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Photography by TJ Salsman
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Adam Woodruff strides through waves of prairie dropseed, black-eyed Susan, and amsonia. He’s explaining that he had to move a knoll to form a plateau so he could plant a prairie outside his client’s windows. Just then, he spies a weed and stoops to pluck it.
He can’t help himself. As he approaches his 40th birthday this month, he’s acutely aware that his landscape-design style is unfurling like the fiddlehead on a fern. And he wants the manifestation of that style to be perfect. No weeds allowed.
This particular residential garden is a large rural property outside Girard in central Illinois. Across 12,000 square feet of gardens, Mr. Woodruff has interplanted layers of naturalistic perennials and shrubs with the verdant foliage of tropical cannas, crotons, elephant ears, sansevierias, and sun coleuses.
He points to clumps of Tiger Eyes sumac that eventually will reach a height of 8 feet. “I need density,” he says, “but also the airiness of something dancing above it as the wind comes through.’’
Indeed, Russian sage, tall verbena, Morden’s Gleam loosestrife, Karl Foerster feather reed grass, Ruby Giant coneflowers, and rattlesnake master wave in the breeze like restless fans at a ballgame.
Mr. Woodruff talks about creating a new environment for specific clients, but one could say he’s doing the same across the spectrum of landscape design. He’s drawn inspiration from the Lurie Garden in Chicago’s Millennium Park and pilgrimages to visit its designers and growers, like Piet Oudolf in the Netherlands and Roy Diblik in Burlington, Wisc.
But adding flourishes of tropical foliage that he admired while traveling in Malaysia and Singapore has made this style his own.
He calls the emerging style “natural-ism with a twist.” It’s one that reflects the grace and diversity in nature, and it holds the promise of a one-of-a-kind form.
“He’s the rising star in St. Louis,” says Bill Ruppert, a plant broker. “He is a very gifted young man and has a unique way of combining plants. He’s a nouveau American designer, along the lines of Oehme, van Sweden [& Associates].” That landscape design firm blends native and cultivated plants for a look it calls the New American Garden.
Those who like native prairies will find much to like in Mr. Woodruff’s style. And those who eschew native plantings as wild and weedy will be drawn to the unconventional pairing of perennials, ornamental grasses, tropicals, and long-flowering annuals.
His home in Springfield, Ill., is a modest, buff-colored brick bungalow that stands out among the neatly kept houses on his street because of the rich gardens he’s crafted. A generous swath of floriferous perennials and annuals screens the street alongside the house.
His gardens are a masterpiece of layers, textures, and color, but he has yet to turn his attention to the backyard. Good thing. Three weeks before, a car veered off the street and smashed through the backyard’s privacy fence, leaving ruts in the turf. A photographer is due just days after our visit to shoot the gardens for Horticulture magazine, and Mr. Woodruff is worried about what he’ll catch in his viewfinder.
What we see are dense mounds of Purple Smoke baptisia, spikes of Coconut Lime coneflowers and Purple Rain salvia, the lollipop blooms of Fireworks globe amaranth and rattlesnake master, and the broad leaves of Blue Hawaii elephant ears. Smoke bush, crape myrtle, and bayberry form the structural backbone. Crème Brûlée coreopsis, Dakota Gold helenium, and Fishnet Stockings coleus are just a few of the colorful fillers.
Surely, the photographer would find something to shoot other than the crumpled fencing.
The trajectory of Mr. Woodruff’s career was not always aimed toward landscaping. Mr. Woodruff spent his early years in college and beyond in business. But his early interest in plants kept nudging him back to earth.
Mr. Woodruff was born in 1971 in Virden, Ill., a tiny farming town outside of Springfield. The second oldest of five children, he was looking to earn some pocket money at age 13 when he met his first garden muse, Mabel Crooks. Mrs. Crooks, now in her nineties, needed the young Mr. Woodruff’s help maintaining the extensive gardens she had cultivated over the years.
Afterward, he studied finance at Eastern Illinois University, but later gravitated to horticulture. During a summer internship with a landscape designer, he realized how much he loved the hands-on work. Still, after graduation, he took a job keeping books for a restaurant and later went to work for a real-estate association. Landscape design was something he did on the side to make extra money.
Tom Marantz, chairman and CEO of the Bank of Springfield, gave him his first big break. Mr. Marantz was looking to totally revamp the landscaping at the bank’s flagship facility in 2004, and he tapped Mr. Woodruff for the job.
“He has generously given me creative license with very few restrictions,” says Mr. Woodruff. One of Mr. Marantz’s suggestions was to forgo the evergreens that are ubiquitous on most commercial properties. Not a problem for Mr. Woodruff. He started modestly with 20 plant species. Over the years, he has expanded the beds to 22,000 square feet and 170 species.
Mr. Woodruff doesn’t just design the landscaping at the Bank of Springfield—or for any of his other clients, for that matter. At the bank, he has done the backbreaking work of planting 5,000 specimens in the spring and maintaining the grounds through the long, hot summer.
He’s known by nearly all who come and go at the bank in the course of a day. One day last summer, he led a visitor on a tour of the bank’s gardens.
A worker in a Red Cross trailer parked outside the bank calls out: “Adam the Gardener? What’s that green plant?” It was the graceful papyrus grass called King Tut—the showstopper in a large container packed with angelonia, gaura, elephant ear, licorice plant, vinca, sun coleus, and lantana. Satisfied, the woman went on her way.
Mr. Woodruff only spends part of his time in Springfield. He splits the rest of his time between St. Louis and Cambridge, Mass. He moved to St. Louis in 2003 in search of a richer social life. Here, he met his partner, Sean Muthian, a research scientist for Pfizer. Last summer, the company relocated Mr. Muthian to Cambridge.
It was the landscaping at the Bank of Springfield that captured widespread admiration for Mr. Woodruff. In 2009, the Perennial Plant Association honored Mr. Woodruff at its symposium held in St. Louis. There, he met Mr. Diblik, a grower of perennials who is responsible for the plants at the Lurie Garden in Chicago.
One of Lurie’s chief designers was Mr. Oudolf, the Dutch landscaper whose New Wave Planting movement calls for a style that is more relaxed and less controlled than traditional garden design. Mr. Woodruff and Mr. Muthian made a pilgrimage of sorts to the Netherlands, where Mr. Oudolf treated them to a personal tour of his private garden outside the village of Hummelo.
Later, Mr. Woodruff saw Mr. Diblik’s Wisconsin nursery, Northwind Perennial Farm, and consulted him on moving toward a more sustainable plant selection for certain sites—that is, toward plants requiring lower maintenance in terms of grooming, feeding, and watering.
Along the way, Mr. Woodruff began blogging for Dave’s Garden (davesgarden.com) and then Gardening Gone Wild (gardeninggonewild.com). He’s also posted whole portfolios of his work on his web-site (adamwoodruff.com).
In the last two years, his design work has infiltrated several commerical areas in Clayton. He transformed the foundation plantings at The Plaza in Clayton luxury condominiums near the Ritz-Carlton, St. Louis. Early last year, he snagged the contract to design, install, and maintain the 100 planters and containers gracing the public plazas at Pierre Laclede Center. And he got the nod from Centene to design containers with a sleek, contemporary look at its headquarters across the street.
Purple and chartreuse dom-inate the containers on Pierre Laclede Center’s plazas, with brilliant bursts of gold and fuchsia. In one planter he’s combined Red Abyssinian banana plant and Black Gold sansevieria for drama, Sedona sun coleus for filler, and New Gold lantana and purple heart for trailers. Another features yellow croton and King Tut papyrus grass with Dragon Wing begonia, Pink Chaos coleus, Limón talinum, and Luscious Grape lantana.
Mr. Muthian’s move to Cambridge and the maturing of Mr. Woodruff’s business have forced a shift in his business model. Now he will be relying more heavily on his 24-year-old brother, Marc, and perhaps others to maintain the gardens to his standard. Mr. Woodruff’s put the house in Springfield on the market and is commuting between St. Louis and Boston.
“It is no longer possible to physically do every aspect of the work myself,” he concedes. He’s also tapping other professionals for bookkeeping and marketing to give him time to focus on his clients, design, and networking.
It’s a fine balancing act. He chooses his words thoughtfully:
“I think I’m going to be a better designer as I learn to have a better balance in life.”
