Amber Freda’s New York City Landscape Design Expertise
Amber Freda has taught dozens of classes in New York City landscape/garden design at both the New York and Brooklyn botanical gardens. Her client list includes many of the world’s most notables, including George Soros, Anna Quindlen, Brett Icahn, Joseph Edelman, David Faucon, Reshma Shetty, Mark Bertolini, and Bobbi Brown.
Amber has been interviewed as a guest expert on the CBS New York Morning Show. She has also been featured in The New York Times, the Associated Press, Better Homes & Gardens, HGTV, Daily Candy, New York House, New York Resident, Garden Design, Design Bureau, and New York Magazine.
Amber started her own business in 2004 with a desire to provide high-end, detail-oriented New York City luxury landscaping services. She wanted to offer people gardens with a design aesthetic that felt like a seamless and natural extension of their homes, capturing their particular personality and style, as well as giving them the feeling of being in a private oasis.
Amber personally oversees the design of every project from start to finish. Your project will never be handed over to a sales rep or an installation crew, like most big landscaping companies, where the owner is only there for the consultation. Amber will be there working on your project every step of the way, from the initial design to the day of installation, making sure that every detail meets her high standards.
Healing Gardens
We also offer clients the opportunity for a more interactive gardening experience that helps people to connect on a deeper level to both their gardens and themselves. Healing gardens engage the senses on multiple levels through a combination of aesthetics, fragrance, tactile experiences, and sound. Upon request, Amber can also recommend herbal baths and teas using herbs from your garden that will assist with your ongoing healing process.
I love making beautiful gardens for people, but lately, I’ve felt like I want to create gardens that are not just lovely to look at but that also include a healing, soulful component as well.
Many of the people I work with live in cities like New York, where one of their only connections to nature on a regular basis is this garden that I’m working with them to create.
I believe that people are missing a sense of connection to each other and to the earth. Our brains evolved over millions of years living most of our days outdoors. We have a complex interdependency with nature that we’re not even aware of that affects us in profound ways.
Our eyes developed with these fractal images alongside us of the way bark looks on trees, the way moss and lichens and grasses and ferns grow, or the way waves crash on the shore.
When we no longer have the visual, auditory, and olfactory cues from nature, what it does is create a deficit in our brains, a disconnect that can result in a myriad of problems. Things like depression, anxiety, insomnia, and lethargy can be alleviated through a greater connection to the natural world. Even the smell of the earth, of dirt, is being shown now in studies to have an effect on our serotonin levels, which affects our everyday moods.
I have decided to help address the disconnect I see between people and the natural world by opening up a new branch of my business that will be specifically devoted to healing gardens. A healing garden is one that engages the senses on multiple levels – through sight, touch, fragrance, and sound. It’s a garden that encourages interaction, whether it be listening to the sound of leaves rustling or water running, or the smell of flowers, or being visually very beautiful, or something that looks pleasing to the touch.
I can also recommend specific herbs that will be useful to you that can be used to make teas or baths that can soothe and heal your body and mind.
When we lived in tribal societies, every tribe had its medicine man or woman who helped people heal through plant medicine. I think the reason why there is so much interest now in herbal remedies is that we are coming full-circle back to our roots to discover why it is we are here, our connection to the earth and to each other, and this is something we’ve been needing and wanting for a very long time now.
By having a thoughtful, balanced approach to our own garden designs and landscaping, we also can achieve greater peace of mind as well.