Fast forward through a move to North Carolina in middle school, employment at a number of wonderful garden centers, work on island farms and gardens in Massachusetts during college, and eventually a Masters degree in Landscape Architecture and work on projects at multiple scales both close to home and around the world.

I was still working as a landscape architect in DC in 2016 when I attended a conference where an ecologist challenged a group of us to examine our responsibilities to landscape outside the urban core. At my firm’s main office in Seattle we were proud to work exclusively in the city, avoiding development in what should be ‘natural’ areas. From the ecologists’ perspective, though, wild places need design, consideration, and advocacy.

There is little of the natural world that has been left untouched by humans and simply leaving nature to ‘take her course’ doesn’t necessarily produce the most natural results. Besides, if we become cut off from extra-urban places we will lose knowledge of and connection with it.  How can you protect something you don’t know exists or advocate for a process that you don’t understand or recognize?

In 2017 we moved to New Hampshire and now live in an old farmhouse at the base of a mountain on a beautiful piece of property surrounded by conservation land. I was awarded a grant to have restoration work done on part of our forested acres and I am studying first hand the ways in which forestry, agriculture, gardening, and design intersect with ecology.