About the Studio
Northern Landscapes is led by Mara Vossberg from a small studio on Superior Street in Duluth, Minnesota. We design four-season gardens and resilient hardscape for properties in USDA zones 2 through 5 — the shorelines, ridgelines, and high-elevation places where a July rendering tells you almost nothing about how the place actually lives.
Book a Site VisitMara founded the studio in 2009 after completing her Master of Landscape Architecture at the University of Minnesota. She is a registered Landscape Architect in Minnesota, Wisconsin, Michigan, and New York, and she has spent the sixteen years since working almost exclusively on cold-climate properties — places where the design has to survive seven months of snow, road salt, frozen soil, and a growing season that can fit inside a long weekend.
The Duluth research nursery grew out of an early frustration: the published hardiness ratings she was relying on turned out to be optimistic by a full zone once you accounted for wind exposure, frost-pocket drainage, and the Lake Superior effect. Today the trial garden has recorded seven winters of survival and bloom data on more than 240 perennial cultivars, and the notes from those beds feed directly into every planting plan the studio produces.
Mara writes and speaks regularly on sub-zone-4 gardening. She was the cover subject of Fine Gardening in March 2021 for the article "Designing Gardens That Work in Zone 3," and her work has been featured in Garden Design Magazine and on Houzz, where the studio was named a 2023 Top Rated Designer.
The studio is deliberately small. We accept a maximum of fourteen new commissions a year, and the team below is the full team — every project is drawn, planted, and built by people on this roster, not by subcontractors we met at a trade show.
MLA, University of Minnesota. Registered Landscape Architect in MN, WI, MI, and NY. Sets the design direction and runs every project from first site visit through final walkthrough.
PLA, leads construction documents and the studio's larger estate commissions. Joined the studio in 2014 after eight years at a Minneapolis firm. Detail-obsessed about grading on frozen-soil sites.
ISA Certified Arborist, #PN-9947A. Reviews every existing-tree assessment on a project and writes the preservation and removal recommendations. Specializes in bur oak, American linden, and the underused native species that survive zone 3 winters.
Two horticultural designers who maintain the trial garden and annotate the Five-Season Plant Matrix, plus two in-house stone and masonry specialists trained in dry-stack limestone and Lake Superior basalt — the two regional hardscape materials clients ask for most.
We don't run our own awards program. Everything below was written, awarded, or rated by someone who walked a finished project in February, not by us in a marketing meeting.
Mara was the cover subject of Fine Gardening's March 2021 issue, the magazine's lead piece on gardening in sub-zone-4 climates. The article walked readers through four completed projects and the plant-selection logic behind each one.
A 2022 APLD Award of Excellence in Residential Design for a 4.2-acre estate on a north-facing slope above Lake Superior. The judging cited the project's basalt walls and its planting plan, which was annotated against the Five-Season Plant Matrix rather than the more common July-only rendering.
Named a 2023 Houzz Top Rated Landscape Designer. As of 2024 the studio holds a 4.9 average across 184 verified Houzz reviews — drawn from clients in Minnesota, Wisconsin, Michigan, New York, Vermont, and Colorado. Thirty-eight percent of those clients returned for a second-phase project within five years.
A northern garden that only looks right in July is a garden that looks wrong for seven months of the year. Every planting plan we draw is annotated against the Five-Season Plant Matrix — what it does for spring bulb, what it does for summer bloom, what it does for fall color, what it does for winter structure, and what it feeds the chickadees, bumblebees, and migrating warblers when almost nothing else is in flower. February is a design condition, not a design afterthought.
— Mara Vossberg, MLA
A Site Visit is where the studio actually sees your soil, your aspect, your wind exposure, and the way snow lies on your land in February. Consultations are booked six to eight weeks in advance, and eleven of fourteen commission slots for the 2025 design season are already reserved as of January.
612 completed designs since 2009. Studio inquiries: [email protected] · +1 (218) 555-0142.
