Laurel Award for Horticulture

In June 2026 the Preservation Society of Newport County presented O'Connor Design Build with its Laurel Award for Horticulture, recognizing the rain garden we built at Marble House. The Laurel Awards are given each year at the Society's annual meeting to the people and firms whose work has made a lasting difference to its historic properties; the award for horticulture goes to work in the landscapes and gardens.

The garden sits in the southwest corner of the Marble House visitor parking lot, and it was designed to do a quiet job well: catch the stormwater that runs off the pavement, hold it, filter it and let it soak back into the ground instead of running toward the street and the bay. At 2,800 square feet it holds 25,000 gallons at rest and takes on as much as 38,000 gallons during a heavy rain while it drains.

What a visitor sees is a garden, not infrastructure. A channel of river stone carries the water in. Native perennials and grasses fill the ground around it, left to go to seed for the birds, with blueberry and viburnum for the wildlife that eats berries. A path of stepping stones and a pair of granite benches invite people to walk through and sit a while. The plants were chosen with Jim Donahue, the Society's Curator of Historic Landscapes and Horticulture, to grow together into colonies that need very little tending.

The garden was a project of Scenic Aquidneck — the Preservation Society of Newport County, Aquidneck Land Trust, Preserve Rhode Island and the van Beuren Charitable Foundation — and was built by our crew. It opened with a ribbon cutting on June 27, 2025.

Read more: Rain Garden Makes a Splash in Newport (Preserve Rhode Island, July 25, 2025).