After a 20-year career in graphic design, marketing, and project management, I realized that I needed to do work with plants to make our world better. With that idea as my driving force, I enrolled in Oregon State University’s Horticulture program, earning my bachelor’s degree in horticulture with an emphasis in sustainable landscape design.
I have an intense love of growing plants and am passionate about native-focused plant research. I believe the urban environment is a fantastic place to grow natives and hope to do more work to bring life to the spaces people live.
I center my work around native plants, ecological communities, and using the ecology we see in nature to influence our horticultural decisions. I draw many of my influences from Tom Stuart Smith, Piet Oudolf, Thomas Rainer, and Claudia West. In addition to my degree in horticulture, I am also certified in Permaculture design and Permaculture design for climate change. When I’m not designing landscapes, I work at Doak Creek Native Plant Nursery south of Eugene, Oregon.
Why Urban Genesis?
Landscapes in the urban environment tend to be barren stretches of grass or mulch sparsely peppered with over-pruned shrubs. These landscapes provide so little ecological benefit that they may as well be a parking lot (to paraphrase Doug Tallamay). I’ve run across perspectives by others passionate about natives who believe we should just “rewild” our cities. While a fun concept, this isn’t practical. Our world is irrevocably marked by human use – there is no going back.
However, while I don’t believe we can return to a wild and unpeopled world, I do think we can make something new. By using the archetypes we see in nature, the centuries of horticultural practices by indigenous peoples, and modern plant and soil science we can create something full of life in the barren urban environments we’ve inherited and created. In urban and sub-urban spaces we can learn from ecological communities to create rich plant systems that thrive in the built environments we live in. We can create something new and vibrant in our human-disrupted spaces. Urban Genesis represents this ideal.