Landscape Architecture Magazine March 2025

ELLIE SHECHET (“The Lessons of Little Island,” page 54) is a writer and editor based in New Orleans. You can contact her at e.shechet@gmail.com. “Clients are increasingly requesting ‘instant landscapes’ that look lush on day one, and I could have spent more time on the process of craning full-grown trees onto the pier at the height of the pandemic.” ALISSA WALKER, “Cities of Gold,” page 90) is the editor of the newsletter Torched (torched.la), which tracks the legacy improvements Los Angeles is making ahead of the 2028 Summer Olympic and Paralympic Games. You can follow her on Instagram @awalkerinLA. “Extreme heat poses an existential threat to the Summer Olympic and Paralympic Games, so it was fascinating to contemplate how these events might instead position themselves as a global urban greening movement.”…

In August 1865, Frederick Law Olmsted gave a report on the character, management, and suitability of the Yosemite Valley and the Mariposa Big Tree Grove, which had recently been granted by Congress to the State of California for public use “inalienable for all time.” Before the assembled Yosemite Committee, of which he was the nominal head, he read the report aloud, a fact that interested me as I imagined the group of men convened on the future park’s lands, listening closely, if not in agreement. Olmsted’s work on the valley had begun a year earlier, on the heels of the Civil War, and the politics of that conflict helped to shape his arguments, which only sharpened over the next decades. Olmsted didn’t just write about the valley’s natural features and…

PRESERVATION Roberto Burle Marx once concluded a lecture “with a word of praise to the element of the inexplicable, which allows us to create free of formulas.” That’s good fun when you’re designing the way Burle Marx did at the Cascade Garden at Longwood Gardens outside Philadelphia. Arriving on-site in the early 1990s, he all but discarded the planting plan he’d submitted, opting instead to select plants directly from an array of palettes and place them with an improvisational flourish. When your job is to document and preserve that same garden, however, things have to be a bit more explicable. As part of its years-long Longwood Reimagined project, led by Weiss/Manfredi and Reed Hilderbrand, Longwood Gardens dismantled and rebuilt the Cascade Garden, Burle Marx’s only extant North American project. The…

Forbes Lipschitz Associate Professor of Landscape Architecture, The Ohio State University BROWNOTTER BUFFALO RANCH Bullhead, South Dakota Ron Brownotter’s transformation of 20,000 acres of farmland into native grassland, now home to the nation’s largest Native-owned buffalo herd, illustrates how the reclamation of Indigenous landscapes can serve as a powerful tool of cultural resilience and decolonization. ITASCA STATE PARK Itasca, Minnesota At Itasca State Park, the headwaters of the Mississippi River offer a quiet but powerful reminder of how even the smallest sites are part of larger systems, shaping landscapes, supporting ecosystems, and carrying the interconnected stories of a continent. HIGH ROCK BAY ROAD Copper Harbor, Michigan At the tip of the Keweenaw Peninsula, the deeply rutted road to High Rock Bay compels visitors to slow down, syncing their pace with the…

MATERIALS For their competition-winning design of the 20.5-acre Warsaw Uprising Mound Park, Warsaw-based offices topoScape and Archigrest viewed a dumping ground as a treasure trove. The park’s site had been an active landfill for war-damaged buildings from 1939 to roughly 1960 and had since become overgrown with both native and invasive vegetation. The designers preserved and reused both the debris and the ecosystem it cultivated. “We decided that we wanted to keep everything possible,” says Magdalena Wnek, cofounder of topoScape. The team retained and updated a flight of stairs that led to a 1994 memorial as the main path through the site, then added a winding ramp partially set within a constructed ravine. Debris collected from excavation was reused in three ways. The largest ruins—including a window arch, a chimney,…

Some of the most engaging new playgrounds take their inspiration from nature but are also fantastical worlds of their own. One tiny playground at Presidio Knolls, a Mandarin immersion school in San Francisco, features a bamboo forest, a climbing tower, and whimsical mini-hills. Designed by Creo Landscape Architecture, the stakes supporting the bamboo double as design elements, adding pops of yellow to the palette of green and teal. Vertical elements are key to a bayou-inspired playground at Creekside Park, by TBG Partners, in Richmond, Texas. Delineating a splash pad and other play areas are abstractions of reeds and wetland plants painted in ombré gradations, including vivid pinks and yellows. At Nature Play in Denver’s City Park, Dig Studio evokes eight different Colorado ecosystems, down to the specific rocks and sunny…