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Midwest Home and Minnesota Nursery & Landscape Association 2011 Awards
This year's Designer in Bloom and Budding Talent awards
2011 Designer in Bloom Award Winner:
Douglas Owens-Pike, EnergyScapes
Eco-Minded Design
Sustainability is all the rage these days, but eco-minded landscaping is far from a new idea. Douglas Owens-Pike, founder and owner of Minneapolis landscape design firm EnergyScapes, Inc., has specialized in native landscapes that conserve resources for more than two decades.
He literally designs “energyscapes”—landscapes that help decrease a home’s heating and cooling requirements, and rely on native plants that require little water, chemical fertilizers, or pesticides.
Wisconsin native Owens-Pike earned a master’s degree in Plant Ecology from the University of Washington, but he credits his grandmother with starting him down the sustainable garden path. She grew native plants and vegetables in her gardens, but relied on compost to feed the soil and her plants. “She did quite a bit to train me,” Owens-Pike recalls. “And she was the first person I knew who had the idea to combine flowers and food-producing plants.”
After graduating in 1981, he planned to go to work for a public land-management agency, but found himself in the midst of a Reagan-era feud between protectors of wilderness areas and oil and gas interests. Instead, he ended up in Washington, DC, lobbying on behalf of public lands. In 1983, he and his wife returned to the Midwest and made Minneapolis their home.
Photo courtesy of Energyscapes
At that time, few shared his passion for sustainability. Then he met award-winning landscape designer C. Colston Burrell and landscape architect Jim Hagstrom, owner of Savanna Designs in Afton. “They were both interested in native plants, and they really mentored me,” says Owens-Pike. He founded EnergyScapes in 1989 and has earned a reputation for designing water-wise, eco-friendly landscapes that include a variety of mostly native plants. “Working with them, I discovered my knowledge was pretty unique in the field of landscape design,” he says. “It was fun to begin to apply it.”
Recognizing Owens-Pike’s talent for creating beautiful landscapes that conserve energy and resources, jurors named him the 2011 winner of the first-annual Designer in Bloom award. Co-sponsored by Midwest Home magazine and the Minnesota Nursery and Landscape Association (MNLA), the award recognizes an established designer with at least 15 years experience. Owens-Pike is the founding president of the Minnesota chapter of the Association of Professional Landscape Designers (APLD) and often speaks on ecological landscaping.
Though he is a proponent of native plants, Owens-Pike will use exotics—if they are not invasive—as well as heirloom or other plants homeowners request. “I talked to a client the other day about some scented iris that were really important to her,” he says. “It’s fine to keep them. We just need to move them to a more appropriate place in the garden.” If it had been an Amur maple she wanted to keep, well, that would have been a different story. “Those trees are gorgeous, but I urge people to get rid of them because they proliferate to the point of excluding other diversity.”
There’s little need for such exotics, since native plants offer an ideal balance between beauty and environmental stewardship. “To me, the fun of working with native plants is finding the right plants for the site,” he says. “If you look at the range of native conditions in a region, you can find a plant that can cope with the environment. You just have to know what you’re doing.”
Meleah Maynard is a Minneapolis writer and master gardener.
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Photo by Todd Buchanan
2011 Budding Talent Award Winner:
Jack Dorcey, Landscape Design Studios
Bringing Ideas to Life
It wasn’t love of formal gardens, intrigue with water features, or fascination with perennial beds that led Jack Dorcey into the landscape design business. It was weeds. “I was in junior high in 4-H and a leader there got me involved in a statewide weed-identification contest that really piqued my interest in plants,” Dorcey recalls. He quickly put his newfound weed-spotting skills to the test in his mom’s garden. “It was always a disaster, so I took it over, got rid of all the weeds, and started perennial beds all over the place.”
Today, Dorcey is a trained horticulturist whose landscape designs have won numerous Minnesota Nursery and Landscape Association (MNLA) awards over the years. No doubt his early experience cultivating his mother’s garden, as well as helping out with his 10 brothers and sisters in the alfalfa, corn, and soybean fields on the family farm in Nebraska, contributed to his choice of vocation. He attended the University of Nebraska, majoring in horticulture with an emphasis on design, and was a designer with Bever Landscaping in Forest Lake for four years before starting White Bear Lake-based Landscape Design Studios with a coworker from Bever in 2010. In March, Dorcey won the first-annual Budding Talent award, co-sponsored by MNLA and Midwest Home magazine.
Photo by Landscape Design Studios
Dorcey says he doesn’t have a signature style; he listens to clients and designs features for their projects. “I like the natural look of perennials and boulder walls, but I’ve also done formal gardens, Japanese gardens, and contemporary gardens with clean edges,” he says.
It’s the challenge of creating what homeowners want that really inspires him. “It’s all about being a detective,” he says. He asks questions about how they live and how they’ll use their outdoor space: What’s the biggest party you’re likely to throw? How often do you think you’ll be out in your backyard? “I know that I got it right when I go back once a project is done and there are empty beer cans out around what’s left of the bonfire they enjoyed the night before.”
Though Dorcey occasionally has to coax clients out of a bad idea, he more often helps people hone in on features they would like to have in their landscapes but can’t visualize or don’t think are possible. A couple of years ago, for example, a couple approached him at a home show saying they were thinking about a swimming pool. They invited him to their house to talk about it. They changed their minds about the pool, but wanted discuss other ideas. Three hours later they were again excited about a pool—partly because of Dorcey’s unique design concept. Far from the usual kidney-shaped concrete affair, he envisioned a 30- by-40-foot pond with a liner, pea-gravel bottom, and fish. Bio-filters keep the pond crystal clear, so chemicals are unnecessary. There’s even a beach area where the homeowners can lounge in chairs with their feet in the water.
“It’s the first pool like this I’ve done so far,” says Dorcey. “But it’s a really neat concept, so I’ll probably be doing more.”
Meleah Maynard is a Minneapolis writer and master gardener.
For more information on featured products and suppliers, please see our Buyer's Guide.
6 ISSUES (1 YEAR)
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