20. Molly Hendry on Telling Stories with Gardens

MOLLY HENDRY BIO

Molly toggles the worlds of design and plants as both a trained horticulturist and landscape architect. Up through July 2023, she was the Associate Director of Gardens Support for the Friends of Birmingham Botanical Gardens for 5 and a half years. There she was actively involved in the horticultural and design development of the 26 unique gardens that make up Birmingham Botanical Gardens. She was also a key support player in the renewal of the Gardens's master plan, in addition to managing ongoing garden projects. Since recording the podcast, she has stepped out to create her own garden design studio, Roots and Ramblings, where she does design work for folks in the Birmingham, Alabama area. With this studio, Molly is most interested in the intersection between people and places. She loves designing gardens for "hands in the dirt" gardeners, focusing on how design is not just a masterplan on a piece of paper, but an ongoing dialogue between a person and a place... often with a spade in hand! One of her top honors is that she spent 10 months living in the UK, sinking her hands into the soil at some of the top gardens across the country as the Garden Club of America's 2016–2017 Royal Horticultural Society's Interchange Fellow. You can learn more about Molly by visiting her website Roots and Ramblings and by following her on Instagram @mollshendry.

SHOW NOTES

• Molly on her childhood spent outdoors

• Encouragement from her parents to pursue landscape architecture 

• Molly’s focus on horticulture and landscape architecture at Auburn University

• The impact of study abroad trips on Molly and the stories she learned about gardens

• How Rousham deeply touched Molly

• Molly’s internship at Winterthur and a valuable lesson learned

• Experiences while being the Garden Club of America's 2016-2017 Royal Horticultural Society's Interchange Fellow

• Shadowing Nigel Dunnett and James Hitchmough to learn about naturalistic planting and how to think differently about plants and gardening

• Time at Great Dixter and lessons learned from Fergus Garrett

• Fergus’s sketches and mind maps

• Molly’s roll as Associate Director of Gardens Support for the Friends of Birmingham Botanical Gardens

• Thoughts on how to illicit emotions in gardens

• The analogy of garden design with Salt Fat Acid Heat by Samin Nosrat

• Molly’s approach to designing gardens and questions she asks clients

• How writing helps Molly be a better gardener and how she reviews her thoughts on New Year’s Day

• Using the app Notability in the field and Google drive

• Favorite books including Anne of Green Gables and Russell Page’s Education of a Gardener

• The myth that we can’t garden the same as the English do

• Molly’s favorite ice cream flavors

• Propagating horticulturists by bringing in the human element and engaging with children

• Learn more about Molly by visiting her website Roots and Ramblings and by following her on Instagram @mollshendry

6. Thomas Rainer on Planting in a Post-wild World

Thomas Rainer’s Biography

Thomas Rainer is a registered landscape architect, teacher, and author that lives in Arlington, Virginia. He is a leading voice in ecological landscape design and has designed landscapes for the U.S. Capitol grounds, the Martin Luther King, Jr. Memorial, and The New York Botanical Garden, as well as over 100 gardens from Maine to Florida. He is a celebrated public speaker who has garnered acclaim for his passionate presentations to audiences across the U.S. and in Europe. Thomas serves as a Principal for the landscape architectural and consulting firm Phyto Studio in Washington, D.C.

Thomas received his Masters Degree from the University of Georgia. Thomas has worked for the firms Oehme, van Sweden and Associates, and was most recently a Principal at the landscape architectural and planning firm, Rhodeside & Harwell. He has a broad range of experience in project types ranging from intimate residential gardens to expansive estates, rooftop gardens, botanical gardens, large-scale green infrastructure design & implementation, and national memorials. His work has been featured in numerous publications, including The New York Times, Landscape Architecture Magazine, The Washington Post, The Chicago Tribune, and Architectural Digest.

While passionate about design and focusing on details, Thomas is a specialist in applying innovative planting concepts to create ecologically-functional designed landscapes. His recent work focuses on the artful interpretation of wild plant communities into designed plantings that thrive in the context of towns and cities.  He also continues to love working on residential gardens, enjoying the intimate collaboration with clients and creating spaces. 

Thomas teaches planting design for the George Washington University Landscape Design program. His recently published book co-authored with Claudia West, Planting in a Post-Wild World, was released in fall 2015 from Timber Press and was selected by the American Horticultural Society as one of the 2016 books of the year.

You can learn more about Thomas on his website thomasrainer.com, his firm Phyto at phytostudio.com, and on Instagram where his handle is @thomasrainerdc.

SHOW NOTES

• Thomas’s childhood experiences with plants and wilderness

• Our recent trip to see Amsonia in Arkansas (Searching for Amsonia in Arkansas Part 1 and Searching for Amsonia in Arkansas Part 2)

• The shift from being a lawyer to becoming a landscape architect and advice for students interested in switching careers

• Traveling with Darrel Morrison on graduate school student trips studying the landscapes of the south

• Creating a language around plant communities to communicate with others

• How gardeners can learn to read plant body language (aka plant form) to layer diversity

• How to cover the ground with plants to reduce work and searching for plants that will grow well as ground covers

• Warm-season versus cool-season plants

• Planting in a Post-wild World by Thomas Rainer and Claudia West

• The five principles of designed plant communities and how they distilled the principles down

• Richard Hansen and Friedrich Stahl and their book Perennials and Their Garden Habitats

• The Knowledge Project podcast

• Embracing stress in plantings

• James Golden’s garden Federal Twist

• Flickr as a resource to see plant growth in the wild

• Limiting factors for naturalistic planting in home gardens including plant height similarity, scale, and tidiness

• Native plants need to be approached with artistry like the creativity of how plants are used at Chanticleer or Great Dixter

• Failures in green infrastructure and pollinator plantings and why

• Jim Collins Good to Great doom loop

• Roy Diblik’s The Know Maintenance Perennial Garden

• The importance of doing one outstanding naturalistic planting example that becomes a model (and Jim Collins Good to Great bullets before cannonballs)

• How Thomas hones his skills with the challenges of site design and finding inspiration from plant people

• Thomas technique of using his mental library during the design process of thinking back to photos or places he’s seen before

• Thomas’s recent attention to style and how to give plantings an edge with attention to color

• The myth that soil fertility is always good

• Sowing Beauty by James Hitchmough, the book Thomas returns to frequently

• What Thomas would have changed about Planting in a Post-wild World including more diverse habitats, more examples of the principles he and Claudia developed, and land management strategies

• How we can propagate horticulturists by sharing passion

2. Caleb Melchior on Being a Landscape Architect

Caleb Melchior’s Biography

Caleb Melchior is a landscape architect and planting designer with Coastal Vista Design, and he teaches Professional Practice, Theory of Landscape Architecture, and Ecological Planting Design at Florida International University. His practice centers on planting design and materiality, with a focus on wild plant communities of the Gulf Coast and Caribbean. He has experience designing fine gardens, estates, and public spaces throughout the southeast United States including P. Allen Smith and Associates in Little Rock, Arkansas and ASA Engineering in Chattanooga, Tennessee. He collaborates with other designers, horticulture experts, and landscape management teams to make sure that design ideas are realized throughout installation and the ongoing life of projects. Caleb is heavily involved with design communication. He presents frequently at landscape and horticulture-related conferences. His work is regularly published in national and international publications such as The American Gardener, Horticulture, and Land8.

You can find him at his website www.calebmelchior.com and on Instagram at @the_curious_gardener.

SHOW NOTES

• How Caleb got interested in plants

• Lessons learned at Sugar Creek Gardens in Kirkwood, MO 

• The pursuit of landscape architecture at Kansas State University

• Embracing Bauhaus principles in design

• The impact of Konza Prairie

• Caleb’ research on experiential learning and legibility in plant communities in public gardens with his thesis, “Knowledge gardens: designing public gardens for transformative experience of dynamic vegetation”

• Caleb’s research sites at Champan Botanical Garden and The Meadow at Kansas State University

• The importance of working at different places and lessons Caleb learned at Confluence, RS Walsh, P. Allen Smith and Associates, ASA Engineering, and Coastal Vista Design

• The importance of practice in learning, reading, and watching videos like Garden Masterclass and Caleb’s curated list on Land8

• What a typical day looks like for Caleb and the design process at a site

• Designing and planting with regulations

• Growing In Mind, a podcast by Caleb Melchior and Preston Montague

• Oculus Rift technology in the landscape design process

• How the green industry and smaller studios can adopt models and strategies for solving problems

• The importance of communicating with clients and how to improve communication with clients

• Recognizing patterns of thinking in the design process

• How to Make Art at the End of the World by Natalie Loveless

• Understanding what clients want and blending their priorities with the principles of design

• The importance of spaces to sit in the landscape

• Excitement for umbellifers (Apiaceae)

• Cutting herbaceous plants back to improve growth

• The effort to connect horticulture with others by being present in the public