In a densely populated city like NYC, green spaces are a limited resource. Sera Rogue wants to change that by cultivating green spaces through her sustainable landscape design and holistic gardening studio, Red Fern Brooklyn. Rogue and her team create and install custom-designed gardens to fit your unique needs. By using an ecologically-conscious approach, Red Fern Brooklyn believes stewardship and sustainability can grow in tandem in and around your home.
Red Fern: A Garden Design Studio Turning NYC Green
The turn of a new season can spur excitement for a multitude of reasons for New Yorkers, especially during the transition into spring when the eagerness to be outside is palpably felt throughout the community. Many fantasize about being surrounded by nature, yet such spaces are a limited resource in our urban city. What if we could cultivate those spaces a bit closer to home and simultaneously use them to steward our own ecology?
Sera Rogue couldn’t ignore this seed of a conundrum and her curiosities grew into the creation Red Fern Brooklyn, a sustainable landscape design and holistic gardening studio. As the owner and designer, Rogue seeks to connect her clients to our ecological system by offering design expertise, classes, and a variety of initiatives.
Serving numerous locations throughout Brooklyn, Manhattan, and New Jersey, Red Fern Brooklyn offers garden design, installation, and maintenance along with other services to create and cultivate green spaces. Rogue brings her client’s visions to life alongside assistant designer, Finn Bellanger. Another team member, Shahrayer Shahamet, assists with gardening and manages Red Fern Brooklyn’s social media platforms while Kate Douglass helps with administrative work.
After working in the area for over nine years, Rogue notes she’s leading the Red Fern Brooklyn team through a period of transition by focusing on initiatives to deal with climate change and increased sustainability. “Our first and foremost goal is to help people green their own properties and green their homes,” Rogue said, “to make usable spaces that are ecologically sound is what we’re all about.”
The Red Fern Brooklyn team works to ensure each project is not only custom-designed to fit each client’s needs, but that their work will encourage each person to become a better steward of our ecology. It can often be easy to lose a connection to nature while navigating through the flurry of an urban city. Rogue believes awareness of our ecology is crucial to understand how we can better steward the earth we inhabit.
As we grow in awareness and knowledge of the current state of the earth, feelings of hopelessness to alter the situation can definitely arise. However, Rogue doesn’t dismiss the daunting reality of climate change, rather, she wants to lean into how we can make choices that are less harmful and more nourishing for the earth.
“We can use our green spaces as a way for us, individually, to work with native plants to support our local fauna or develop a way to use our own waste through compost to make our gardens healthier,” Rogue said.
Designing spaces with native plants is central to Red Fern Brooklyn’s initiatives to mitigate environmental problems and seek natural solutions. Native plants, as opposed to imported ones, use less water, thus conserving the resource. Additionally, the benefits of native plants extend to other species by feeding local pollinators like bees and butterflies while also providing seed and food for bird populations.
Red Fern Brooklyn understands the constant upkeep of an ever-growing green project can be overwhelming to maintain. Thus, they offer a variety of services to support you and your project after installation. A few of the services include maintenance programs, care guides, and ongoing consultation.
By blending her experience in the creative field of filmmaking with her love of nature, Rogue tells a story with each green space she creates. When she visits a site for the first time, her approach to assessing the space is twofold. Rogue checks the physical space for any potential issues such as problems with drainage or privacy concerns and turns urban idiosyncrasies we often perceive as negative into beneficial aspects of the design.
Next, Rogue gets to know her clients on a personal level to ensure the space can match their lifestyle and uniquely fit their needs. She is able to envision the design by considering a variety of factors including the family profile of each client. Perhaps there are children in the household and a design feature could cater to specific activities they enjoy. Additionally, she considers the schedules of the family members and how they want to use the space.
Furthermore, Rogue takes note of the client’s individual style and personality as inspiration for the green space design. Whether installing an edible garden, or a backyard oasis, Rogue says she wants to make a space more habitable, local, and functional.
“As much as I love the outdoors and nature, I absolutely love meeting new people and living in such a vibrant, diverse city like New York, and getting to hear different people’s stories is very compelling to me,” Rogue said.
Over time, Rogue has shifted Red Fern Brooklyn’s focus to expand beyond simply creating beautiful spaces, to more of an ecological-centered approach. She seeks to combine the dynamism of our urban culture with a consciousness of our natural world in her work. “It has become not just about the aesthetic, the style, or the design aspect of things,” Rogue said, “but how can I use those things to help my community on a bigger level.”
According to Rogue, cultivating green spaces is not only good for each person’s individual mental health, but also for our community at large. She dispels the notion that people are either born with or without a green thumb and instead believes that gardening is for everyone. For Rogue, connecting to nature is all about acknowledgement, regardless of our experience or location.
“…acknowledging where we can do better and also acknowledging our innate connection to the natural world,” Rogue said. “We’re not separate from it. We’re bonded inextricably to nature.”
For more information on Red Fern Brooklyn’s upcoming classes and initiatives, visit their website at redfernbrooklyn.com or find them on instagram @red_fern_brooklyn.
