Rooted

Housed in an early 19th-century building at a crossroads in New London, Pennsylvania, Rooted is a retail shop devoted to local makers and artisans. Its owner had already given the store a clear identity — commissioning a hand-fabricated sign built from a slice of tree trunk and salvaged metal letters — before turning her attention to the front garden. What she found there was a stone wall, a few creeping flowers, and an otherwise narrow strip of grass between the street and the porch: a space that said nothing about the shop it introduced.

Our team saw an opportunity – a shop built on unconventional, handcrafted goods deserved a garden willing to be equally unconventional. The long, narrow footprint also posed real practical constraints — the challenges of getting a mower down a wall to a narrow grass strip, and a hedge sheared twice a year offers little in the off-season. We designed instead around color and seasonal succession: a planting palette that delivers its strongest floral impact in spring and again in late summer, then relies on the plants’ own architecture — seed heads, dried hydrangea blooms, ornamental grasses holding their structure through winter — to carry interest the rest of the year. Nothing here is coaxed into a repeated shape; the plants are left to hold their natural form, season by season.

Because the owner is resourceful and hands-on by nature, our scope centered on site analysis, concept development, and a planting plan she and her staff could install themselves — no construction required. The result carries the same spirit as the shop it fronts: rooted in place, unpolished in the right ways, and changing enough through the year that a passerby sees something a little different each time. It is a small garden doing a large amount of storytelling.