical work? And what is like the design and the thinking?
- [06:48]
A
One of the things I love about the way I've Got about this is that I am there on the scene for the most part with whatever's going on, like enjoying the hours of the day and just seeing it come together piece by piece. And if my client is happy with what they're seeing, they tend to give you free rein and autonomy. And of course, you have to surprise people sometimes and say, oh, this is.
- [07:10]
B
But wait, I want to stop you for a second because they like what they see when you plant, it's like very small plants. You don't know what it will look like. Really.
- [07:18]
A
Yeah. Just remember that especially the longer I do this, and I've been doing this a long time. But when a client realizes that they've connected with somebody who's a plantsman and a gardener and has style and this way of arranging plants together and objects and all that, and also understand structural design, that isn't a landscape architect. I don't mean this to sound anyway, except just honest. They, I think, mostly feel lucky because they realize like that you're paying attention to the way they live their life with their house, their comings and goings in doorways and when they look out windows and how all this is going to relate. It elevates the whole experience of gardening and collecting plants, I hope to something else than just like having a bunch of flowers around.
- [07:59]
B
How do you price? That's the problem that most independent pander or entrepreneurs are having. How do you price the project?
- [08:06]
A
It's. I'll tell you with. I've been doing this a long time. It's always been time and materials, right? Yeah, materials is materials. And then you can mark up, you know, people do this in their own way and that at this point, I. Even on this big project I'm on, I am charging hourly and it's hefty, but. And then materials I mark up and she lets me do it at the end of the season.
- [08:28]
B
So what is more profitable, commercial spaces or private gardens?
- [08:32]
A
But I much prefer working in. In for private clients in residential situations. The commercial work I used to do was fine. I got a lot of experience as long as I was happy enough with the fee I was getting. And then of course, all my travel expenses and so forth were covered. Then that was that. I didn't have to worry about what materials and plants cost. That was something that the contractors had to deal with. But in those cases, I had to agree to a design fee that's very different to like installing a garbage.
- [09:00]
B
Oh, what's the structure? There is a design fee and then time and material.
- [09:04]
A
There have Been some situations like that, it essentially is time and materials. But certain clients will have a ceiling. That's fair enough. But we don't want to go over X. We don't want to go over 30,000 or 50 or 100. So then you know within that, that you know what you can get done. I would say to somebody just starting out, don't necessarily go into this field for the money, but you can make it. It took me a long time to really step up and stand in my own shoes. I remember years ago when I wrote a book, I had an agent and she told me there was a picture that was gonna run in a magazine and I was barefooted. And later she said something about, you're not that little barefooted boy from South Carolina any longer. You're a figure in the garden world. That sounds like such a mouthful. Have the bear saying that?
- [09:49]
B
No, but it's true.
- [09:50]
A
I said, you said, you know that something about should I have not been sitting, had that my picture with like a bare feet? She said, that's not what I'm saying. She said, the picture's fine. She said, stand in your shoes.
- [10:02]
B
Great lesson. What is the project you're working on now? What is this farm?
- [10:07]
A
It is a 300 plus acre cattle farm. It's grass fed beef. I was approached about designing and developing the 300 acres, the ornamental and useful gardens and the landscape gardens around the house and some of the other outbuildings and that.
- [10:24]
B
Oh, okay. We have a very short season here in the northeast, basically November, December to April. What do you do in the dead season?
- [10:33]
A
I really just take four months off. It's really December through March and actually I get going in March like last year. We really got a good start in March. So it's really just those four months and it's nice to kick back, be more introspective, to take a vacation. Yeah, Some landscape architects and landscape designers are at work on big projects and have lots of clients and they've got plenty of work in the winter, staying busy developing the drawings. When I developed the plans for the farm that I've been talking about, this big project I'm on now, I worked with a landscape architect in the winter months I would go to her home office in Yonkers and we would work and then we would work remotely some and then I got the plans ready to present.
- [11:09]
B
Did it happen to you that you planted a garden and towards mid season you said, oh, I'm not that crazy about it.
- [11:16]
A
That's just part of it right there is it's never good enough. When I walk into a garden at Salve that I haven't been in for a bit, one of my gardens in high season, when it's blossoming and everything's happening, I am aware of concerns with problems and that and what's not great and what's showing stress or something like that. But initially what I take in is I'm like, wow, this is. And that can depend on the time of day and the light too. It's the middle of the day, just bright light and go, oh, this is awful. But I could walk into that same garden at 6:30 in the evening and it's beautiful. Yeah. Typically what I see at first is what I love. I see this living, breathing palette of plants and a kind of a picture I'm creating and a feeling and a whole mood and atmosphere I'm striving for. And it's that and it's living, breathing and it's always changing. And then quite soon I'm focused in on what's not right and what I don't like and what I would do differently. I've been doing it long enough now. It's rare that if ever that I go like, why did I do this
- [12:18]
B
In September, end of August, everything dies. Do you still have to work to clean the garden, prepare it for next year?
- [12:24]
A
Well, you say everything dies. Yes. A lot of herbaceous plants, herbaceous perennials, flowering perennials, grasses and so forth die back. But the life of the plant is in the soil, underground. I really love the late season the most. Like August into September especially, and then early October, because I can start to let go of some of the. My obsessive kind of like managing the garden and the seasons. The next season's coming to claim the garden in a way, like fall. Like the leaves start falling and coming in and it becomes a whole other experience.
- [12:59]
B
How do you deal with deer pests?
- [13:01]
A
I have a wide knowledge of plants and there are quite a number of things that they won't bother. Interestingly, a lot of blue flowered plants. And I'm talking about perennials now, ornamental grasses. But we do some spraying at the farm. I've been lucky. They just stay at a distance and I think it's because of the horses and the cattle and the dog. They have so much green territory there in the mountains to roam around in and eat that they just. They come at the edges of the garden. But I do some targeted, very strategic spraying. I use something called Bob X. It's just like completely harmless. It's in organic ingredients. Nothing harmful. It's just like mint and rotten eggs. I've actually got different. I like the smell because it works. So I don't mind it. Some people find it stinky, but it. I hit certain things.
- [13:46]
B
Yeah. Eventually we have to spray some. I want to know if you see any difference in the garden because of global warming.
- [13:52]
A
I've watched the weather change tremendously. I really have.
- [13:55]
B
Really.
- [13:56]
A
I've been gardening the Catskills since 1990, just in my own little garden in Phoenicia all those years ago. I got a hard frost in the Garden on September 21. Over the years, that started getting later. So by the time I left there 20 years later, the first frost, I could count on it not happening any earlier than, say, mid October. Wow. Now, there was not a freezing. There wasn't a frost. There wasn't a killing frost, A hard frost. The entire month of May. That's a change. That is very much a change.
- [14:27]
B
But do you also see plants that didn't used to come back, coming back now because it's a little warmer?
- [14:33]
A
Yeah. And I planted some red buds in the garden, some small buds, and so they're iffy around here, but we decided to try them. Murmur was like, let's give it a shot. So I put. We put five small red buds in last spring, and I was just over this morning because I had a quick meeting at the farm before seeing you. And I'm looking at them every time I go, and the buds are swelling and they're going to blossom. And they came through a very cold winter. And other things in the garden. Over in Woodstock years ago, some verbena came back. I was like, what the world. So things are changing.
- [15:05]
B
What is more important for your business? Knowledge of plants? The design aspect, to have a good eye for colors, for height of plants and all of that. Or business skill.
- [15:18]
A
I've gotten better at business skills, but I'm not great. But anyway, to answer your question, so business out the door, spatial design are, like, equally important to me. I'm a plant lover, and I love richly planted gardens. And I think I've gotten fairly good at combining a big variety of things and, like, still having calm and serenity and rhythm in the planting instead of it being chaotic and, like, messy.
- [15:44]
B
Is there niche landscape designing? People just want. I want all purple or people.
- [15:50]
A
There's definitely people that focus on small gardens. I do. But a lot of people, of course, in the city focus on roof gardens and small gardens because that's what they're faced with. There Are people that focus on, say, vegetable gardening.
- [16:02]
B
Do you have a favorite annual or a favorite perennial that you always use in gardens?
- [16:08]
A
Like I told you, my first flower bed was a circle of petunias. And I've always loved petunias. They were in my first garden. They're great container plants. Petunias have come a long way in recent years. There are a lot of what they call self cleaning, which is a gross term. And one of my favorites is one called Vista Silverberry.
- [16:25]
B
That's your favorite?
- [16:26]
A
Probably my very favorite. Petunia is a species, petunia, Petunia integrifolia. So I have them specially grown. I think I ordered like 150 this year.
- [16:35]
B
What's the most important skill for somebody to get into this business?
- [16:39]
A
You just have to build up practical experience with growing the plants. And the same thing with spatial design. You start out and you go, oh, I like this, or I don't, and this doesn't make sense. You change it if you can. It's important to understand plant association, like how you associate one plant or many plants together. And it just. It takes time. I think so much of the way I go about that, assembling a planting of woody plants combined with herbaceous plants of all kinds, perennials, annuals, and then bulbs come in. It all comes from looking intently at plants themselves in nature, in other gardens. What I'm thinking of before I'm ever thinking about color, I'm thinking about form and structure and how these things are all going, what their habits are. When you talk about a plant's habit, you talk about what it does in space. Does it grow flat on the ground? Does it grow upright? Does it weep? Does it ramble? Is it like static and tight? And it's important to understand good pruning and why you're pruning. Like when somebody asks me, like, how do I prune this? What are you after? Are you shaping a plant? There's all kinds of pruning. The basic rule of thumb, though, with pruning trees and shrubs for aesthetic kind of appreciation, is you remove any dead or diseased wood and then you start just removing what doesn't belong.
- [17:58]
B
What do you do about watering?
- [18:00]
A
I do not install irrigation and I have it for years. My method is, even with big trees, is to coddle and pamper them. Some in their first year hand watering, maybe a soaker hose, whatever it takes in the first year, if you have a dry year, and if it's a dry summer, we may do. We may soak them like a Slow soak, say for an hour here and there, but they're pretty much on their own.
- [18:21]
B
What about annuals? You have a garden very large and very.
- [18:25]
A
Yeah, but annuals, if they're in the ground and they're. You planted them in a situation where it's decent soil and it's all about right plant, right place. Yes. If it's, if it's. If we go into a dry season after new things go in the ground.
- [18:37]
B
That's part of your job?
- [18:38]
A
Yeah, it's part of my job or whoever. And I love watering. It really allows me to spend time with plants and think about what I'm doing or why I did this. And maybe we'll do it differently and. And it doesn't mean that things don't die occasionally or that things don't look a little like stressed and thirsty, but you just roll with and the next thing you get a downpour for a few days and it's all refreshed and going again.
- [18:59]
B
Talk about technology. Do you use AI? I can design a garden for you to see.
- [19:04]
A
I'm saying that somebody, just a nurseryman, just mentioned to me yesterday in Kingston that he was working with someone, not a professional designer at all. He's in another profession altogether, but he loves gardens and he's bought a place upstate. And so he's working with this nurseryman on plant selections and so forth. And the garden he created with AI And I didn't know. I didn't know how to ask intelligent questions because I know nothing about that. Another friend sent who has a place. He and his husband have a place nearby. They recently sold it and bought the house up the road. And he was sending me an AI generated garden design. Not a plan like a layout, but just a three dimensional, like an image of a possible garden. I said, this looks really great. How did you do this? He said, it's pretty easy with AI I'll show you. I have limited interest in that kind of thing. And I'm in Luddite when it comes to technology and computers. And so I just get stuck.
- [20:02]
B
And so you don't use any kind of software to design.
- [20:06]
A
But like I said, when I need drawings, and certainly when I was doing commercial work, I worked with the landscape architect. We would take the plans that were developed by the engineer on the project and then we would just change the planting.
- [20:17]
B
You love what you do, obviously, since the age of nine before.
- [20:22]
A
Yeah.
- [20:22]
B
Do you want to retire? Do you still love it or are you a little bit over it? You've had enough.
- [20:29]
A
I think that sometime. But a I can't retire, I just can't. But I also don't really want to. What am I going to do? So I have that time of the year off to do other things. And what's good about my situation here is that it's a big project, it's a big undertaking and it's stressful and in fact it's time to start thinking about bringing. I would like to bring somebody in at my younger who could come in and bring his or her own approach and knowledge and experience. But defer to me, it's my creation, it's my design. But I want to learn from a younger person who's got knowledge of trends and ways of doing things, horticulturally and otherwise and be open to that and not have an ego about it. I feel like if I can give this another eight or ten years running the garden because I'm fit and healthy and right and I love being active. I know it's really good for me. I think one of the reasons I'm in general good health is because I've spent a life in gardens. I just do. As long as I can design and run the garden and then step away exactly from it full time, I can still enjoy it and be involved. I think because I just grow closer to and involved with the clients in a good way. They're becoming friends.
- [21:42]
B
Dean, thank you so much. I just want to say that in the show notes I'm going to put links to some of your pictures of your amazing gardens. People have to see it and thank you so much for sharing all this knowledge.
- [21:54]
A
Oh, thank you.
- [21:55]
B
Yes, that's it for today. To hear more about good paying careers you can build without a degree, head to how much can I make that info? We have over 80 episodes with growing library of articles with real data and insights on different jobs. You can listen to people in those roles talk about what the day to day is really like, how they got in and how much they make. So visit how much can I make that info? And I will see you next week.