Northern Landscapes · Est. 2009 · Duluth, MN
Cold-climate gardens, designed to look intentional in February.
A specialty landscape architecture studio for harsh-winter properties across the northern U.S. and adjacent Canada. We design four-season gardens, native plantings, and resilient hardscape for homeowners who refuse to settle for a yard that only reads well in July.
Book a Site VisitThe problem
Most northern landscapes were drawn for someone else's climate.
Look out the window in mid-February. The rhododendron is a wet skeleton. The foundation evergreens have thawed into mud. The "specimen tree" is wrapped in a burlap sack like a piece of furniture in storage. The only structure left is the deck nobody uses in winter and the plastic edging that has heavened itself out of the ground.
This is not bad luck. It is a design failure. The average residential landscape in zones 3–5 is a July rendering with a snow problem — built around peak-bloom perennials, manicured lawn, and ornamental species that were never trialed at twenty below. When the growing season ends, the garden ends with it, and the property reverts to a long, low, brown rectangle until May.
A cold-climate garden has to solve a different set of problems: snow load on structure, road salt on foliage, freeze-thaw heave on paving, desiccation wind on broadleaf evergreens, browse pressure on every woody plant within a mile of a deer trail, and a viewing season that is six months of brown, white, and grey. We design for all of it. That is the entire premise of the studio.
The deliverable
The Five-Season Plant Matrix.
Every planting plan we issue is annotated for five performance windows, not one. A bed that earns its square footage in July and disappears in November is, in our vocabulary, an incomplete design. Our drawings tell a client — and the contractor who installs it — exactly what each plant is doing in spring, summer, fall, winter, and for the wildlife that has to live there year-round.
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01
Spring bulb
Snowdrops, scilla, and early narcissus threaded under deciduous shrubs so color arrives before the canopy leafs out and the bed is visible again.
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02
Summer bloom
Cool-season perennials and prairie natives — coneflower, liatris, bee balm, baptisia — chosen for stem strength under August thunderstorms and pollinator value over a long window.
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03
Fall color
Amsonia, sumac, witch hazel, serviceberry, and selected maples selected for layered color — gold, rust, and true red — timed to peak in late September, not late October after first frost.
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04
Winter structure
Red twig dogwood, river birch, ornamental grasses left standing, and conifer masses arranged so the garden has a readable silhouette under eighteen inches of snow.
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05
Wildlife forage
Native fruit, seed head retention, and early-season nectar sources sized for migratory songbirds, native bees, and overwintering pollinators — measured against browse pressure.
Commissions
Four ways we work with northern property owners.
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A
Residential design
Full-yard redesign for homeowners in zones 3–5, typically on lots between a third of an acre and two acres. Concept, planting plan, hardscape drawing, and a phased implementation schedule.
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B
Estate & acreage work
Lakeshore, ridge, and rural properties from two to forty acres. Master planning, shoreline stabilization, native meadow restoration, and tree work supervised by our in-house ISA-certified arborist.
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C
Builder & developer packages
Front-yard and amenity design for production builders and small developers building in cold-climate subdivisions. Plan sets drawn to builder pricing, with a winter-interest spec sheet.
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D
Contractor design partnership
We design, your builder installs. White-label planting plans and hardscape drawings for landscape contractors across MN, WI, MI, NY, and VT who want a registered landscape architect on their team.
The trial garden at the Duluth nursery, March 2024. Zone 3a.
Behind the studio
A 7-winter trial garden, and a designer who grew up in Zone 3.
Northern Landscapes was founded in 2009 by Mara Vossberg, MLA, in Duluth. Mara holds a Master of Landscape Architecture from the University of Minnesota and is a registered Landscape Architect in Minnesota, Wisconsin, Michigan, and New York. She grew up gardening in a USDA Zone 3 backyard in Two Harbors, and that is the perspective the studio is built around.
The Duluth research nursery is a working trial garden, not a showroom. Across seven winters we have recorded hardiness data on more than 240 perennial cultivars at Zone 3a — which ones hold a bud through a January polar vortex, which stems collapse under wet heavy snow, which foliage burns under road salt drift, and which simply disappear by year three. Every planting plan the studio issues is built from that data, not from a wholesaler's shelf.
Selected work
Gardens built to be read in snow.
A small sample from 612 completed residential and estate designs across Minnesota, Wisconsin, Michigan, Vermont, and Colorado. Each project was photographed in the dormant season unless noted — winter and four-season conditions are the only honest test of a cold-climate garden.
Estate · Cascade Ridge
Lakeshore · North Shore
Residential · Mad River Valley
High altitude · Front Range
Builder package · Harbor Ridge