
fritz&gignoux

We decided long ago when we opened our doors that we would focus our energies on creating gardens that would marry our client's dreams and ideas with the site tangibles running tandem with our attention to every detail and our ever present guiding hand to create the magic. We are so fortunate to work with highly talented craftspeople day in and day out all year long to bring our many gardens to life and with wonderful clients who believe in the process. It is an educative journey. A lifetime of travel and our wide ranging educations have informed our highly personal and integrative design process. We build gardens of all scales and complexity and have stayed true to our decades held belief in building a healthy soil foundation on which to integrate companion planting alongside native plant species to sustain our organic gardens. For every garden there were many goals set and met, there were frameworks to create, and focal elements to consider as well as drainage to engineer and structures to design. But there were also many questions. For example, what is it that makes a healing garden therapeutic in nature? Or what are the qualitiies of an English cottage garden such as Thomas Hardy might have considered? Or how does one preserve and translate the vernacular or historic landscape in a working or hobby farm landscape and garden? Over the years, we have posed hundreds of thousands of questions and as the answers unfolded so too did great gardens.
Gertrude Jekyll, the beloved English plantswoman, garden designer and artist once said, ‘it is just in the way it is done that lies the whole difference between commonplace gardening and gardening that may rightly claim to rank as a fine art. Given the same space of ground and the same material, they may either be fashioned into a dream of beauty, a place of perfect rest and refreshment of mind and body--a series of soul satisfying pictures--a treasure of well-set jewels; or they may be so misused that everything is jarring and displeasing. To learn how to perceive the difference and how to do right is to apprehend gardening as a fine art.’