Jane Berger, a former Voice of America correspondent, is now a professional landscape designer. Berger owns the Garden Design GroupLLC, a design company that serves the D.C. metro area. She has also written about gardening and landscape design for American Gardener, American Style and Home & Design Magazine.
How did you become interested in gardening?
I’ve always been interested in gardening up to a point. I mean, my mother always had a nice garden when I was a child, but it was really when I was the London correspondent for Voice of America and I saw so many great gardens when I was over there. I walked through gardens on my way to work every morning.
Why did you make the transition to landscape designer?
When I was a news correspondent, I had a lot of jobs where I traveled all the time, and I got really sick of traveling. I was the White House correspondent for a while, and I was the Pentagon correspondent for a while, and I got really tired of that … I just decided that I had done that long enough.
You mentioned visiting gardens in London. Are there any gardens around here that you would recommend?
Washington is a wonderland of beautiful gardens. Probably at the top of my list would be Dumbarton Oaks in Georgetown and Hillwood Museum and Gardens, and of course if you’re interested in plants, there’s not any better place to go than the National Arboretum.
Do you have a favorite plant?
I have a dwarf Japanese cedar and I have a Dee Runk boxwood. My favorite perennial is a Maryland native plant called Indian Pink.
What is unique about gardening in D.C.?
The mid-Atlantic is a great place to be a gardener because we can grow Southern plants that can’t grow up in Pennsylvania and places like that because it’s too cold. We have overlapping zones here.
