TROUTBECK: Briefly, could you sum up Reed Hilderbrand's approach to landscape architecture and what sets you apart as a firm?

BEKA STURGIS: I would say most landscape architects are really concerned about how we understand sort of what the underlying conditions of the environment are and many of the invisible things, whether it's the air or the wind,
or the different small organisms that you maybe don't notice, how they're all structuring the world that we live in. And then depending on the kind of landscape architect that you are, you're either really interested in large ecological restoration or you're interested in specific urban conditions and how you can actually bring open space to people in cities. Or you might be really interested in sustainable transportation. I don't know, things like that. So there are lots of different ways to practice being a landscape architect.

I think at Reed Hilderbrand what we are most interested in is sort of what it means for humans to connect in a really present and daily way with the landscapes where they live and that there is an act of kind of creativity and almost spirit that can come forward when you're able to basically foster an intentional and in some ways like caring set of relationships between people and where they spend time. And that when we're looking at projects, our hope basically is if people can have a much more intimate set of relationships with the natural world and with climate, which when I say climate, it's like, where's the sun coming from? The different times of year, wind, all the things that move, our waters, the fact that actually our soil moves and is alive, right? If people can really start to pay attention and to care for that, I think we have a hope that actually the world and all of our relationships will be a little bit closer to the relationships that we dream of. And so we most love to work on projects where the people that we're getting to work with really are interested in asking questions around how do we make our land or our and our human relationships and experience deeper through understanding the possibilities on where we are. And so we work all over the place, really many different places, and we work at all scales and we work in cities and we work in real world lands and we work in tiny gardens or rooftops and we work, Michael and I are working for the Powder Art Foundation in Utah, which is 12,000 acres, right? Scale is not something that defines our work, but it really our work is about relationships. And we're really, really motivated to make beautiful relationships. But those are human relationships and topographic relationships.

MICHAEL: A large part of our work is not just about creating beautiful spaces, but bringing legibility to what's already there. And I think for Troutbeck in particular, we did a ton of work looking at exactly what the topography is doing and the vegetation and hydrology, and really trying to bring all that forward. I think there's so many ways in which the history of Troutbeck is so layered and that's like visible in the landscape, but they're like present in the landscape and oftentimes that all those layers end up becoming a little bit fluttered and the sort of the original sort of site becomes a little bit muddied and it's hard to understand what the site is actually doing. And so, so part of our work when we first started working with Troutbeck was looking at the master plan that's already been created and trying to reorganize things, reorganizing those same programs and all the things that Tropbeck wanted to bring to really tie it to the landscape and bring forward the landscape while still satisfying all the programmatic requirements. And so for the cottages, they're all very sensitively sited with the slope. And we chose our planting palette to really try and bring legibility to that. Well, in a condition that used to exist there, and unfortunately it all got sort of
lost through the construction process and even the ways we aligned the pathways and roads and walls was all following the land form and the contours so that you can be on site and just immediately understand sort of what the land is doing, what the vegetation historically did there. I mean you get a sense of sort of the up and downs and the flats and then
all the program and parking and cabin siding and everything is sort of keyed into all of that.

we offered a revision [to the master plan] that was based on the fact that you have this amazing river going through the center of Troutbeck. And we said it feels like everything needs to be based on that magical condition. And many of the most beloved parts of Troutbeck from the bridge to the terraces outside of the manor house are all about that. And then we said, you know, you have this extraordinary garden tradition. And we had some interns and they went to the New York Botanic Garden and looked up the archives and found that Troutbeck for a long time you had the foremost clematis collection in the nation. So we tried to bring forward not just the kind of natural systems of the river and the floodplain, the river banks, and then the woods that are kind of the hills or knolls all around, the old pastures, and there's this geomorphic order, and then you have this garden and development order, and those two, in a way, the development of the manor house and the gardens, we felt like that's historic preservation. It's a moment of what would be called significance from a historic preservation point of view. You have this beautiful natural system. And we want everything that happens going forward to be about bringing those two conditions forward. And the tensions and differences are points of beauty and experience that we want to kind of maximize. And the idea of having cabins was already a part.

We tried to say, "Look, if you have these cabins, they really have to defer to the river and the woods. They need to feel "fitted." And I think they didn't feel that way when we started, right? They were, it was a little too cookie cutter.

TROUTBECK: They look, it's unbelievable how fast once you planted, everything just became lush and looks like it belongs there. And then of course, the fact that the architecture does differ so much to Benton and the color palette of the buildings themselves. And I think.
Stonehill Taylor had a nice phrase: they said, the cottages "sit lightly." And that stuck with me because I feel that they do seem to perch within as opposed to be set upon, which is really nice.

BEKA STURGIS: Yeah, and I think that was so important. As we worked with the team using some of the rock that ended up being unearthed as part of the excavation to help knit them back, we tried to keep as many trees as we possibly could. We didn't get to keep quite as many as we had intended. But even the work to go out and find two large trees that would settle in the start of the turn, I think is really important and a real testimony to Troutbeck's kind of legacy with horticulture. Because some of some of what we've done is garden like, right? It's not totally easy resort planning, planting. It's much more idiosyncratic, ecologically rich, but also there's some real surprise choices that make it feel true to the kind of quirkiness and romance of Troutbeck, which we were interested in.

TROUTBECK: Can we talk just for a second again for the layman about native species and the role that they play in a project like this?
You want to be a landscape architect? Come work with us and bring some delicious food when you come over. You're most welcome to come visit the studio. I do need to, I think we probably both need to go at one, but we'd be happy, as I said, to schedule another conversation and very...

BEKA: So, to super briefly, probably on the question of natives, we were working with the is it the Housatonic Valley Association on the conservation easement and really trying from the very start of our work almost to identify critical species within the native plant community that would be most beneficial to plant was really important, and that we really wanted to work within the community that you are within to hear from your local experts about what was most important to them that for us to preserve, protect, or add or supplement was one of the starting points of the project in terms of natives.

We worked from the very beginning with Anthony to help talk through some of the challenges with the previous native planting efforts that you had made and just the reality that we are living in a time where the precipitation cycles, I don't sound like a layman right now, but when it rains, it's not as predictable as the way it was before. that the presence of invasives is much greater and their sort of bullying power is much greater. And so how you protect without an enormous amount of resources, the kind of vulnerable native plants is a difficult question. There had been efforts at Troutbeck to establish native plantings before, but they the number of invasives and weeds that had come in and put them under pressure was a real challenge. So we tried to develop the planting that we have to be as much of "a mat" as possible. So there was as little room for invasives and weeds to come through so that invasives don't flourish. We also, I think, said we don't really believe in 100% native strategy and that actually diversity is critical and we're at a sort of moment where I think we would say we're a little bit, it's a little bit, there are all these naturalized good citizens within the plant community and that being a little bit more expansive about what is a great plant for the right site.
It's good to have some level of diversity that is beyond a strict native plant palette. So our palette is not 100% native. It is really native dominant.

MICHAEL: [The site] was a massively dense stand of invasive euonymous burning bush. It like completely choking anything out. At the same time that euonymus was doing like a really amazing job of screening and like we could imagine that that sort of planting quality would actually be good for the between the cabins and so what we actually did in creating our majority native planting palette was choose species that were equally scrappy and full and that would that would basically mimic sort of the impression of the invasive euonymus. So it would get get quite tall and get quite like round and full and really fill in and provide some privacy between the cottages, while also minimizing the possibility of invasives coming in. And so while it looks like really beautiful and garden-like in many ways, it's also a pretty scrappy planting palette. Yeah, tough. We give you really tough plants. They might look pretty, but they're super tough.