Plant-hunting is always in season at the Leach Botanical Garden in Portland, Oregon, the storybook base of the botanist Lilla Leach, where Land Morphology has begun a next-century upgrade to the grounds.
By Bradford McKee / Photography by Sahar Coston-Hardy, Affiliate ASLA
A path leads through a grove of camellias in the Woodland Garden, down to the Leach House next to Johnson Creek.
“We wanted that project so badly,” a friend told me when I mentioned my upcoming visit in May to the Leach Botanical Garden in Portland, Oregon. The Leach Garden is a former private property, about 90 years old as a garden and about 40 years old as a Portland public park.
Cheryl Barton winds down after decades as CEO, and her office becomes part of SCAPE.
By Bradford McKee
Kate Orff, FASLA, the founder of SCAPE, saw a strategic expansion to the West Coast. Photo by Lena Shkoda, courtesy SCAPE.
If there were good, recent books on passing a design firm’s ownership from founders to successors (there aren’t), it sounds as if Cheryl Barton, FASLA, and Kate Orff, FASLA, would have had little use for them. In March, the San Francisco-based Office of Cheryl Barton, Barton’s firm since 1995, became the West Coast office of SCAPE Landscape Architecture, the firm Orff founded in New York in 2004. Continue reading Designed Transition→
Supplies are short and prices are bonkers. What’s behind the issues in the supply chain, and when will they end?
By Bradford McKee
An Alpine crew installing granite pavers at a new park near Hudson Yards. Photo by Dylan Peck, Alpine Construction & Landscaping Corporation.
Don’t worry, it’s not just you. The supply chain chaos that has dogged the whole economy the past couple of years is hitting every point of the uniquely perishable process of building landscapes. Continue reading Your Stuff Is Coming (Someday)→
The standard model of practice in landscape architecture—killer hours, ho-hum salaries, and often little say among staff—has long assumed the profession is competing with itself for talent. That’s no longer the case.
There’s quite a lot of stirring these days in landscape architecture offices, and it’s enough to make firm owners and leaders nervous in unfamiliar ways. Continue reading Work in Progress→
In two influential books, the entomologist Douglas W. Tallamy has spread a message of people-powered biodiversity, to say that if humans have crowded out nature across the world, they can also invite it back in at close range. Continue reading Big Tree, Small World→
With regular business upended by the novel coronavirus, landscape architecture principals plot, wait, and wonder.
By Bradford McKee
There was a moment on Friday, March 13, when the novel coronavirus changed everything at the office, says Annette Wilkus, FASLA, the founding partner of SiteWorks in Manhattan. “I walked in on Friday, and one of the staff who’s usually solid had this look in her eye and said, ‘Annette, it’s getting really crazy.’” Continue reading The Offices: Everything Changes→
You say Olmsted park space is sacrosanct. What exactly does that mean?
By Bradford McKee
To the annals of things you thought might be sacred but actually aren’t sacred at all, you can now add 20 or so acres of a Frederick Law Olmsted and Calvert Vaux park in Chicago that will be used to build the Obama presidential library. Continue reading Rahm Emanuel’s Giveaway (Part 2)→
The Magazine of the American Society of Landscape Architects
