Chokeberry & friend
GMD is a small landscape practice focused on design, installation, and ongoing management.
We work across a range of scales and project types, integrating ecological understanding with clear planning and careful execution. Our work is best suited to clients who value collaboration, long-term thinking, and landscapes that evolve over time through intentional design and stewardship
Leah Gardner plays a central role in shaping the creative direction and visual expression of GMD.
Drawing on a background in landscape architecture and decades of field study and experience, Leah brings a balanced approach to landscape design informed by both practice and place. She creates spaces where beauty and function coexist, designed to foster a lasting connection between people and the natural world.
Leah’s conceptual design work is attentive to how people move through and connect with their environment; while her deep love of nature, observation of how plant communities thrive as natural systems, and eye for beauty guide her complex planting design.
Leah leads hand rendering, shaping how design ideas are developed, refined and communicated, and collaborates on conceptual and graphic design across projects. She is deeply involved in on-site layout and planting design, guiding plant placement and composition with long-term management and stewardship in mind. She plays an active role in client and crew communication, on going site assessment, and management coordination.
Before partnering with Joan to form GMD, Leah helped to develop service-learning studios, public and community-based demonstration projects, education and outreach initiatives, landscape demonstration projects, and interpretive sign development. She further shares her deep appreciation of nature and native plants through artwork available on Fine Goods.
B.S. in Horticulture and Landscape Design
Master of Landscape Architecture
Joan Monaco plays a central role at GMD in shaping how design becomes landscape.
Drawing on a background in architecture, along with experience in project management and landscape construction, Joan guides design decisions as projects are developed and refined to respond to the realities of implementation and site conditions.
Her work pays close attention to how ideas carry through grading, materials, and on-the-ground decision-making.
Her approach is informed by early experience in construction management and hands-on engagement with earthwork and excavation, grounding design in the realities of soil, slope, drainage, and sequence.
With more than a decade of experience in landscape design and implementation, Joan approaches projects as interconnected systems—considering phasing, site dynamics, and long-term performance as part of the design process. She collaborates with crews and clients from design through installation and ongoing management, helping ensure that landscapes are built with clarity and care over time.
She is particularly interested in how biodiverse landscapes can be woven into cities and neighborhoods, creating everyday opportunities for interaction with ecological complexity. This perspective shapes her work at GMD, where she considers how landscape design can quietly influence human experience and expand shared ideas of what landscapes in urban settings can be.