The studio
Five people,
one valley, since 2009
We are deliberately small and deliberately local. Everything you see on this site was drawn, built and looked after by the same five people.
1184 Rural Avenue SE · Salem, OR
How it started
One truck, one drawing board,
a lot of clay.
Nadia started Moss & Meadow in 2009 out of a garage on Rural Avenue, drawing plans at night and planting them herself during the day. The first three years were almost entirely small back gardens in Candalaria and Morningside — the kind of jobs bigger firms turned down because they were too fiddly to be worth the mobilisation.
Those jobs taught us the thing the studio still runs on: valley clay does not forgive shortcuts. Every problem we've been called back for in sixteen years traced to grade, drainage or soil — never to the plant list. So the sequence hardened. Water first. Levels second. Stone third. Plants last, and fewer of them than the client expects.
We've grown to five people and we intend to stop there. Five is the number where Nadia still walks every site herself, where Elias still runs the machine rather than a schedule, and where nobody has to be subcontracted in on a Friday to hit a date. It caps how much work we can take in a year. We've made peace with that.
What we hold to
Four rules we
don't bend.
-
Grade before glamour
Water and levels get solved before a single plant is chosen. It is the least photogenic week of any build and the only one that decides whether the garden survives its third winter.
-
Right plant, right light
We would rather plant fifteen things that want to be there than fifty that need persuading. Half our design time goes into watching where the sun actually lands.
-
Nothing subcontracted
Design, stone, planting and care are all people on our own payroll. If something is wrong, there is exactly one phone number and nobody to point at.
-
Say no early
Lawn in dry shade, a wall doing a job a grade change could do, a plant that will need a hose every August — we'll tell you at the walk-through, not in year two.
Who turns up
The whole studio,
all of it.
- NH
Nadia Haddad
Principal designer
Founded the studio, 2009
Trained in landscape architecture at Oregon, then spent six years on a wholesale nursery floor — which she maintains taught her more about plants than the degree did. Draws every plan by hand first.
- EM
Elias Moreno
Build foreman
With us since 2012
Runs the machines and the schedule. Fifteen years of grading and drainage in valley clay, and an unusually strong opinion about base depth under seating areas.
- TO
Tess Okonkwo
Planting lead
With us since 2016
Horticulturist. Sources everything, sets everything, and keeps the trial beds behind the yard where we kill new plants on our own time instead of a client's.
- SW
Sam Whitaker
Stone
With us since 2018
Dry-laid walls, flagstone and steps. Came to us from a masonry shop and has never once let a riser vary by more than a quarter inch across a flight.
- JA
June Alvarez
Care crew lead
With us since 2020
Runs the eight-visit calendar and writes the note that lands in your inbox after each one. Knows what every shrub in a hundred-odd gardens is supposed to become.