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In advance of Memorial Day weekend—when it’s officially time to get outdoors, enjoy!—I thought I’d focus on our garden and share some of my favorite garden books. Next week, I’ve got some big news coming your way, so stay tuned.
This week, we’re going to work from the outside in. One of the best parts of the house we bought is not the home itself but the land it sits on. We have a full acre; the house sits at street level and looks out onto a descending landscape, a corona of trees, and a mountain ridge in the distance. While the house was on the market, some of the plantings suffered, but we could see that it had been designed with care, that there was a flower lover who had lived here. We wanted to create a relaxed, unfussy landscape that offered a sense of discovery as you explored it (just as we like houses with nooks and surprising details).
For this, we turned to Jenny Jones at Terremoto, a firm in Los Angeles that’s known for its focus on indigenous plants and non-linear designs. I’m excited to introduce you to Jenny today with a Q&A about how she became a landscape architect, Terremoto’s ethos, and what she thought about our landscape when she first saw it.
Jenny at work, in Ojai.
This interview has been edited for clarity and length.
Let's start with your background. I was curious about when you first realized that plants mattered to you?
I think I've always known. But I have to admit that in the early part of my life, I probably was a victim of plant blindness, which most people are. I cared about ecosystems and the environment generally, because growing up, my parents would take me to Chincoteague—one of the barrier Islands off the eastern shore of Virginia that’s pretty wild and kind of stuck in the 1950s in a good way. We would go and spend a month at a time, and I would have free time to move and play throughout the landscape, communing with nature.
Then I studied environmental science and got a degree called Environmental Thought and Practice, which included policy, history, theory, economics, and literature. It was very interdisciplinary, and that was where I was first exposed to landscape architecture. After I graduated from college, I did have a bit of a detour; I followed a friend who was applying to Teach For America. I wanted to do something different and meaningful, so I ended up teaching middle school science, moving across the country to West Oakland, California. It was very eye opening and formative for me—being a teacher is really hard and I didn't quite think I was built for it, but I treasure the experience. After that, I was still a little lost and burned out, so I came back home and started volunteering at a place called Casey Trees in Washington, D.C., which is dedicated to reviving the city’s urban forest. I was trying to figure out, “What am I doing? What's my next move in life?” The organization had a landscape architect working for them. I simply saw this person's office with the drawings on the wall and went, "Oh, that's cool." Then I applied for landscape architecture programs and ended up going to school.
Keeping the flow outside an A. Quincy Jones-designed home in L.A. (Image via Terremoto)
That's very cool. What does a landscape architecture program involve?
The world of landscape architecture, I would say, is much more focused on the public/civic realm that's institutional, commercial, and very tied to development. When you go to an outdoor mall or a museum, like the Getty, it's all designed by a landscape architect—but also parking lots and mundane “streetscapes” that you see in suburban and urban areas. So landscape architects do a wide range of practices.
At Terremoto, we were all trained in landscape architecture, but have ended up much more on the garden design end of the spectrum. It's an interesting place for us to be, because we learned about infrastructure, systems engineering, and the intersection with lots of other disciplines, like civil engineering and soil engineering. Many landscape architects get trained to go work in really complex urban conditions, like the High Line. Even though it seems wild with native plants, the High Line is actually very complicated. Another great example of landscape architecture is Central Park, designed by Frederick Law Olmsted in the 1800s. It looks natural, like it was always there and somebody just came in and put some roads through these rolling hills. But Olmsted very thoughtfully designed it. It's all orchestrated: There was a lot of grading and he brought in trees. So that's a really good example of traditional early landscape architecture.
Mesmerizing pathways at the Laguna Canyon Foundation. (Image via Terremoto)
So, do you think of what you do as garden design or landscape architecture?
I think Terremoto lives in between, which is what I like about us. I would say there is a movement in landscape architecture now to return to gardening and bring it back into the profession. Some people say (and I agree) that landscape architecture lost its roots in engaging with plant material and natural systems. It got too heavy into designing things on computers that are very resource-intensive and require a lot of structural engineering. Many landscape architecture firms actually start in residential design because that's where you get your footing and then you graduate to doing public work. That's kind of where we're at now with Terremoto. But we don't ever want to stop doing residential, because that's where we experiment. There's an intimacy that we love. We would like to bring more of that experimental ethos into the public realm.
Working closely with (and on) the land is part of the Terremoto process. (Image via Terremoto)
And how do you define that ethos?
Well, we have a little thing that we're playing around with called Radical Gardens of Love and Interconnectedness. The idea is that the gardens and landscapes we design are considerate of all forms of life. We try to be the least resource-intensive and the most environmentally and socially responsible. Like I said, there's a side of landscape architecture that's very extractive and consumptive—you know, roof gardens use a lot of plastic and there's a lot of foam and plastic in many landscape products. So we try to design and build without using materials that are fossil fuel-based or that are just going to end up in a landfill later. We are trying, but it's hard because of the sort of gardening norms. In Southern California, you put in an irrigation system. Finding a client who is willing to hand-water is a small percentage.
I think we failed on that front—we’re going to want irrigation in some areas.
If you have a big garden, like your project is quite large, it would probably be impossible. But if you have a small garden in Echo Park, you could hand-water your native plants to get them established, then you can really back off on watering; you don't have to install an irrigation system and you're not putting plastic into the ground. It's all these little details about irrigation and soil health—and obviously using native plants, that's a big one. We're trying to push for biodiversity as much as possible in our projects. We have this laundry list of tenets that fit under the umbrella of Radical Gardens of Love and Interconnectedness.
A stroll through Sea Ranch and the sweeping vistas. (Image via Terremoto)
In the world where you have clients coming to you, it must be sort of tricky. You're trying to express these beliefs through your work. But then there are client demands. So how do you think about that?...
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