Landscape Designer and Harvard resident Rochelle Greayer has a green thumb when it comes to growing new businesses. Several years ago, Greayer started a blog about landscape design called Studio ‘g’. Her growing list of followers is attracting enough advertisers to supplant her design business.
A year ago, Greayer and her business partner, Susan Cohan, launched an online magazine about landscape design called Leaf Magazine, which has a growing list of followers as well.
Greayer is also one of the founding members of the Harvard Farmer’s Market, which recently completed its sixth and most successful season.
The latest endeavor for the designer and mother of two is the launch of her first design class — to be held in partnership with floral designer Roanne Robbins — in Greayer’s barn on Pinnacle Road.
For more information, visit her web site.
Leaf Magazine just celebrated its one-year anniversary. How did it get started?
My business partner and I knew each other through online networking. We’re both landscape designers. She’s down in New Jersey. We’re both active in online activities related to landscape design, as professionals working in the industry. We’re both bloggers and we’d seen trends of online magazines being able to emerge because the technology made it more simple to create that magazine feeling. And it’s fairly inexpensive technology and we didn’t have any in our area [of landscape design].
What is Leaf Magazine all about?
When I moved here eight years ago from where I lived and worked in England, it was so different coming here, because it’s such a gardening culture over there. There are about eight beautiful magazines [in the U.K.] covering the industry in whichever way you can imagine.
Here we have a couple but they’re small and struggling. We really saw a hole in the market for a practical magazine that was inspiring but in a way that is attainable rather than completely aspirational. Not necessarily being a hard-core gardening magazine, we’re much more about design in the same sense that an interior magazine would be — they’re really lifestyle magazines.
We saw that as a real pull — having a garden and living in a way where you’re eating directly from your garden, you care about environmental issues, you like to be outdoors — you just have this nice lifestyle that extends beyond your front door.
How big is the staff of the magazine?
We have six people who work on the magazine now. My partner, Susan Cohan, and our advertising sales person and our graphic design person all live in the New Jersey. Myself and our copy editor and one of our contributing editors are up here, between Maine, New Hampshire and Massachusetts.
A lot of people ask how we manage with everyone working from home in different places. That’s totally not the way most magazines operate. The way we make it work is we use online tools and Skype and chat all the time.
How often does a new issue come out?
Right now we’re at three times a year. That’s what we’re planning for next year. We’re definitely looking for publishing business partners that might help us financing-wise and industry-wise to grow it. Right now we’re growing organically, which is great, but we’d love to maybe speed it up a bit and take on a partner so we can do four or six issues a year.
Tell me about your blog, Studio ‘g’:
It’s might be one of the biggest in the industry about garden design. Blogging seemed like a great way for me to organize myself creatively. It quickly evolved to attract a lot of readers.
About a year and half ago – really it was the same time that I started Leaf – I’ve made it really the only thing I do. I’ve stopped taking on design projects and continuing to grow the blog by adding revenue there and make a living off of that.
You’re starting to offer design classes. What’s that all about?
I have this bigger end game in mind of offering classes in related topics as an extension of the blog and Leaf. The first one features Roanne Robbins, who was a vendor at the Farmer’s Market. She’s a contributor on Leaf as well as a contributor on ‘g’. She and I will be running the class.
I have a barn where I live on Pinnacle Road by Carlson’s, and I’ve always wanted to use the barn to have classes and events there. So we’re running our first class on Nov. 14. You can learn from Roanne how to make beautiful Thanksgiving centerpieces from cuttings from your garden, and cut flowers you might buy at the grocery store.
We’re also trying to focus on going for a walk in the woods and how to gather things and how to use things that you might just see around. To me the reason you would want to come is because it’s a nice place with nice people to hang out for two hours — almost like going to the spa for two hours. It’s almost like spoiling yourself.
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