(bright piano music) - Hi, this is Phil Luciano with the Peoria Journal Star, and today we have not just a special guest, but a special setting.

Today we have with us Douglas Hoerr of Hoerr Schaudt, and you are a landscape architect, correct?

- That's correct.

- And we're gonna explain what that is and some of your background, but we're here at Maryann Zimmerman's home in Peoria, and you designed this a while ago, and this is just, wow.

This is quite the place.

What did you do in this area when you came here?

- You mean for this garden?

- Yeah.

- Everything, basically.

(both laughing) I think I did this job 30 years ago after I came back.

I worked in Peoria for nine years, then I went to England and worked as an English gardener, and they were one of the first people to say, "We want an English garden," and so about 30 years ago for Tom and Maryann.

- And still looking great.

- Well, she loves gardening.

(both laughing) - And I know you do residential work and a whole lot of different things, and we're gonna get to that including your background, but I think it would help viewers who aren't familiar with you to maybe talk about one of your more recent projects which is so amazingly impressive, and that's the old Chicago Post Office, and for those of you who're unfamiliar with this, this is obviously it's an old post office, but it's huge.

I think it's got like 1,600 workers in there.

It's now a commercial, various tenants and whatnot, but some of the details on this are just mind-blowing to me.

To you, it's probably just another day at the office, but 10,000 helicopter lifts to get to the rooftop, 40,000 plants, 50,000 cubic feet of soil, and you got a 100,000 bees up there.

- Yeah.

- That's quite the garden.

We're talking big garden some time.

Can you talk about that project?

- Well, the post office languished for years in Chicago, and it got finally a developer came in from New York and turned it into office, and so we did a four-acre rooftop.

It's four acres of real estate overlooking all of Chicago obviously from every direction.

And because the post office doesn't have a lot of windows and it's so large that the windows are all, so they needed an amenity of people to be able to go up on the deck because for open space and light.

And so, that became a priority, and we have basketball courts up there.

There's a bar, there's a winter garden, there's meadows, walking trail, jogging trail, and so it's happening around the country, out of the country that you take advantage of that real estate on your rooftop because you're paying taxes on it- - Well why not?

There's sun up there.

- And so, all the developers now are doing amenity decks, and our amenity deck's better than yours and the pools and the cabanas and everything like that.

- And it's just impressive that there's that much space that for years, like you're saying, in a lot of places were going unused, and now it's like hey, let's put something great up here, and you know what to do with all this stuff.

- Yeah we just finished another one in Houston the same size.

Just came on line the same time, four acres, so yep.

- So your background, you grew up in Indiana.

- Yeah, Northern Indiana.

- And then you went to Purdue.

- Right.

- And then if I understand this right, you found out you had a relative or some relatives in Peoria, the Hoerr's of Hoerr Nursery.

- Right.

- So then you came here and did a little work there.

What went on there, and what happened after that?

- Of course, I knew my relatives, second cousins, my dad's first cousin, his uncle D.A.

Hoerr, and my dad said, "You oughta move to Peoria "and learn the craft of landscaping," and he goes, "Plus Peoria, it's great.

"Never had a recession, never will."

So I moved here in '79.

In 1980, Caterpillar laid off 50,000 people.

Pabst left town and said hire 'em out.

So for the nine years I was here, I was basically working in a depressed economy, but made so many friends and great clients, and it's a very special place to me, Peoria.

- And from there, is that when you went on to Europe to really learn this craft?

- Yeah.

Yeah, I knew that when I was looking through the camera lens the next year at my projects that they were never gonna be in a magazine.

They were wonderful, and everything about it was missing that whole layer of what was popular at the time, English gardens, the perennials, nonstop blooming, and the complexity of making a landscape into a garden.

I wanted to go do that and be the best landscape architect I could be.

- And what grabbed you about the whole field of landscaping and to this degree?

This isn't just like my garden in my backyard.

I mean, this is some serious scope, some serious achievement.

What got you into that and made you keep pushing on?

- Well, I wanted to be a developer, I think, out of high school, and then I thought, well, okay, if do a developer, I can take an average piece of land and make it better through landscaping and make more money.

Fortunately, I didn't go into development because I am not a linear-thinking person.

I would've lost my shirt.

(both chuckling) So again, I think that I just love the short-term gratification of designing something on paper, and then realizing it in a very short order of time, and it's sort of like creating art for people, and there's an engineering component and there's a very left-right brain portion to it, including the business, but I just get a great deal of satisfaction, and I'm lucky that I like what I do when I wake up in the morning.

- I think one thing for those of us who aren't of that sort of, you said left-right brain and however you combine all that, that we're not of that vantage.

Like we can see, man, this is a beautiful garden, or we see the post office in Chicago, the old Chicago Post Office, and like, wow, that's neat.

The part that a lot of us don't quite get is how you have the blank canvas, and then you go from point A to point Z.

Explain if you can how you get that inspiration, how that works.

- Well, it's taken me a long time.

I mean, a white piece of paper is always like probably writer's block.

You can have white or, you know.

But you learn to do.

I'd start off at D.A.

Hoerr doing foundation plannings for people, your typical meat and potatoes landscaping, lamppost plantings, and rethinking how you got to the front door and trying to be creative and make every project interesting, but basically, if you- I always say I have four clients.

The architecture is a client, the style of the architecture, the mass of it, the way it's laid out.

The clients, the client or clients.

Sometimes you have to be a counselor to get out, but learning to know the clients that you're working for, what their druthers are, what the program is.

They have little kids, they want a pool, they want vegetable gardens.

And then of course the site.

You get to know the site, and sites have many micro-climates as you know.

Your own home, you know you got a shady side, a sunny side, but maybe a dry side, a wet area.

You can't just power through those without horticulturally, you can do the framework of a landscape, the bones of it and the paving and everything else, but if you want the horticulture to really thrive and do well, you have to listen to the site and not work against it.

In other words, you can't grow grass back in the woods, so maybe quit trying to grow grass in the woods and bring it in and make a shape out of it like this so it's part of the design, and then I would say the context, where we are.

We're in Peoria, Illinois, which is unique to anywhere else in the world.

I just came back from Montana working on a mountaintop overlooking Flat Head Lake.

It's unique to that part of the world, and you read the greater context, and this is a deciduous woods.

This is a deciduous Midwest woodland.

When you use your evergreens, you've gotta be careful how you do it because they are really not in the greater landscape.

So you gotta be careful on what the- And also, when you're in a four-season climate like this, I always design for the winter first.

So if the winter view holds together, it's gonna get better and better through all the seasons.

So the shapes and patterns and the way it all looks like a black and white piece of art, and then the color comes in throughout the season.

- You bring up an interesting point, and Hoerr Schaudt is in Chicago, but you're also in LA and in Kansas City.

- Correct.

- You do college campuses, you do botanical gardens, rooftop gardens, residential work.

So you do all different sorts of stuff, and all over the place.

So when you do like a Montana, and I have no idea how many times you go to Montana, but if you go to someplace you've never been to, what do you do?

Do you research?

Do you go there and scout out the whole area?

How do you make it germane for that place?

- Well, I've been fortunate to travel around the world and look at it.

Your eye sees what your eye sees, right?

I mean, if you really open it up and say what is the natural beauty of this?

What's the terrain?

You've researched the climate, rainfall, and all that kind of thing.

But my antennas start coming out when I land or as I'm driving towards it, and as soon as I pull in to the site, it's the puzzle of it.

I just love- - The ideas start coming, how to put it together, and all that stuff.

- Yeah, I mean, you don't wanna get too far ahead of yourself because you don't really know the program, but you certainly know if you're at a deciduous or if you're in an evergreen forest.

If you're gonna start doing Japanese gardens right away, then you better make a little courtyard for it so that it doesn't fight what's around it.

- Do you come into that sometimes that you think, hey, here's what we can do, but once you start getting into the whole mix, and it doesn't work out.

Has that ever happened, or are you- - Well, I try not to let it happen, but, when you- - Well, it's nature.

They don't always obey like that wasp I was- - No but truly, if you learned this in England, really.

If you really listen to the site and the micro-climates and what's hardy.

Every time you try to plant something that isn't quite hardy, it's gonna bite ya.

And so, listen, buy the right plants for the right spot.

There's a lot of materials available.

The botanic gardens will share this and all that, but every program is different, and some people, there's opportunities to have an inward-looking courtyard even on a small property.

How you treat the front, and then what you see out the back, and you can have a garden break down into little rooms so that it's experiential.

You can discover it, but the composition as a whole, I like to think of it as a piece of artwork.

It doesn't change from modern to classical in the 20 inches, diagonal to diagonal, so you sort of want it to all fit together, but you can have your own moments within that.

- And on your website for Hoerr Schaudt that you can kinda get some of those ideas, some of those suggestions about the things, different things in different places, but especially for those watching this and have residential gardens of some type, I think that they're two of the schools of thought are the traditional and modern versus modern.

Can you explain those a little bit?

What's the difference between the two?

- Well, then there's totally naturalistic.

- Okay.

- I mean, either the house is here and the nature runs through it, or the house is here and it's like the sun king, Louis XVI, man over nature, and you control everything in nature, or you let nature go through it.

So every home like a Tudor needs some of the bones of the house to extend into the landscape to make it function as a machine, really.

I mean, a Tudor by itself in a prairie.

Eh, that's probably not the best fit.

You might choose a more modern piece of architecture especially in this part of the country with a flat roof and linearity that goes with our prairie landscape.

I mean, I try to get into it to that degree.

- Gotcha.

- It's not just landscaping, it's palpating the whole canvas, but contemporary is usually spare.

Clean lines, not a lot of curves.

If they are curves, they're very geometric curves.

You don't do wiggles.

I try not to do wiggles anyway, but- - What is a wiggle?

- Well, I mean, you see it on people's foundation plannings.

They just think if one curve is good, five are.

- Ah, curly cues and whatnot all over.

- Right, and I'm just saying that if you- This garden, for instance, is built on a grid, and so if you strip away all the plants, it's very organized, but once the plants in an English-style garden, the plants flop over the lines.

So that like this gravel path, that actually is very linear, but as the plants go in and out.

So you can impact the way your design, you can style it.

Like if it's a French garden or Italianate garden, it's very clean lines, and things don't grow over the lines.

English, it's effuse, and a more contemporary garden is sort of more stripped down, more clipped, really clean bones, but then as you get into a Tudor or a French style, then you might have a lot more like trimmed boxwood parterres and things like that.

I mean, I don't know if that's making sense.

- Sure.

- It is a short course.

(both laughing) - So as, as we were talking a minute ago that you do so many different types of gardens, campuses, botanical gardens, all that stuff.

What are some of the top achievements if you had to go and someone saying, "Hey, tell me," as I am right now, "Tell us what are those things that, wow, "this is something I'm really, really happy about?"

I know you have with all your stuff, I mean, but this is really something that that we did, and I'm really proud of this thing.

- Well, clearly, if you can turn, create a garden that takes former golfers, and now they don't want to golf on weekends.

They wanna be in their garden.

That's a lifestyle change, okay.

But commercially, I mean, I think when I first started doing Michigan Avenue in Chicago when I landed and Crate and Barrel where they didn't have gardens or horticulture.

I wouldn't call them, but it wasn't horticultural-intense.

It was architectural-intense, architectural-centric, so there might be some trees and pits, but they were sick trees 'cause they weren't even giving them enough room.

So the transformation of what was once an urban, tough-looking city that now is a kinder, more inviting for people that aren't urban dwellers to come and see beauty in nature within a city setting, I think that's something I think I influenced a great deal.

Public streetscape gardens, not just public gardens, but in the commute every day, and so that has spread around the country, and it's allowed me to build, start to get rooftops and the streetscapes in Houston, Dallas, wherever.

But I think that was a transformative thing that I was sort of on the front end because I'm a landscape architect who understands horticulture, and that's kinda rare.

You would think, oh, that's- - That's basic.

It's not.

- But landscape architects get one semester of horticulture in four years.

(Phil chuckling) So to learn horticulture is a lifelong endeavor, and that's one of my passions is combining that, and my firm is built on being horticulturally savvy.

- So the streetscapes, and they are becoming more, like you say, people appreciate these more now.

They're becoming more and more part of cities.

20 years ago, 30 years ago, that wouldn't have been the case.

Is this a change that is just happening aside from what you do, or is what you do making the change, or is it a combination of both?

- Well, I think cities need to look kind.

I mean, if you go to a corporate park, historically, they do a pretty entrance and they put trees down, so they're like welcome.

This is a pride of ownership, somebody's proud.

Your own home, you can always say, "Oh my neighbor's lazy.

They don't mow their lawn."

So basically, a city, if you don't have a private-public partnership.

In other words, if you're in a city and it looks run down, like that's not my responsibility.

My property line ends here.

So I think that the turning point for like Michigan Avenue, it was like hey, maybe the private needs to step into and help pay their share, and by doing that, you attract more commerce.

You get people to stay longer, spend more money.

They'll pay up to 10% more.

Proven study, University of Chicago over the years, and crime goes down because pride of place is like, I always say, you go to France, and the little shopkeeper's out there sweeping down the street and walk.

That was not really something that was happening in America.

People would do a planter outside their store, they go, "That's the city's, that's not my response," or my sidewalk's crummy.

The city needs to fix it.

Well, I think when you start to see what the benefits are of pride of place and on a massive scale, it's the same as pride a place for your own home.

- And that's a point I was hoping you'd talk about that it's an investment, not just to have pretty flowers, and that's cool, but it's a matter of it brings the value of people's connection to a city and the respect.

There's a lot of ancillary effects that these gardens have, right?

- Well, right.

I think mayor Daley, when I was starting in Chicago and was become a big supporter realized that it made good financial sense.

It wasn't like landscaping as it- It used to be landscaping, oh, that's a waste of money.

That'd be the first thing cut, and all of a sudden they started to see that it is a own economic engine that contributes, and it's not just beauty.

If done properly and on the right scale and bring seasonality and so the city changes for visitors.

With no horticulture in the city, you don't know what season it is.

- (laughs) Just cement.

- I mean, I was doing some work in Des Moines years ago, and I got there and there were just trees and concrete, and I went back to my photos from the first time, and I didn't know if it was summer or fall or winter.

It was no indication because you were... Horticulture and beauty was sort of excluded from cities for so long.

- Can you explain if this happens to you.

So you do residences, you do public type of gardens.

Do you ever have a situation where somebody has an idea, and the somebody could be a city, somebody could be a homeowner, and they've got this idea and they've hired you, and then you're like, "That isn't gonna work."

Does that happen, and how do you deal with that?

- Well, I think that you want them to have opinions.

You want your clients to have opinions and tell you what they want, and typically, if somebody's going to invest in landscape architecture and design or hire an architect to do their home, they've been looking through magazines and pulling articles in "House" and Pinterest for a long time, so they sorta know what they want.

- So they're kind of somewhat educated.

- But if they want a garden or a landscape that just fights the house.

I mean, if I started putting a picket fence in front of a Tudor house, I say I know you love picket fences, but I can't let you do that, (Phil laughing) and you find that out in the first meeting if there's a synergy or not, and I've just learned to be very honest and say I think that's going the wrong way.

I've also told clients who I've seen on the front end talk about building a new house and seeing them bicker, and I said you guys really shouldn't build a house together because you're gonna get divorced.

- (laughs) So, you're also a marriage counselor, too.

- Well, I mean, you live long enough.

I've been doing this for over 40 years.

- That's interesting.

Build a house or do however, or you're landscaping is indicative of the relationship stability, I guess.

- It's a people business, it's a service industry, but at any rate, it's fun.

It's fun to figure out the puzzle and to hit all the check boxes and make the whole thing work as really outdoor rooms and service the household, but also be pretty to be out in and look back at, the house.

Not always looking out from the house at the neighbor.

Sometimes create.

There's a dump truck backing up and making money, somebody money, huh.

(laughs) - So for those, we've got a few minutes left here.

For those of you folks who are watching this and they have just a regular, typical home garden, flower garden, that type of thing, do you have any tips you can offer just on that level of things they can do to just make that better?

- Well, okay- - Or things they don't do right or?

- The thing I see is people plant way too close to their house.

Not every house- Foundation plantings, they were meant really for houses, Victorian era, that had huge porches to soften the podium of the house, but I think don't plan so far out so that you can get to the windows.

Leave two foot, maybe a gravel strip so you can wash the windows.

Get the plants away from the house.

Maybe think about where you sit in the house on a day.

I mean, I always say people probably sit in the same four chairs their whole life in different rooms.

What do you see when you look out?

What do you wanna see?

So if you put all your money against the house, you'll never see it.

So think about creating some plantings like this where you to look out and see your garden, and don't put it at the far end of the property where the farther you go away from the house, the bigger the movements have to be, or otherwise it just looks trite.

So layer your garden, maybe bring the pretty garden up close, and then, let it become more landscapy as it goes out.

And then... don't enter into it saying I want purple flowers or white flowers if that plant isn't gonna do well, and if you've got deer, don't plant deer food.

- (laughs) That's a problem here, right?

- Yeah, for everybody, it's forever.

Let it be your garden.

Research it a little bit, and also soils.

People don't like to invest in soil because it's expensive and you don't see anything, but without good soil, good drainage, you're really fighting it, and you're gonna say, "I'm not a good gardener," when the truth is you might be a good gardener, but you haven't teed it up to let it survive.

- In the long run, - To thrive, right.

- It makes sense to invest in the soil cause it'll be there and be better.

- Yeah.

I mean, you really have to think about soil 'cause this is such tight clay, in Peoria especially, that you have to really make sure that you've got some it crumbles a little bit and that you got some drain tile in there, otherwise plants will just unless you wanna do all water-loving plants, they'll drown, and don't over-water 'em.

- Well, that doesn't sound like too tall of an order to do.

I mean, you look where you're gonna be.

You don't put your plants too close to your house.

Make sure the soil's good, do a little research, and maybe it can't be like your gardens, but it's going to be better.

- Well, and also plant plant trees that bloom at different time so that doesn't all come at once.

Plant fall asters for color and plant trees that have great fall color and have a beautiful form in the winter.

The naked form, you know, of a tree that loses its leaves.

It's all part and parcel of the layers of design that at least I think about, but I've been doing it for a long time.

- When you visit people's houses, do you get this question?

Like a doctor goes to a cocktail party.

Hey doctor, can you tell me what's with this mole?

- Oh yes, it's exactly like that actually.

- (laughs) And then you're giving your advice every place you go.

- Or I get what is this bug?

I'm like, really, I don't go that deep.

- (laughs) You're not an etymologist.

- No, I'm not, or why is that.

Yeah, I mean free advice is what it costs you, so that's what it's worth.

So yeah, I get that question a lot.

- That's a nice compliment.

- But if people say, "Hey, I want a tree that does this, "it looks like this, and has fruit that I could eat," I give 'em five things that might work.

- Gotcha.

Well, thanks so much for coming here today.

Douglas Hoerr from Hoerr Schaudt, and you're all over the place, but today you're in Peoria.

Thanks so much for sharing your experiences and your knowledge and your plants.

- Hey, thank you.

This is fun.

It's good to be home.

(bright orchestral music)