A successful park or garden tells you how to use it, not through signs or maps (though those can help, too) but through its design. It offers paths for walking, benches for admiring vistas and viewsheds, and clearings for picnics and lounging. It welcomes you and encourages exploration. A successful career, however, can be much harder to plot. 

“I was so unhappy,” remembers landscape architect Emma Kelly of her time working in advertising. She had just graduated from Harvard University, “panicked,” and taken a job in Chicago. “I felt my soul leaving my body,” she says. “I spent time crying on the bus on the way to work. I was like, man, what am I doing?” 

At the time, she didn’t know landscape architecture was even a field. However, she had enough self-knowledge to begin her search for happiness by writing down her options. “I would make lists all the time of where I would rather be, what I would rather be doing, and I began to winnow it out.” She discovered four key elements that appeared time and again. A good career for Kelly would be one that involved spending time outside, being actively creative, opportunities for self-employment, and chances to be of service to others. “I didn’t want what I was doing to be a negative for the world. I wanted to contribute to beauty and people and to making connections. That’s when I found this thing called ‘landscape architecture.’” 

Back to Harvard, but this time Kelly enrolled in graduate school for design. It was “everything I wanted and more,” she says. She was able to study the theory, history, and practice of building an outdoor environment. “I loved learning about landscape history, from Pliny and Roman beginnings through midcentury modernism Scandinavia,” Kelly says. After graduating, she landed a job with a firm in Boston, Hargreaves Associates (now Hargreaves Jones), working on long-term, large-scale projects. “I loved it, but we decided to move back to Maine because my husband wanted to go back to school. He had a degree in history. But he had worked in gardening forever, and that’s how we met,” she explains. (Her husband, Mark Kelly, is still a professional gardener, and the couple sometimes gets to work on sites together.) Upon moving north, Kelly landed a job at Richardson and Associates, where she stayed for several years, learning but also planning, slowly, to embark on her own.  

Although Kelly has been flying solo since 2013, she credits Todd Richardson with “setting the seeds” for the cooperative and collaborative process she’s developed at Emma Kelly Landscape. “Todd is a really energetic, magnetic guy, and his design process is really personal,” Kelly says. “In Boston, I could spend an entire year working on a 200-page CAD drawing set, and maybe I would go to the site once. It’s not like that in Maine.” Here, instead of working on a computer constantly, Kelly spends much of her time outside and on-site, observing the landscape. She notes how wind and water move across a piece of land, how meadows and woods encroach on lawns, and how local wildlife feed upon—and live among—the plants. “You can’t fight nature here,” she says. “Maybe elsewhere you can impose your will. But you can’t here. You have to work with it.” 

Working with it, for Kelly, means letting the elements inform her designs without deferring entirely to them. She doesn’t plan just a pretty, formal garden or try to imitate “nature with a capital N,” as she puts it. Instead, Kelly creates “homages” to place. “In Maine, I stopped tiptoeing around the landscape, and as a result, my relationship with it improved,” she says. “A lot of the landscape around us is functional and accidental, but it still fills your soul. If you’re walking on a really good path with a girlfriend, you don’t care that half those trees are invasives, or that there is dog poop on the side of the trail.” No part of Maine, she points out, is untouched. You don’t need to visit a primordial forest or a formal garden to have a good, nourishing time outdoors. 

This attitude works particularly well when it comes to residential work, Kelly has found, since these are places that will be continuously occupied (or at least, in the case of second homes, used with some frequency). “I love meeting people at their homes, but I also know that it’s deeply personal for each client, and sometimes it can be deeply fraught,” she says. “But it’s really rewarding as well. I never come to a site and try to push people around.” She likes to go with the flow, and so perhaps it is fitting that she begins most projects by considering the water. “Do you have it, or do you not? Where is it going? Where does it show up?” she asks. Kelly recalls an early project at Seal Harbor. The home was built up against a slope, near rough cliffs. A previous designer had installed diversions to channel the water, leading it through the land, but, Kelly says, it didn’t work. “The water didn’t want to do that. And the work I did began with dismantling those elements and creating little riffles and pools for the water to move where it wanted, then building paths that would let you occupy the space.” To connect the house to the site, she installed a series of decks that would allow homeowners to walk over the water. To help with erosion on the slope, she planted tiny saplings, sorbaria, serviceberry, and sassafras, “things that are native and would take root,” she says. “Within a year, the whole slope was green and happy.” 

Although Kelly typically sources her plants from nurseries, she likes to supplement these purchases with foraged local sod, bushes, and trees. “It’s awesome to move stuff, but it is hard,” she says. “I’ve experimented with planting tree sod. Sometimes, when I’m driving, I’ll spot a really good rhododendron by the side of the road and ask the landowner if I can dig it up.” Not only is this fun, it also gives the garden a little visual authenticity. Plants that grow wild in Maine earn their survival, fighting against the storms and the droughts. “Nursery material doesn’t look as good in Maine,” she says. “It’s too thick, too trim—it hasn’t been shaped by the wind.” Mixed with happy, healthy, greenhouse-spawned plants, these little touches of truth make her homage sing. The results, she says, can be downright “numinous.”