What an honor to be selected as a 2023 Design Futurist by Pacific Horticulture and their esteemed jury. We submitted Resilient Cottage Garden in La Canada/Flintridge as a prime example of our dedication to the land, the waters, and the biosphere. This garden was the only one selected from Southern California and we are overjoyed to be one of the seven award recipients.
Pacific Horticulture’s DESIGN FUTURIST AWARD elevates the power of garden design to achieve climate resilience, steward biodiversity, and connect people with nature. The award celebrates visionary designers and regional plants. It honors people whose landscapes conserve plants and wildlife, treat our water and soil as precious, and hold the well-being of human beings at the center of our gardened environments.
The award called for garden designs that are easily replicable, are modest in size, or have been designed for intimate neighborhood community use. Winning designs aligned with five core themes: Growing for Biodiversity, Drought and Fire Resilience, Nature Is Good for You, Garden Futurist, and Sustainable Gardening.
Water, life, and legacy are the true inspirations for all of our designs. And specific to this client was resiliency. Our client’s dedication to building a conscious homestead and her own self-sufficiency have inspired us to connect the dots of energy, emissions, water optimization, habitat enhancement, and community empowerment to support her along her journey to be a better planetary caretaker. She was inspired to demonstrate ways to be less extractive and more supportive of life cycles, as well as harvesting energy from the sun, harvesting and storing water, and interrupting the waste stream in her garden creation.
In order to embody the theme of Garden Futurist, we must first travel to our garden’s past: What could be more futuristic than attempting to recover pre-colonial landforms and intentionally arranged naturalistic plantings? Can we simplify the focus of our design to reimagine form follows function? By reimagining this doctrine, we are referring to the function of the land and the waters, determining their emergent forms both physically and aesthetically. In other words, in order to move forward, we must go back to before the land was appropriated by colonialism. No easy or perfect way exists to accomplish this, but by starting with carbon in the soil, a focus on rainfall integration, falling in love with native plants and wildlife, and our deepest wish to share this with the community, we have honored both the laws of physics and a shared sense of belonging.
See the award recipients and their projects here: https://pacifichorticulture.org/articles/and-the-design-futurist-award-goes-to/Â
We’d like to thank our AMAZING client for bravely entering into this journey with us as well as our team and our collaborators throughout this project.
Our Dedicated Team
Gisela Garay, Studio Petrichor
Leigh Adams, Studio Petrichor
Our Awesome Collaborators
Arrow Sprinkler and Landscape, Contractor
Anna and Max of Saturate, Ongoing Landcare
Jason Wan of Hunter IrrigationÂ
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