Almost a year ago, Bethany Rydmark relocated her eponymously named company from a home studio to a Montavilla office, sharing space with Arctura Design Build at 425 NE 80th Avenue. Since moving into the green cement-block building, Bethany Rydmark :: Landscapes has grown into a five-member team helping clients create functional, evolving outdoor spaces designed to thrive in a changing climate.
Rydmark’s return to Montavilla workplace harkens back nearly 20 years to her time working for Quatrefoil, which operated from the boxy 1,200 square-foot building at 404 SE 80th Avenue before that company relocated to NE 65th Avenue. That job also influenced her family’s move into the area. “My husband and I ended up moving about a year later to live in the neighborhood so that I could be close to work, and he was close to his university around the corner,” recalled Rydmark. In 2013, she started her private practice from a backyard studio and a decade later signed a lease for the NE 80th Avenue location in May 2024.
Rydmark explained that she has always loved gardens, and outdoor interactions were a staple of her upbringing. However, passion alone will not lead a person to a career in landscape architecture. It is a State-licensed profession that required she complete a five-year Bachelor of Landscape Architecture (BLA) degree from the University of Oregon and participate in a three-year apprenticeship program before taking the national Landscape Architect Registration Examination. Bethany Rydmark received her license in 2010 after completing an oral exam with the Oregon Landscape Architect Board. In 2012, wanting to expand her understanding of the profession’s practical applications, she embarked on a year-long worldwide trip to visit diverse landscapes and ecosystems. “I went to 25 countries and territories for a year and brought all that inspiration and knowledge back with me,” Said Rydmark.
According to Rydmark, understanding how gardens thrive in other climates is essential to working in Portland as environmental shifts make tradition less impactful in landscaping design. “We do incorporate a lot of native [plants]. We’re very happy to celebrate and use natives, but we love to help encourage clients to think beyond the traditional palette of plants that have been used for a long time. Part of that’s out of necessity because the climate continues to change, and our weather patterns have shifted. The typical Portland garden you saw in a photo from a garden club in the 60s, those plants don’t necessarily live in and experience the same weather patterns now that they did then.” She explained that holding to older design principles creates resource-heavy gardens, requiring extra water and protection from freezing weather or extremely hot days.
The team at Bethany Rydmark :: Landscapes produces spaces tailored to their clients’ desires while staying committed to creating a sustainable outdoor space that continues to grow into its envisioned shape over years. “We’re interested in places where we can make a difference with thoughtful, non-cookie-cutter design, which is sometimes hard because oftentimes in public spaces, there are the cookie-cutter ways of getting things done. There’s city code, and there’s the standard accepted way of doing things. Our ethos is about how we dig down to find health, [building back in] holistically healthy ways of design, creating things that are beautiful, that are also nourishing to our human spirits, to our ecosystem, neighbors, and other creatures,” said Rydmark. That can include considerations for pollinators, soil health, or birds. Their designs often shape lighting arrangements to maximize safety while reducing the disorienting effects of light pollution on migratory birds flying in the night sky.
Bethany Rydmark explained that her company is best suited to people making a long-term investment in their properties, spending twenty percent or more of their home’s value on the entire outdoor project. “Oftentimes, I find that people are committed to their land for a period of time to justify the amount of effort that it takes to go through a thoughtful design project; they’re the ones that are a good fit for the level of work that we do,” said Rydmark. “We focus on residential scale projects from estates and beautiful luxury homes to more modest-sized properties where clients have a vision. We are also partnering with a few other architects and developers on more commercial projects.” However, she feels good outdoor design should be accessible to everyone but would rather people with constrained budgets put most of their money towards plants and placemaking material instead of the services her company provides.
Investments in outdoor spaces extend beyond the initial design and implementation. Many plantings take years to reach maturity, so designers use filler plants to keep the soil protected and active, but people will need to remove them as the primary vegetation grows to its intended size. “I kind of laugh at the idea of the no-maintenance garden unless you’re going to go walk in the woods and be a visitor there. Just about any landscape you interact with has some form of dynamism,” said Rydmark. “Oftentimes, I’m working for clients that are aware that they need extra help and will plan for a maintenance budget going into the future, whether that’s ongoing regular maintenance from a company that can provide that or an engaged gardener.” However, manicured spaces are not always the outcome of designed gardens. “Honestly, sometimes maintenance is overdone, and I teach people how to take a step back and let things look messy, to build a rich garden ecosystem with a little less maintenance and a little more allowing for nature to cycle through,” remarked Rydmark.
Bethany Rydmark :: Landscapes focuses on working with customers to create authentic outdoor spaces people can enjoy as much as their homes and businesses. “I like to stick with things that are real, real stone, real wood, real steel, real stone, and real rock. It’s the antithesis to the AstroTurf, Trex decking, or fake stone veneer that pretends it’s something else,” said Rydmark. “Oftentimes fast or cheap design and construction can strip out life and leave something that’s somewhat exploitative of resources. Our hope is to create places that have a story to tell, that have been thoughtfully designed and thoughtfully constructed with honor given to the materials, to the people, to the outcome, to the long-term life of the place that we’re shaping.”
People interested in seeing Bethany Rydmark :: Landscapes’ featured projects or talking with the team about an outdoor space can contact the group at bethanyrydmark.com.
