What we believe

We work with homeowners, co-ops, community boards, non-profits, public parks, city agencies and everyone in between to improve quality of life (no more gas blowers, toxic chemicals or inert plant material!).

With our growing portfolio of innovative ecosystems in commercial, residential and public settings we are leveraging biodiverse corridors to stabilize temperature, absorb rainwater and establish successful retention zones to ensure our soils withstand drought while retaining a healthy microbiome.

As professional stewards of the environment, it is our responsibility to transform landscapes into thriving ecosystems that inspire and sustain. Rooted in principles of ecological integrity, our commitment to sustainable practices and our integrative process extend our work beyond beautification.

We cultivate resilient and regenerative outdoor spaces with intentional operations that reduce waste through circular design & construction and that center longevity. Our designs and operational expertise ensure that great design doesn’t live and die on paper! Through the design and feedback process, we hone green infrastructure intelligence to solve individual and community scale problems such as stormwater management, steady ambient building and outdoor temperatures, and increased local biodiversity. It is important to us that, while solving practical problems, we co-create elegant and generative sanctuaries for humans too.

  • Since its founding in 1992, the Ecological Landscape Alliance has been a leader in promoting sustainable approaches to landscape design, construction, and management. ELA’s commitment to innovative ideas and evidence-based practices has made the organization both a trusted resource and a vibrant community of landscape professionals and devoted gardeners.

  • HOMEGROWN NATIONAL PARK® is a grassroots call to action to regenerate biodiversity and ecosystem function by planting native plants and creating new ecological networks.

  • The NYC M/WBE program is designed to promote City government contracting and subcontracting opportunities for businesses certified as minority and women-owned with a real and substantial presence in New York City and surrounding counties.

  • U.S. Green Building Council members are driving the entire green building community forward and they represent the best organizations from all fields.

Our vision is that one day professional horticulturalists and land stewards will manage and maintain critical green infrastructure across our city.

Who we are

    • B.S. in Ecology

    • WEDG certified

    • LEED AP in Neighborhood Development

    • NYCEDC Waterfront Pathways Fellow 2025

    • NYCEDC Senior Fellow Waterfront Pathways 2026

    Rosemarie is a green infrastructure professional with more than 14 years of hands-on experience in nature based solutions to climate change. As an artistic praxis, she works with nature to create living murals, as well as functional ecosystems, designing with spirits of place and for the generations to come. Her designs have focused on blending the boundaries between human and non-human communities.

    Drawing on her history as a community organizer, Rosemarie works tirelessly to build environmental and social resilience by facilitating ecological intimacy and fostering ecological literacy. In 2012, she served as AmeriCorps, working in community gardens across the five boroughs and worked on several facets of the Million TreesNYC Initiative.

    As the founder of Our Temenos and the Circular Construction Hub she aims to revolutionize an industry while building a broader culture of collaboration, reciprocity and problem solving. She brings the ingenuity of her roots and perspective gained from a unique lived experience into every room she enters.

    Rosemarie enjoys dancing, playing with mud, cooking from nose to tail and a good book. She is known to burst into spontaneous bouts of song.

    Rosemarie serves on the board of MetroHort and Artemis Ecology & Arts Initiative

    • OSHA 30

    • SHRM-CP

    Erika brings her innate sense of balanced aesthetics and a dedication to operational excellence. With more than a decade of hospitality and fine dining experience, she has garnered a skillful attention to detail and logistics.

    Erika began her work in landscaping with a drive to create and maintain bio-diverse outdoor spaces that encourage sustainable living practices.  

    Erika loves nurturing community in and around urban green spaces that are in harmony with native ecosystems while exploring accessible opportunities for rejuvenation and conservation.

    Erika serves on the board of Artemis Ecology & Arts Initiative.

    • MSc in Sustainable Food and Natural Resources

    • Intermediate Autocad certificate

    Esmé combines a background in sustainability and design with more than five years of hands-on experience in horticulture and landscape construction. She began as a gardener and held Project Manager roles with previous organizations. Esme designs custom residential landscapes and hardscapes utilizing this hands-on intelligence and her more research based theory provided through her studies in Germany. While overseeing residential and commercial installation and maintenance projects throughout New York City, Esme leans heavily on her expertise in sustainable land stewardship and permaculture to drive forward innovative solutions to everyday problems.

    As a native New Yorker, her experience of the city and its evolution has informed her process and desire to create thriving, resilient green spaces for all who call this city home.

How we’re different

  1. Our Business Model

    Worker cooperatives are values-driven businesses that put worker and community benefit at the core of their purpose. In contrast to traditional companies, worker members at worker cooperatives participate in the profits, oversight, and often management of the enterprise using democratic practices.

    Our democratic business model centers care for the planet, our clients and one another. As land stewards we recognize that every team member is a valuable part of the whole and an integral part of our larger community, to which we are deeply rooted. In addition to opportunities for growth, education and advancement, we offer a living wage that accounts for the wear and tear of physical labor on the human body and the unique demands of our industry. Members of our staff bring with them diverse educational and professional experiences as well as certifications in relevant specialties.

    We proudly boast the only paid internship in the field of horticulture that is a partnership between a non-profit and private institution. Our internship is a hands-on opportunity for NYC youth interested in professional level careers in green infrastructure. We proudly hire from this program and from the alumni network of other workforce development programs. It is our honor to share the love of our craft with the next generation and grow alongside the next generation of land stewards.

  2. Our Operations

    Sustainability is not an afterthought or a branding strategy at Our Temenos. We go out of our way to compost, salvage material, and build workforce pipelines. This is not merely a commitment to lofty ideals, it makes for a stronger business that was scalable at its core.

    Our designs and field work combine the most up to date research and our industry thought leadership with feedback and information from our hands-on experience. We are discovering and implementing better solutions to long standing industry problems on a daily basis. Our entire team is engaged in this process which yields top tier results in our ecosystems and green spaces. We are setting the standard for the entire industry for technical and professional landscape management. Moving away from “mow and blow” protocols and offering feasible solutions to noisy, smelly gas blowers, indiscriminate weed whacking and inches of dyed mulch.

  3. Our Impact

    We are a for profit organization proving that impact can drive strategic business decisions. In a decade, Our Temenos grew from a one woman show into a robust and dynamic team. We have built over 120 green spaces across NYC, planted tens of thousands of native plants, transformed hundreds of acres of green space into thriving and functional resources to build the resilience of the city we all love so much. As a small MWBE organization we are applying pressure to, and influencing, the largest players in our industry to do the same.

An egalitarian business model aims to eliminate the race and class disparities in the industry.

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