– by Deborah Rogers –
This is part of a rotating series of articles on members of Sidney Meet Up Women’s Networking Group, featuring women in business on the Saanich Peninsula.
Looking Pacific Ridge Landscapes up on Facebook, or through their beautiful website, is highly recommended. There is a strong design aesthetic that runs through all their promotional material, and as owners Merle and Katie Kroeker have produced it all themselves, it gives a pretty strong indication of the quality of their garden visions.
Katie seems delighted to have relocated to Sidney. Together with her husband Merle, she has been working as a garden designer for seven years. Despite having a successful and award-winning company based in Edmonton, the couple made the decision last fall to relocate to the Saanich Peninsula. They fell in love with Sidney on their first visit, and are thrilled to have found a situation where they can do what they love year-round. “There’s triple the amount of plants we can use and the palette is amazing.” Katie has found that the beauty she relies on for inspiration is abundant in their new home, which has been great for creativity. She stresses that “learning is always important, whether I stayed in Edmonton or here, it’s always about continually being at the forefront of what’s happening in the industry.”
I appreciated Katie’s seriousness as she told me some of her sources of inspiration. The beauty of Vancouver Island provides natural colour and texture combinations, but Katie says she is also inspired by beauty in general. Fine Arts, such as dance, sculpture or painting, determine the direction trends are heading. She rounds out her knowledge by reading about garden design and design philosophy. She can’t help but use her hands to describe the current obsession with meadows and wild plantings: landscapes that shift and move.
Although their website and Facebook page are filled with photos and advice, in Sidney you can also view a completed project in person. Katie describes the great opportunity they had to help Margot Wilson develop the outdoor area of the newly relocated Sidney Dig This (on Third Street). An uninspiring plot has been transformed with some hardscaping, including a pergola, water feature and deck, along with container plantings. There will be a grand opening in June to celebrate the collaboration.
Each client and each design is very different: “we don’t have a cookie-cutter plan that we roll out for each garden.” Knowing how to translate a client’s understanding of what will work for them into a design that will enhance and express their personality is one of the key skills, “most importantly the garden should be inviting but not demanding.” For Katie it’s about the design, and installation of that design, rather than the gardening. Pacific Ridge Landscapes doesn’t do landscape maintenance, but will work at either new build properties (like the Spirit Bay site in Sooke) or to overhaul existing gardens.
