The Studio
Twenty-two seasons in the Bluegrass.
Hedgerow & Vale was founded in 2004 on a rented half-acre and a conviction: that central Kentucky deserved gardens designed with the seriousness of its farms and the patience of its bourbon.
Iris Vale came home to Lexington after a decade with estate gardens in Virginia and the Cotswolds, and started the studio with one mason, one truck, and a planting plan habit nobody local would indulge: Latin names, month-by-month drawings, and a straight-faced insistence that January mattered as much as June.
Owen Hartwell joined in the third season and built the other half of the practice: crews that keep gardens for decades, working to written calendars, led by horticulturists rather than schedulers. Today the studio runs nine gardeners and masons, designs and builds a handful of gardens each year on purpose, and keeps roughly forty estates in stewardship across the county.
The name is the method. The hedgerow is structure: the bones of a garden that hold it together in every season. The vale is the ground itself: this county's limestone, rainfall, and long golden autumns. Design that honors both, and the garden takes care of the rest of the argument.
Figures are fictional and illustrative; this is a demonstration website.
The people
A studio of gardeners, in the old sense.
Designers who plant, masons who read drawings, horticulturists who write. Everyone here works in the ground.
Iris Vale
Principal designer & founder
Trained in estate gardens on two continents, Iris draws every master plan the studio issues and still spends Fridays on job sites with a pencil behind her ear. Known for planting plans that read like casts of characters, and for talking clients out of features they would not use.
Owen Hartwell
Head gardener
Owen runs the build crews and the stewardship program: the written calendars, the February pruning notes, the standing appointment with forty gardens' worth of weather. If Iris writes the gardens, Owen keeps them honest, season after season, decade after decade.
Anyone can make a garden look good in May. We are hired for the other eleven months.Iris Vale, principal designer
What we hold to
Three working rules.
Design in four seasons
Every plan is drawn as a calendar before it is drawn as a map, and judged by its worst month. January earns its keep or the plan goes back to the desk.
Build in the ground's own material
Kentucky limestone, native canopy, oak and cedar. The Bluegrass supplies the palette; our job is to compose with it, not to import a different county.
Keep what we make
Gardens are not projects with end dates. Stewardship is half this studio, and the gardens we keep are the proof of the ones we build.
Begin with a walk in the garden.
The first meeting is a morning on your property: no drawings, no obligation, just an honest read of the ground and how you want to live on it.
Or call the studio: (555) 045-2500