Huckleberry Perch

From a bare hilltop, a client’s desire to revive sentimental connections to Martha’s Vineyard invited the submitting firm to undertake an experiment: weaving an ecologically rich garden into the steep sandy slopes of a disturbed site. Rather than replant a lost forest, successional plant communities—shrub thickets, meadows, and fern-covered embankments—root the home to ever-evolving surroundings while creating diverse habitat. Dry-laid stone walls and reclaimed granite paths navigate terrain, grounding the architecture in place. This layered, low-maintenance plant community proves resilience and beauty can emerge through thoughtful rehabilitation and careful stewardship, honoring both personal memory and family history.

A Landscape Remembered and Reimagined

Huckleberry Perch presents a story of renewal and childhood landscapes reimagined for the future. Sitting atop one of the highest points on Martha’s Vineyard, the property has long been a place of discovery, with the client recounting most fondly the gathering of beach plums, blueberries, and huckleberries with his late grandmother.

By the time the landscape architects joined the project, much of the land had already been cleared for house construction, leaving behind a barren, lifeless expanse surrounded by a sculptural beech, oak, and pine forest. Rather than replant the forest, the team embraced a successional native plant palette, crafting a mosaic of unique species assemblages that grew quickly into a thick vegetative armor that adapts to everchanging weather patterns. The challenge was to invite wanderlust through experiences that engage the site’s topography and to stimulate the island’s unique ecologies to return to the site where mature woodland once stood. The resulting landscape blends strength with beauty, offering dynamic multiseasonal interest, increased habitat, and expansive biodiversity.

Re-Rooting Home 

The robust new plant community includes many nitrogen-fixing, drought-resistant species that thrive in acidic, nutrient-deficient soils. Dense thickets of bayberry, beach plum, chokecherry, sweetfern, and huckleberry transition into sweeping meadows of little bluestem, Indian grass, fescue, ironweed, and asters. The whole site now vibrates with life, and a complex food web is on full display year-round. Textural fern colonies and sedge clumps anchor embankments with fibrous root systems to prevent erosion while softening transitions between open and wooded areas. Small groves of staghorn sumac, birch, and sweetbay magnolia provide scale and tone down the structure’s crisp architectural forms. 

Impeccable masonry extends the building’s geometries to guide movement out into the landscape. Salvaged granite slabs carefully embedded into the earth form paths and terraces. Hand-tooled staircases grip sculptural landforms, forging unique textural dialogues between built and natural forms.

A central activity lawn—the gravitational core of the landscape —provides flexible space for gathering, recreation, and movement. Sun-loving drifts of Black-eyed Susan, Joe-pye weed, purple love grass, Russian sage, and goldenrod surround the space to ensure floral impact and pollinator support near the home. Overall, intentional plantings quickly give way to wilder, more spontaneous edges, where evolving colonies overlap with the surrounding forest.

Connecting to the Land

Huckleberry Perch thrives through ongoing collaboration. The client is a passionate steward, observing and responding to the site’s needs. Early years of hands-on maintenance, from meadow weeding to strategic mowing, have allowed the garden to settle into a mostly self-sustaining rhythm. Periodic embellishments are made, and invasives species are carefully monitored and removed. What began as an open expanse has become a layered, living system—one that continues to evolve. With each season, the site becomes richer, more deeply tied to its context, and more attuned to the ecological memory of the land. 

• Contemporary Landscape Martha's Vineyard (CLMV) - Landscape Contractor
• Stedman Construction - General Contractor
• R+D Studio - Architect
• Nina Farmer Interiors - Interior Designer
• Sourati Engineering Group - Surveyor and Civil Engineer

Products

• Hardscape
• Lighting