After two decades as a graphic designer, I made the decision to shift my focus from visual design to living design — from pixels to plants. That journey led me back to school, where I earned a degree in Horticulture from Oregon State University, and eventually to the founding of Urban Genesis.
Today, I work part-time with Doak Creek Native Plant Nursery in Eugene, Oregon, where I grow and care for native plants and collaborate closely with the nursery’s owner. My own work with Urban Genesis is focused on ecological consultation, landscape design, and custom plant growing, all tailored to the unique challenges and opportunities of urban environments.
Urban Genesis was born from a simple but powerful idea: small, intentionally designed plant communities can function like ecosystems. When we design with the relationships between plants, soil, wildlife, and humans in mind, we create spaces that are beautiful, low-maintenance, biodiverse, and resilient.
Unlike traditional landscaping, my work considers not just what plants look like — but how they live, interact, and support life. I take into account soil health, water dynamics, site-specific conditions, and the realities of the urban environment, including heat reflection, compacted soils, and altered hydrology. The goal is to help people build landscapes that are not only functional and attractive but that also increase biodiversity and improve ecological health.
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.
