Ron Herman (1941-2018) was the son of a Southern California nurseryman and attended North Hollywood High School while working with his father developing gardens for many Hollywood personalities. He earned a Bachelor of Landscape Architecture from UC Berkeley (1964) studying with noted designers Garret Eckbo, Robert Royston and Lawrence Halprin, founders of the philosophy of landscape design that came to be known as California Style. He married Jenny Woo in 1981.

Following graduation in 1964, Herman became a design associate with Robert Herrick Carter in Los Angeles where he worked on projects such as the Century City Hotel, the Hunt Foods Headquarters and the Union Oil Headquarters. It was there that he met landscape architect Thomas Church when Church’s firm hired Carter’s firm to develop construction drawings for the new Los Angeles County Museum. He then opened his own design office in Los Angeles. In 1967, at age twenty-four and with an established landscape design practice, Herman pursued graduate studies in Japan. He noted, "The three years of graduate work at the University of Kyoto during the 1960s changed my direction completely. I had seen pictures of Japanese gardens and thought they were precious. Studying them firsthand opened me up to the dynamics of the Japanese form, the interplay between the formal and the informal" (Herman biography, firm website). His success at the University of Kyoto led to a teaching position as Visiting Lecturer at the University of California at Berkeley where he taught all areas of landscape architecture, including Japanese garden history while engaging in his design practice. Twenty years later in 1988, he left academia to concentrate on residential design. Herman authored numerous papers on Japanese garden design including, A Guide to the Gardens of Kyoto, co-authored, with Marc Treib, often noted as an authoritative text on Kyoto's historic landscapes.

In 1972, Herman partnered with his former UC Berkeley classmate Larry Carducci to start Carducci-Herman & Associates in Berkeley. The firm landed its biggest project in 1980 designing for a residential development known as Fairbanks-Ranch that covered 3,000 acres in north San Diego on land that had been owned by Hollywood stars Douglas Fairbanks and Mary Pickford. Carducci and Herman amicably split ways in the late 1980s, and Herman continued with his own small practice. His firm has been engaged in planning and implementing gardens across the country. Residential projects include those for Larry Ellison, Joe Montana, Neil Young and numerous other sports, entertainment, and high-tech personalities. In the area of public landscapes, he completed the Oracle Corporation World Headquarters in Redwood City, CA, and designed the East Wing garden at the National Gallery in Washington D.C. Although famed for his mastery of the Japanese form, his projects embody a broad range of style and invention.

Herman was a Fellow of the American Society of Landscape Architects (2008) and a UC Berkeley College of Environmental Design Distinguished Alumnus (2018). His writings and projects are in many publications, including Process Architecture 61: Landscape Design - New Wave in California (1985); New American Garden (1998); Pocket Gardens (2000); The New Garden Paradise: The Great Private Gardens of the World (2005); The Contemporary Garden (2009); and The Gardens of Ron Herman (2012); as well as the magazines House & Garden, Architectural Digest, and Fortune.

Sources:

Ron Herman biography on firm website, accessed 2016. (website no longer live)

Padua, Mary G. “Remembering Ron Herman.” The Cultural Landscape Foundation, 30 July 2018, tclf.org/remembering-ron-herman.