In a course led by 2024-25 McHarg Fellow Leah Kahler, students explored the movement of plants across cultures and climates, as well as the relationships between recreational and productive landscapes.
2 min. read
The origins of your neighborhood’s tree canopy is just the kind of question that occupies Leah Kahler, a landscape designer and fellow at the McHarg Center for Urbanism and Ecology, who worked as a landscape designer with Reed Hilderbrand before signing on as the McHarg Fellow. Some of her favorite days on the job were spent visiting nurseries, selecting trees for use in the parks and gardens she and her teammates designed. Often, a species that the designers at the Cambridge, Massachusetts, firm wanted for a particular project—a climate-adaptive or otherwise atypical plant, say—wouldn’t be available. It got Kahler thinking about the provenance of plants, their cultural associations, the environmental and climatic implications of the plant-product supply chain, and the meaning of so-called “native” plants.
Leah Kahler, a landscape designer and fellow at the McHarg Center for Urbanism and Ecology was drawn to teaching “to help equip entry-level designers with the conceptual and technical skills to push the field toward environmental justice goals.”
(Image: Courtesy of Weitzman News)
As the 2024-25 McHarg Fellow, her research and teaching focused on the movement of plants across cultures and the relationships between recreational and productive landscapes.
This spring, Kahler taught a seminar titled Clones, Zones, & Migrants: Taking Stock of the American Plant Nursery Trade. The course was an investigation of plant movement, motivated by three questions: “Where do plants in designed landscapes actually come from? What does ‘native planting’ even mean for plants and political boundaries on the move? How might alternative methods of plant procurement change the way we design?”
Through a series of readings, lectures, and exercises, students explored the geopolitical underpinnings of contemporary horticulture and the cultural meaning of plants as a medium for design. In one exercise, students investigated specific terms related to landscape architectural practice, from “grafting” to “wild harvest” and “hybridization.” In another, they drew planetary-scaled “cartographic drawings” illustrating how plants move between different geographies.
This fall, Kahler will bring the research on the regional implications of faraway cultivation practices home to the Gulf Coast via a visiting research assistant professorship at Tulane University’s School of Architecture and the Built Environment and continue interrogating the environmental and cultural impacts of landscape architecture’s material practices.
“There’s an exciting, growing interest in the social and ecological implications of materials used in the construction of built landscapes, as well as in the labor conditions of the people who are foundational to making these landscapes. But so far, the far away geographies of plant production have not been studied as part of this political ecology of landscape architecture. I’m interested in what these landscapes of labor and production can tell us about how cultivation practices might align with—or fall short of—our field’s aspirations to environmental justice."
This story is by Jared Brey. Read more at Weitzman News.
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