Three Honor Awards from the Rhode Island Nursery & Landscape Association

The Rhode Island Nursery & Landscape Association recognized three of our projects with Honor Awards in its 2023 Professional Excellence Awards, presented at the association's Winter Conference and Trade Show in Warwick on February 28, 2024. The program is judged blind — no company names, client names or locations on the entries — by a panel of landscape professionals who weigh difficulty, craftsmanship, horticultural practice and what the work gives back to its surroundings.

Old Beach Oasis — Honor Award. The lot fell about sixteen feet across fifty, so a pool only made sense with walls to hold the hillside. We built tiered boulder retaining walls, a custom plunge pool and a broad bluestone patio, managed the stormwater through stone beds and areas that let it soak away, and finished the front entrance with a wall that matches the home's original brownstone paneling.

Home on Hamilton — Honor Award. A renovated Jamestown home needed a new driveway and planting. Stone walls are part of Jamestown's character, so a serpentine stone wall became the driver of the design, running beside a new gravel drive to make a winding approach to the house, with perennial gardens for seasonal interest and a rain garden beside the wetlands to improve the drainage.

Brook Woods — Honor Award. An overgrown property with water and flooding problems and difficult terrain. We cleared unhealthy trees and invasive plants, built a stone terrace off the back of the house for sitting and dining at the same level as the rooms inside, and ran a series of reclaimed stone steps down to the lower lawn toward the brook, with drainage and rain gardens front and back to put the water where it belongs.

Read more: RINLA spring 2024 newsletter (awards write-ups) · RINLA Professional Excellence Awards.