Julie Moir Messervy Design Studio (JMMDS) comprises three landscape architects, one designer, a marketing and communications manager and principal Julie Moir Messervy. JMMDS's landscapes include parks and arboretums, museums, cemeteries, academic/corporate campuses, children's gardens, as well as scores of residential clients. The JMMDS team creates conceptual and schematic designs and oversees all installation and planting details.

The Toronto Music Garden, Toronto, Ontario

JMMDS designed the Toronto Music Garden, with cellist Yo-Yo Ma as a creative collaborator. The design of this award-winning three-acre public park on Toronto's Harborfront was inspired by the "First Suite for Unaccompanied Cello" by Johann Sebastian Bach. Curving paths move visitors through six garden "movements." In 2005, the Toronto Music Garden received a Leonardo Da Vinci award for innovation and creativity.

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Woodland Modern, Dedham, Mass.

 

JMMDS created a woodland garden for a contemporary house on a pond that blurs the lines between traditional and modern, natural and built spaces. At the front of the house, three evenly spaced "Fastigiata' ginkgo trees form an openwork aerial hedge. New ledge-like stones bring the feel of the existing ledges into the new front garden bed.

A new stepping stone path along the side of the home winds past a Stewartia tree through drifts of ajuga, geraniums, anemones, daylilies, and echinaceas. Bluestone squares bring a sense of movement and rhythm to the long narrow space where a white, purple, and green-hued shade garden includes heucheras, anemone, Solomon seal, Hakonechloa and ferns.

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The Pond Home, Southeastern Vermont

For a mountaintop home in southern Vermont, JMMDS enlarged an existing pond and simplified its shape, creating a swimming pond with artfully placed stone steps entering the water at several points along the perimeter. A wide, mown-grass path around the pond takes visitors past moss-covered boulders and large swathes of native plantings along the shoreline.

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A Rill Garden with a Living Wall, Boston

JMMDS designed curved living walls of native plantings to soften the entrance to this narrow entry courtyard this four-story Silver LEED certification residence. Behind the home is a COR-TEN steel "handrill" that links the Ipe deck, which sits off the living room, with a JMMDS-designed meditation pool and garden, accessed below via a COR-TEN stairway.