Field & Harbour started in a borrowed room above a chandlery on Quay Lane. Mara Ellison had left a larger office because the drawings were getting prettier and the soil reports were getting ignored. The name is literal: most of the early work sat between a field that wanted to become housing and a harbour that was losing its marsh.
We are still twelve people. That is a choice. Large landscape firms can produce a masterplan in a month; we would rather spend that month walking the site in three seasons and arguing about a single tree pit. Clients who need a deck and a water feature in six weeks are kindly sent elsewhere.
How we work
A commission usually begins with a letter, not a pitch deck. We visit, we look at what already grows, and we write down what the place is asked to do — hold a market, take a high tide, give a school somewhere to sit. Planting comes after the grade and the water. Maintenance is in the first fee proposal, not as an afterthought once the photographs have been taken.
The studio keeps a small nursery relationship on the edge of town. If a specified plant cannot be sourced within a day’s drive, we change the drawing rather than invent a supply chain.
The people you will meet
Mara Ellison
Principal
Leads civic work. Trained in Edinburgh. Twenty years of arguing, politely, for fewer species and better soil.
Tomas Reeve
Planting
Horticulturist. Knows which shrubs will actually hold a slope, and which ones only look as if they will.
Léa Hofmann
Civic projects
Squares, school yards, and the unglamorous coordination that keeps a public site from dying in committee.