APPROACH
Approach
Brown Calderón Gardens is a landscape design studio rooted in ecology and care.
Every design decision carries weight: what we plant, how we build, and how we maintain. These interventions, no matter how small, shape the future of our shared environment.
With a view toward this future, we are guided by site conditions, select plants for their relationship to place, source local materials when possible, and make choices that support resilient, ecologically rich gardens.
Plant Note 01
Black Cohosh
Actaea racemosa
A long-lived woodland perennial native to eastern North America. Well suited to shaded gardens, it prefers moist, rich soil and produces tall white flowers in summer.
Nancy Natalia
Brown Calderón
One of my earliest memories is watching bats gather in a zapote tree at dusk in Mexico City. I was drawn to the landscape before I had a language for it, and for years tried to translate that feeling through painting and, later through my career in the contemporary art world.
I grew up between Mexico City and Boston before moving to New York to study at Parsons School of Design. Eventually, I found my way back to that earlier fascination with the natural world, training in landscape design and horticulture at the New York Botanical Garden before opening my landscape design studio in Ridgewood, Queens.
My approach brings together aesthetic sensibility and horticultural knowledge to create gardens that feel considered yet alive: evolving compositions shaped by intention, time, growth, and decay. I think of each garden as a conversation between the landscape we inherit and the one we choose to cultivate.
Plant Note 02
Tall Verbena
Verbena bonariensis
Upright flowering stems rise through fine textured grasses, their vivid purple blooms provide color and rhythm to the the late summer garden.
According to a Roman fable, Cura, the personification of care, shaped the first human from clay. XXX.
I think of care as a commitment to nurturing the landscapes around us and the life they sustain, until they too return to the earth that made them.
