Denver, Colorado · Central Park
Gardens that know where they live.
Shades of Green is a garden & floral design studio in Denver’s Central Park. We design, plant, and tend small‑scale landscapes with a painter’s eye for color — more petals than pavers.
Garden & Floral Design
№ 01 — The Studio
Run by a neighbor, not a fleet of trucks.
Shades of Green is run by Sarah Strauss, a Central Park local with a lifelong soft spot for flowers and the quiet logic of a well‑planted bed. She started the studio to do one thing carefully: gardens at a human scale, designed for the people who live with them.
That means planting plans drawn for Colorado’s sun, soil, and seasons — perennials that come back stronger, grasses that hold the winter, and color that moves through the year. We keep the hardscaping light. Our work is the living layer.
“A good garden shouldn’t look installed. It should look inevitable.”
№ 02 — What We Do
The living layer of your landscape.
We focus on smaller projects done well — design and planting first, hardscaping a distant second.
i.
Garden design
A planting plan for your space — beds, borders, and the bones of a garden that works with Colorado's light and water, not against them.
ii.
Planting & installation
We source healthy plants and put them in the ground ourselves: perennials, grasses, shrubs, and the occasional small tree.
iii.
Seasonal color & containers
Front-porch pots, window boxes, and cutting beds refreshed through the seasons — tulips to dahlias to dried winter stems.
iv.
Garden tending
Spring wake-ups, mid-season edits, and fall put-to-beds. A few visits a year keeps a young garden becoming itself.
№ 03 — Recent Work
A Central Park backyard, before & after.
A tired patch of lawn became a low‑water garden room: corten steel planters of grasses, evergreens, and cutting flowers along the fence line, with turf and gravel doing the quiet work underneath. Drag the line to compare.
№ 04 — Say Hello
Tell us about your patch of Denver.
A sunny side yard, a porch that wants pots, a bed that never quite worked — we’d love to hear about it. Send a note and we’ll reply within a couple of days.