By Invitation: Along the Garden Path with Ed Hollander

The ICAA's podcast interviews the renowned landscape architect

By Invitation features discussions by architects, designers, garden professionals, urbanists, craftspeople, and luminaries in the classical design field about the relevance of the classical tradition in today's modern world.

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Along the Garden Path with Ed Hollander

In this episode of By Invitation, host Caroline Slaten sits down with renowned landscape designer Edmund Hollander, President of Hollander Design, for a wide-ranging conversation that journeys from New York to England and beyond. Together they explore the effects of climate change on planting design, Ed's travels and work at the Chelsea Flower Show, his early career alongside some of New York's most influential heavy hitters, and, of course, what it's like to meet the King of England.

Edmund Hollander is President of Hollander Design, one of the few landscape architecture firms named to Architectural Digest's AD100 list. He also serves on the Board of the Institute of Classical Architecture & Art, is a recipient of the Arthur Ross Award for Landscape Architecture, an author, and a consummate plantsman.

Join us for a fascinating conversation about great gardens, climate change, remarkable travels, and an unforgettable encounter with King Charles III.

Episode Transcript

Ed Hollander: 00:02

When I was at Vassar or anywhere, if they ever had a category in our yearbook, "Least likely to dine with royalty," there would just been a picture of me there. So the idea that this basic, uneducated ruffian has managed to make enough of himself that he gets invited to have dinner with the King of England, you think, "Okay, maybe we've done something here."

Caroline Slaten: 00:26

Welcome to "By Invitation," a podcast of the Institute of Classical Architecture and Art, where we're dedicated to advancing the understanding, appreciation, and practice of classical design. I'm your host, Caroline Slaten, and in each episode, we'll explore the people, places, and ideas shaping the world of classical design. Today, landscape designer Ed Hollander and I are taking a journey overseas, enjoying some laughs, but also exploring important subjects like climate change's effects on plantings. Along the way, we will reminisce about Ed's travels, his work at the Chelsea Flower Show, his early career with some New York City heavy hitters, and of course, what it's like to meet the King of England. And by invitation, here is today's guest, Ed Hollander. Edmund Hollander is president of Hollander Design, one of a few landscape architecture firms elected to Architectural Digest's A.D. 100 top designers list. He's also on the board of directors at the Institute of Classical Architecture and Art, a winner of the Arthur Ross Award for Landscape Architecture, author, and incredible plantsman.

Ed Hollander: 01:59

One of the questions always comes up, "What's going to be alive this spring?" As climate change impacts landscape, we start to use more and more plants that typically grow in southern climates, crape myrtle, southern magnolias, all sorts of things like that. And now all of a sudden we get a winter like this. So every spring is always a little bit of, what are things going to look like? There's no question, both with natural ecology and human ecology and the impacts that they've had on what will grow where, that things, particularly the Northeast, there's a lot of this going on. But we're seeing a fairly rapid transition in terms of what is a native plant. And things that were native here 50 years ago, meaning they would grow on their own, they provided food for wildlife and songbirds, that they didn't need chemical intervention or support. A lot of those trees and plants don't grow so well here, and they are being replaced by some more southern species. And there's a little bit of unknown as to where we are in this transitionary ecological period. Crape myrtle, Lagerstroemia's, have become almost ubiquitous. And I would say you could go up to zone six. You can go to Connecticut. You can go to the Cape and Nantucket and south of here, where when I started doing this back in the Stone Age, you would never think of planting plants like that. Magnolia grandiflora, the great southern magnolia of southeast United States, is happy as a clam growing here now, where 20 years ago, you would've really been pushing the envelope. And likewise, things like some of the native birches that used to grow here, it's now too warm. And what happens is pests and insects start to feed on them that didn't before. So all of a sudden they now need a lot of chemical intervention to keep them happy and healthy. And if you're trying to grow native where you're not putting toxic chemicals into the landscape, nature is not static. Nature continues to change. And a lot of times people will say to me, "Well, we want to be native." And I'll say, "What year?" And they'll look at me kind of cross-eyed. It's like, well, what was native in this area in 1500 and 1800 and 2000 and 2020 is getting to be a little bit different. So it's something that is academically studied and also observed colloquially by lots of landscape people.

Caroline Slaten: 04:25

So you're really in a profession with living things around you. It's not like interior design where if I put this sette or this table here, it's not going away in 100 years.

Ed Hollander: 04:35

Obviously, we're designing things, we're building things, we're creating things, but we're also creating living landscapes, which means we need to understand everything from bedrock geology to soil as a living thing to then what wants to grow there. And you really have to be adaptable and adaptive because you really can't push Mother Nature someplace she doesn't want to go. Arrogance and Mother Nature are not a good combination. And one of the things that you learn in doing this is that no matter how well-educated and how much you think you know, you really don't know as much. And you get to a point where you're comfortable saying, "I don't know." I have a lot of conversations with Michael Van Valkenburgh, who does a lot of urban work, and we're always exchanging things that we have learned doing projects and installing them and seeing what happens. And not to put down academics, but textbooks are written by academics who do research. There isn't a lot of really valid, up-to-the-date information on a lot of the plant species that will grow here. Even within 100 miles of New York City is so site specific. It's one of the things we always talk about, the three ecologies in our work, natural ecology, architectural ecology, and human ecology. But the natural ecology is so site specific. Even on one property it can be different. So it's difficult to be able to put together a comprehensive list of what grows where, when, how, and why.

Caroline Slaten: 06:12

Take me back a little bit, because we were just chatting a bit before we started, Ed, and you mentioned that in the very beginning stages, you worked on a 7-Eleven.

Ed Hollander: 06:22

So getting out of graduate school, the University of Pennsylvania in 1983, I was already working for John Collins at the Delta Group, which was a wonderful firm of incredibly dedicated people. John had convinced me while I was at there, he was doing work at the Men's House of Correction in Philadelphia, training inmates, giving them horticultural skills to be able to work in parks, and he and I were out picking up seeds of cynanthas on the side of the New Jersey Turnpike and growing native trees and native plants. But when I graduated, I was working for John, helping Bob Hanna from Hanna/Olin in a studio at Penn, and Ian McHarg, and we did that for a couple of years, and I finally wanted to get back to New York, where I'd grown up. Came up to New York, got a job with Howard Abel at Abel Bainnson Butz, and after about two weeks, got a call from a firm called Clarke & Rapuano. Now, Clarke & Rapuano had done almost every big urban project in New York because Gilmore Clark had a roommate named Robert Moses, which isn't a bad guy to know if you're going to be a landscape architect in New York. They were starting on a project called West Way, which was, at that time, the city's answer to what to do with the West Side, where the West Side Highway had fallen down, and it involved building the biggest park in New York since Central Park. There was some controversy to it, obviously, because they were going to be filling in where the piers were, building this park, putting the highway underground. So three weeks after getting this job at Abel Bainnson Butz, I had to go back to Howard and say, "I've really enjoyed being here for three weeks, but I have to leave," and worked for Clarke & Rapuano for a few years up until about 1991 when there was a real recession. That firm was getting sold to a group of highway engineers, and there was a woman named Maryanne Connelly, who I'd gone to graduate school with at Penn. She had been laid off from the Parks Department. So we thought, "It's a great time to start a firm. There is no work. Let's go do this." So it was her, myself, my mother, and Mary- anne's dog. One of our first gigs were the Southampton 7-Eleven, Southampton Mini Storage, because a gig was a gig and work was work, and we were taking all sorts of things. There was a wonderful woman named Lois Sherr, who had been a landscape architect working with Mitchell Giurgola and Robert Stern, and Maryane had been working with Lois. She decided to retire and said, "Would you like to finish our projects with Bob Stern?" And I said, "What a fabulous idea." So we immediately got thrown into a wonderful project out in Quogue with Bob Stern, Albert Hadley, and myself, which was like the cover of the Sunday Times Magazine when Carol Vogel used to still do those things. And I remember one of the more frightening things. So here I am, a young, I don't know what I am, 28, 29 years old, and I'm with Bob Stern and Albert Hadley. And at some point, Albert is making suggestions to Bob about this and that, and Bob turns and in the most derisive tone, says to Albert Hadley, "Albert, don't you have any pillows and ashtrays to rearrange?" Which stuck with me to this day. But you all start somewhere.

Caroline Slaten: 09:28

So how have the green spaces changed and developed?

Ed Hollander: 09:32

I grew up in New York, so Carl Schurz Park and Central Park and Prospect Park, to me, that was kind of the country, and they got very degraded. Once you got to the '70s and New York went into the financial crisis and there was no money given to any of these spaces, and there wasn't a lot of value to it. For years, I was on the board of the New York Restoration Project with Bette Midler, who were doing such great work on urban areas and bringing life back to areas and having community groups involved with it. But there was a true renaissance in the value of green space in New York City that I guess kind of started with Ed Koch, and Michael Bloomberg was clearly the great proponent of that. And I think you've seen the redevelopment of the West Side of New York, the entire Brooklyn waterfront. There's been great value given back to the waterfront public spaces in the city that had been derelict for so long. There is still no reason for me to be a landscape architect based on any family history or knowledge or experience or anything. I ended up going to Columbia Grammar for the last few years of high school, but I was the classic kid with ADHD. I thought every report card said, "If." "If Ed would..." "If Ed..." I thought "If" was a grade at that point. And I said I wanted to apply to Vassar. They said, "Don't bother. You'll never get in." But I applied, and of course, I did get in. But I was a history major, and there was a wonderful horticulture class there that I took, which was kind of an elective, and there was a great old Swedish horticulturist there named Sven Sward, and he said, "This is what you love. You shouldn't be going to business school or law school." It was the '70s. It was more about peace and love and drinking and drugs and girls, and the idea of going to class seemed like an unnecessary distraction from having fun. I'm at Vassar College. It was a pretty fun place. And in spite of myself, they somehow taught me how to learn, so that after Vassar, I went to the New York Botanical Gardens because that was the next logical place. I wouldn't go to class, but I would go hang out in the gardens with the guys that had been doing this for 50 years, and they loved to have somebody who would listen to them and talk to them and learn from them. NYBG had just, I think, acquired the Cary Arboretum, so I went up and studied ecology up there for a few months, and things started to percolate that this was an area of some interest, and I got my certificate there and said, "Well, I don't really want to be a gardener." So what was next? And being a city kid, I thought, "Okay, maybe urban forestry." So I applied to graduate schools. Again, people telling me, "You'll never get in. You don't have any background." Lo and behold, I went down, I had lunch with Ian McHarg and Laurie Olin, who were just the two giants of landscape architecture, that they would take A little kid out to lunch and talked to him, and I said, "Let's try this." And really worked hard, learned how to learn. I'm sitting there with people that can draw like the wind. I didn't know which end of a pencil to pick up, but I knew plants, and I knew wildflowers, and I knew trees. At some point, when Mary Ann was at graduate school there with me, and she knew how to draw. I knew my plants, and I said, "Okay, there's a partnership here." It was a totally serendipitous route that got me to Vassar, that got me to the New York Botanical Gardens, that got me to Penn. There was never a plan or a thought where this is what I'd love to do.

Caroline Slaten: 12:59

So that's how your love for plants and landscape started. What made you start doing work in a classical sense? What informed your traditional style?

Ed Hollander: 13:10

To me, design was problem-solving. I didn't have a great creative mind, but I would look at a property and look at a design and think about how do you solve the problems to make this a livable space. You don't start out with a style. You kind of learn and adapt and learn and adapt. And of course, I did the British tour through the British gardens and the European tour, and you look, and you learn. I remember going to Hestercombe, which was one of the classic great Lutyens, Jekyll collaborations, and I saw that, I said, "That's it. That's exactly it because you can't tell where the architecture stops and the landscape starts." But that was the aha moment that talked to me about how architecture and landscapes, when they collaborate, and when architects and landscape architects collaborate, that's where you create truly magical spaces.

Caroline Slaten: 14:15

Ed, you've been a longstanding supporter of the ICAA's Bunny Mellon Curricula, and for those that are not aware, that curricula provides a variety of programming and landscape architecture for designers, students, and enthusiasts, and it honors Bunny Mellon's deeply held belief that architecture is firmly linked to its surrounding landscape. So tell me, what is it about that program that resonates with you, and you've been such a huge help in not only supporting it but developing that curricula as well.

Ed Hollander: 14:44

Well, I think one of the things I learned early on was how much I could learn from the architects we were working with, whether it was Gil Schafer or Peter Pennoyer or Tom Kligerman or Jack Robertson and Bob Stern. These are really, truly great architects that were much smarter than I was, that were much better educated than I was, that were really talented. And we would learn from what they were doing architecturally, and it helped to inform what we were doing in the landscape, and it was fun. Everyone kind of knows, I think, that one of the things that we tell all our clients is that any successful project is going to be fun to do, and we are going to have fun doing it.

Caroline Slaten: 15:24

You've also been so heavily involved in the ICAA in other ways, and you're now on our board of directors. Can you tell me what the ICAA means to you?

Ed Hollander: 15:32

The ICAA is pretty remarkable in a lot of different ways. I love the interaction, again, between all of the various professionals. It's not one group of people. It's a group of everyone involved with both designing space and creating. Builders, craftsmen, architects, interior people, landscape, and I think it speaks to the fact that we create spaces where people live, and again, the interaction of the various disciplines that all contribute to a successful project, I think is what makes the ICAA so much different. The AIA is a wonderful organization, the American Society of Landscape Architects, but they are kind of all in their own silos. The ICAA brings all of the aligned professionals together who all contribute to creating great spaces and celebrates and integrates all of them into one organization, and I don't know another organization that does that. I've often said in people in our office, because as well as all the classical work, we do a lot of work with Steven Holl and other great modernists. There is no modernist version of the ICAA, and it's a failing in the entire design world.

Caroline Slaten: 16:46

So Ed, a lot of members of your staff are involved in the ICAA as well. Melissa Revis has given a lecture here. One of your staff was the winner of the Bunny Mellon Landscape Prize for emerging designers. What would you say to other firm leaders and other professionals about why they should get involved here and what that investment will do for their firm?

Ed Hollander: 17:06

It's a celebration of what's wonderful about the profession that we're in, and it is great to share all of our knowledge with other people. It's great to hear what other people are doing. We work in a collaborative world, and I think the ICAA celebrates the collaboration of all of the various disciplines that go into creating spaces. And in my mind, it's a pretty unique organization that you would say, "Well, the ICAA, it's a bunch of stuffy old white men in bow ties." But it really isn't. There are all sorts of people here that do all sorts of things that are advancing our profession in a lot of different ways. It has, for me, given me the opportunity to interact with a lot of people. It's given me the opportunity to learn from a lot of people. It's given me the opportunity to have a lot of fun with a lot of people.

Caroline Slaten: 18:00

It's a really incredible community. It's pretty remarkable what's been put together here.

Ed Hollander: 18:04

And not trying to make Peter Lyden feel good, I think he's done a remarkable job at advancing this organization and giving it relevance beyond even the classical community. We've done a lot of work with a wonderful British sculptor named David Harber, and Chelsea, he goes, "You have to come." It's always Memorial Day week, which is always our busiest week ever in the entire world. So finally, a couple of years ago, Melissa convinced me to go over there. All the work there, I was just blown away and had a great time. And so at some point, Melissa comes up to me a few months ago and says, "Oh, I agreed that we would help David design his stand for Chelsea." I'm like, "Fabulous. What's that mean?" She says, "Well, we're going to design it, and then we have to go there to help him install it, and we're going to work with native crafts people there, and we're going to..." I said, "And when are we doing this?" She said, "Well, it is kind of in May 2026." There was the fun side of me that said, "This is a unique opportunity. Let's just roll with this." So we've designed the stand for David Harber. Melissa and the team in the office have done a fabulous job designing an exhibit that really celebrates traditional crafts and traditional techniques that we're then going to incorporate David's sculptures in. And so that we'll be doing this May. We'll be there for the opening and putting the stand together, and which actually works because we've got a few projects in the UK, and we've recently been retained to work on this 12th century house up in Oxfordshire, and we've got a few other projects, and we'll have fun doing that. There is no more fun from a landscape architecture standpoint than going to Chelsea, even without starting to drink at seven-thirty in the morning, which seems to be a requirement. You wake up, in every business meeting, they're topping you off with champagne before you've had your first full English breakfast. But this does tie into, at some point, my receiving an email. So we've obviously done these videos for PBS, "Design Secrets with Ed Hollander," and there are Kristina Murrin from the King's Foundation and some of the people that were there who've come up and say to me, "You know, this is fabulous. My boss would love to see this." And I'm naive and said, "Who's your boss?" And she goes, "Oh, you know, His Majesty." So time passes, and I get an email. "Dear Mr. Hollander, we'd love if you would come to Dumfries House to look at the work we've done there and for a conference on sustainability." And I was like, "Who's pulling my leg? Who's inviting me to go meet and have dinner with King Charles in Scotland?" And I called Peter, and he goes, "Oh, I got an invitation, too." We were surprised. So Peter, my wife Wendy, and I, we go to Scotland. We are at Dumfries. We get a wonderful tour of all the work they're doing there, teaching traditional crafts, working with the local community. What they're doing at Dumfries is remarkable in terms of the ecological sensitivity, the historic sensitivity, the work they're doing with local craftspeople, training people in traditional crafts, biodynamic farming, full sustainability. Obviously, a treat to then have drinks and dinner with the King. We're all in our best black-tie regalia, and we go in for the reception, and fortunately, Christina is there kind of guiding us to where we should stand to be able to speak with the King when he enters. And there were rules and protocol, but I'm not sure that either Peter or I were very large on rules and protocol. Peter gets introduced to the King and immediately starts talking about the ICAA and the King's Foundation and this and that, to the point where I basically have to elbow Peter out of the way so I can get my time with the King. And we talk about stuff, and he is incredibly charming and incredibly reasonable and concerned and fascinated about landscape architecture and landscape design and architecture and the ICAA, I might add, and had a great time with him during the reception before dinner. Now, after dinner, we've all had a few drinks and wonderful wine with dinner and then some after-dinner drinks, and at this point, Peter and I basically have monopolized the King. He's on one side. I'm on the other side. They're playing 15th century music, which my wife Wendy is a specialist in, so she's reveling in that. I've got the King by an elbow, kind of telling him that I'd love to come back and look at the gardens with him in 20 years when things have started to grow. I said to Melissa, "If we're going to do this, let's approach the people at Dumfries and see if we can get these traditional people that have been trained in traditional crafts to help make some of the materials that we're going to use in our exhibit at Chelsea." And so, which they are doing and will be really a feature of this. And so, of course, talking to the King's Foundation again about having His Majesty come by and talk to us at the stand and things like that. So it should be even more fun than usual being over at Chelsea. When I was at Vassar or anywhere, if they ever had a category in our yearbook, "Least Likely to Dine With Royalty," there would just have been a picture of me there. So the idea that this basic, uneducated ruffian has managed to make enough of himself that he gets invited to have dinner with the King of England, you think, "Okay, maybe we've done something here."

Caroline Slaten: 23:29

And now, did you make the King of England laugh?

Ed Hollander: 23:31

No, by the end of the evening, my wife's like, "You know, you're not supposed to touch him." I've got him by the elbow, and we're laughing about the idea that here are two old guys, 20 years from now, stumbling around a garden, looking how plants are growing in. I was going to have fun, and I think he enjoyed having fun. So we had some laughs, we had some drinks, but I was incredibly impressed with the genuine nature of his devotion to sustainability and design. It was a moment that really, I think, changed the way I looked at things because everything that you had read, he really, truly believed in it. And it was inspiring to see someone who could do anything and really cares about sustainability, really cares about sustainable design, really cares about classical design, really cares about what the ICAA is involved with. It was both inspirational, educational, and a lot of fun.

Caroline Slaten: 24:24

So is it fair to say join the ICAA, and you might get to meet the King of England?

Ed Hollander: 24:29

You'll definitely get to meet Peter Lyden and Ed Hollander. That's for sure. And seeing Dumfries House was fabulous. Traveling around Scotland was fabulous. Really had a great time in Edinburgh. It was a great time.

Caroline Slaten: 24:39

Tell us about Dumfries House.

Ed Hollander: 24:41

Well, and there are great stories of Dumfries, but he owns this himself. He bought this thing because it was a derelict property that was going to go on the market. For interiors people, one of the things that Dumfries had was the largest collection of Chippendale furniture that was still there. And instead of it getting auctioned off, he bought this to preserve it and rebuild the house. And obviously, I was more concerned with what he had done on the exterior and in the landscape and all that had been built and transformed there. But I think even what he's done in the house was fabulous.

Caroline Slaten: 25:12

So tell me, Ed, what's next for you? What are your hopes and dreams for the next iteration of Hollander?

Ed Hollander: 25:19

So we have Geoff Valentino and Steven Eich, and Melissa Revis, who are all partners in the firm now. The three of them are significantly younger than I am, significantly more talented than I am, and it has given us the ability, we now have our main office in New York, a fairly sizable office in Chicago, a satellite office out in the Hamptons, another office down in Savannah. We have a growing body of work in the Bay Area and the area between Los Angeles and Montecito. So it's not impossible we're going to open another office out there to handle that. I keep asking myself when I'm going to work less than 70 hours a week, but I have to admit that just going to work every day, either in the office or out on construction sites or walking around tree nurseries or flying here or flying there, makes me smile every day. So the next iteration, I think, is more of what we've done, giving the three partners. They're already doing great work and have given us the ability to branch out into hospitality. Geoff and Melissa worked on this project called Fall Line, which is a 10,000-acre, totally organic, ecological golf resort that just won Best New Golf Course in the United States. Now, I'm not a golfer, but winning this award is an incredibly prestigious thing in the golf community. Melissa worked on a renovation of a small seaside motel called Silver Sands out in Greenport, which won the national award for the best landscape design for a new resort. Baltimore Pendry was the hotel of the year. So we've done more and more hospitality work that we branched out into. Our work in Taiwan continues to grow over there. Geoff's been running a lot of that, as well as a lot of other projects out of Chicago. He's working down in Arkansas. We're starting something out in Jackson Hole. We've got work down in the Caribbean. We're offered more work than we can do, which is a good place to be. But we continue to have fun and get to continue to do good work.

Caroline Slaten: 27:23

You've really strategically invested in the next generation of leadership at your firm. So could you talk a little bit about mentorship and how you have kind of thought through that process?

Ed Hollander: 27:34

Well, none of this is thought through, and none of this is planned out. The one thing that people always think we've had some great plan, and I never have. I didn't take one day of business school to ever plan anything. But I think we've always felt as though people should come to our office and be free to design. We don't sit necessarily and tell people what to design. We'll look over their shoulder, we'll have crits, we'll talk, we'll discuss, we'll laugh. But we like to allow people to grow. As these young kids develop more skills and more talents and they get to do more and more, that, to me, is really enjoyable. It's really fulfilling. And I do enjoy seeing people grow, seeing them get more confident, seeing them get more assertive, telling me that I'm wrong about things, which is okay. If you want to be successful, you've got to trust other people. One of the things, we had a big meeting in the office the other day, is how are we going to use AI? AI is this thing that's coming at us. And I sat down, I said, "Let's put five or six people together and let's think about how this can be used in a way that gives us a greater ability to research our work, a greater ability to understand the ecological implications of our work." We try to stay a little bit on the forefront of what technology can do. But I think we like to think about investing in people and investing in the profession and giving them the tools to let them be everything they can be. We have to be open to adapt to the way the world changes, just as we have to be open to adapting to how climate change has impacted what will grow here. You can't pretend that climate change doesn't exist. You can't pretend that AI doesn't exist. And all of these things, you can either fight them or you can say, "Okay, here's an opportunity that will allow us to do better work."

Caroline Slaten: 29:35

You're going on vacation later this week. Where are you headed to?

Ed Hollander: 29:38

We're heading down to Turks now. We were in Hanalei Bay in Kauai. It's the most peaceful place in the world. I am not a winter sport person. I played ice hockey. It was all fun. My idea of a perfect place is a palm tree, sand, some drawings that I can work on, maybe an occasional cold beer that goes along with it. But I love being able to sit on the beach with some drawings and to be able to have kind of peace and quiet and warm air and beautiful turquoise waters. And people are always laughing because my wife will take a picture of me sitting in a chaise lounge doing planting plans and send it to people in the office. But that's pretty idyllic.

Caroline Slaten: 30:13

What's your ratio on vacation of work to play?

Ed Hollander: 30:17

If you don't look at work as though it's drudgery, it's difficult to have the opportunity to have peace time when you can think and focus, because you're always on Zooms, you're always in meetings, you're always on desk crits, you're always traveling. So peace is a great luxury. And that allows the mind a chance to actually get back where you could be a landscape architect again. A lot of times when you're running a business, you're running a business, and you're dealing with people, and you're dealing with construction, and you're dealing with engineering, and you're dealing with all sorts of stuff. So to be able to get back to being a landscape architect and doing that on vacation is kind of the best of both worlds for me.

Caroline Slaten: 30:49

And what's your favorite spot to vacation at?

Ed Hollander: 30:51

It's got to be Kauai. Kauai is just unspoiled. The biggest question of the day is what color flip-flops do you wear today? Dressing for dinner involves a clean pair of shorts.

Caroline Slaten: 31:04

Now, are you sitting around looking at all the plants and the palm trees and thinking, "Oh, this is an interesting use of this application?" Or-

Ed Hollander: 31:11

Not so much. You always go to the botanical garden, you always want to learn some things. But when we're traveling somewhere, I'm not looking for inspiration. I'm really just looking for peace and looking for the ability to allow my mind to get off of daily concerns. Wendy is a Renaissance musicologist. Her idea of the perfect vacation is the basement of the Bibliotheque Nationale, looking through 15th century music manuscripts in a cold, dusty basement. Okay. My idea is a warm beach with tropical water and palm trees. But the idea of being able to sit somewhere peacefully, quietly, and enjoy the diversity of nature. You can be in places where there is no noise. Now, being a New Yorker, to be in a place where the only noise you hear is surf, wind, and birds, and there's not a man-made sound to be heard, that's pretty magical.

Caroline Slaten: 32:13

Now, Hollander Landscape Design has won a number of awards, a lot of accolades. Are there a few that mean the most to you?

Ed Hollander: 32:20

The ICAA awards are always wonderful because it's not a foreign body that doesn't know you. It's a group of your colleagues who respect the work that you've done. And I think, to me, that's always a very important consideration. We have won lots and lots of awards, and that's great for my ego, which always needs stroking and care, and being a little competitive, that doesn't hurt either. But being recognized by your colleagues and your friends, I think, always is meaningful. The Arthur Ross Award's probably the most significant professional achievement we've had. The only problem with a lifetime thing is you tend to think they're giving these to people who are on their way out. And I hope that we're not at that point yet.

Caroline Slaten: 33:07

Is there anything else you'd like to talk about?

Ed Hollander: 33:09

I could talk for hours, but you probably have other people that are more interesting than I am.

Caroline Slaten: 33:13

Never. All right. Well, thank you, Ed.

Ed Hollander: 33:16

It's a pleasure.

Caroline Slaten: 33:22

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