Corwin Green and Damon Arrington: An Interview With the Founders of Verrru Design

In this week’s installment of Quick Takes, we present a pair of Brooklyn academics with a flair for garden design, Corwin Green and Damon Arrington, partners in life and business. Corwin teaches communication design and social design at Pratt Institute, School of Visual Arts, and Parsons School of Design. Damon teaches landscape design at Cornell, New York Botanic Garden, and Brooklyn Botanic Garden.

The pair’s four-year-old firm, Verru Design, recently showed up on our radar when we spotted the naturalistic plantings they did for a charming townhouse garden (see Brooklyn Backyard Visit: A Fruitful Collab Between an Architect and Landscape Designers). Their M.O.: “We embed ourselves in communities, research their attributes and ecologies, and then actualize design projects.” The up-and-comers even have a podcast, Tree, Shrub, Flower, launched a few months ago, that spotlights the deep roots they have in their New York community. “Our guests are our friends and collaborators, who happen to have Tony Awards, and Emmys and are incredible creatives, whether it be a landscape expert or a leading actor on Broadway.”

Below, Corwin and Damon share the garden book they both assign to their students,  the reason they like to plant when the moon is waxing, and more.  

Photography courtesy of Verru Design.

Your first garden memory:

Corwin: My first memory was in my grandma’s backyard in Waynesboro, Georgia. During summer visits, my siblings and I were tasked with picking figs from her trees, which she would use for desserts and preserves, and to instill a work ethic. As a kid, I didn’t like figs or the idea of working during often hot vacations. Even though I still haven’t developed a taste for them, I appreciate learning the practice of fruit picking.

Damon: I grew up on a dairy farm on southwest Virginia. My mother had greenhouses growing up and she kept my crib under the impatiens flats. My first memories of gardening were the smell of vermiculite and the sound of loud fans humming throughout the moisture-filled plastic rooms.

Garden-related book you return to time and again:

Planting in a Post-Wild World. We recommend it to students in our classes. It is the quintessential book for learning how to create ‘plant communities’. They teach you how to create landscapes that are layered.

Instagram account that inspires you:

Matthew Cunningham Landscape Design @mcldllc. His photos are always top-notch and the gardens he design are very much in our style of wild and lush, appropriately vegetated. He deals a lot with slopes, and we are currently working on a project where the client’s backyard has something like a 20 percent slope, so we’ve been watching how he crafts staircases and retaining walls into the landscapes.

Describe in three words your garden aesthetic.

To steal the words of Laura Fenton from her feature [on our project] in Gardenista last week…”low-key wild.”

Plant the makes you swoon:

Calamintha nepeta. The compact foliage looks good in containers and along pathways and produces a nice show into fall. It has a consistent presence in perennial gardens and a quiet charm that hits you with amazing aromas.

Plant that makes you want to run the other way:

Bamboo. We’ve had jobs where we had to extract bamboo from containers and the roots are really gnarly. We are literally scared of bamboo.

Favorite go-to plant:

Staghorn sumac (Rhus typhina). For unexpected texture, the staghorn sumac has always delighted our clients. And its fall color is absolutely stunning. The seed heads that form are striking in the winter, so its seasonal interest is abundant. Sometimes we choose plants specifically for their winter interest.

Hardest gardening lesson you’ve learned:

Sun conditions. Understanding your garden at both solstices is of crucial importance. In the northeast the summer solstice sun is at a 72-degree angle, the winter solstice is at a staggering 27-degree angle. Mapping this on-site analysis is the most important step in your initial steps. We recently did a pinup at NYBG where the students had to show us the extent of the summer/winter sun in plan view, an integral step for young designers to learn.

Gardening or design trend that needs to go: