Rue Sherwood Landscape Design

A landscape designer, not a landscaping company — and that distinction runs through everything here. Rue Sherwood works out of Ipswich: she draws the plan, selects and buys the trees, shrubs and perennials herself, and then oversees the installation while other people's crews do the building. Her own site states a Masters in Landscape Architecture from the Harvard Graduate School of Design and a degree in Plant and Soil Science from the University of Vermont; her Houzz profile adds APLD Certified Landscape Designer, Massachusetts Certified Landscape Professional, NOFA Accredited Organic Land Care Professional, and Boston magazine's Best of Boston Home 2017 for Best Landscape Architect, North. The accounts from people who hired her are unusually detailed, and they converge. In an October 2017 review, a client whose several acres sat beside a private pond wrote that the job came in on time and within budget, and credited her with steering them away from plants that would "end up as deer munchables." A March 2015 client described a whole-yard overhaul built around texture as much as colour — "From May until October, there is always something interesting to look at" — plus new front and back walkways, retaining walls, and the stone mason she brought in to lay them. An April 2017 client said she was present with the subcontractors daily and communicated before, during and after the work. A June 2015 reviewer put it in time: what took them ten years to think about, she resolved in two or three months. The thing to sit with is when all of that happened. Every written account falls between March 2015 and October 2017, all of it on one platform, and Google carries a single rating with no comment attached. Two of the sixteen Houzz reviews are also from people she hires rather than people who hired her — the installing landscape contractor and a mason — so those read as trade references rather than customer ones. She suits a property that needs a plan before it needs a crew, especially where planting has to survive deer, salt air and a New England winter. Houzz puts her typical job between $15,000 and $150,000-plus. Ask who would actually build it, ask to see something designed in the last two or three years, and understand that the construction contract sits with the installing contractor rather than with her.