Deborah Silver and Co Inc has been designing and installing fine quality landscapes and gardens since 1986.
Deborah Silver is a landscape and garden designer whose firm, Deborah Silver and Co Inc, opened its doors in 1986. She earned her bachelors degree from Kalamazoo College in 1972.
After a brief graduate stint at the Iowa Writers workshop, she supported herself as a fine artist. Following the conclusion of a grant from the National Endowment for the Arts spent teaching in Ferndale, Michigan, she went on to manage Hughes Gardens, a local wildflower and perennial nursery. She briefly managed the perennial plant sales and design division for Al Goldner at Goldner Walsh Nursery until he retired in 1985.
Her landscape and garden design projects combine a thorough knowledge of horticulture with an artist’s eye for design. Her distinctive designs for gardens and landscapes are as much about sculpture and the human hand as they are about a great respect for the natural world.
In 1996, she opened Detroit Garden Works, a retail store devoted to fine and unusual garden ornament and specialty plants. Named by Garden Design Magazine as one of the top 25 garden shops in the U.S. in 2004, it now enjoys an enthusiastic local and national clientele. In March of 2011, the Works was awarded 3 spots in Martha Stewart Magazine’s coveted top 50 garden products of the year.
In 2004, she founded and opened The Branch Studio, which fabricates steel garden ornament, fountains, containers, structures and sculpture, primarily of her own design. The studio also custom fabricates for both design and private clients all over the U.S. The three companies together are able to provide an extensive range of products and services to its landscape and garden clients.
Her commercial projects include a decade long tenure designing and planting for the landscape and gardens at Grand Hotel, Mackinac Island, Michigan, a schematic plan for an arboretum and plantings at the Baltimore Zoo, the design and installation of the common property at Turtle Lake, and the landscape design for the Four Seasons Hotel in Dublin, Ireland, among others. Her residential projects are located primarily in the Midwest.
Dating back to 2009, her landscape and garden design blog, Dirt Simple, is widely read both in the US and abroad.