Season 3 of Garden Spark kicks off in 2019 with 3 terrific speakers and a change of location, due to high demand, that will allow more people to attend! The new location is an event space in northwest Austin at Hwy 183 and MoPac, just minutes from my home where I’ve hosted previous Garden Spark talks. While I’ve enjoyed hosting the talks at home, I can seat only 30 people there. The new location will seat almost 60!

Talks are held on Thursday evenings from 8 to 9 pm. First dibs on tickets are available to subscribers, so I encourage you to join my email list today. Just click this link and ask to be added. I’ll never share or sell your email address. Tickets for the first talk will go on sale to subscribers on January 6th.

Here are the 2019 Garden Spark speakers:

February 7, 2019 – Christine Ten Eyck: “Harsh Beauty: Designing Landscapes for Drought and Flood”

The quest for beauty and meaning will be explored through Christine Ten Eyck’s residential landscaping projects in arid environments that are also subject to flooding rains and freezing temperatures. Working with neglected spaces like driveways and lawns and within the constraints of low budgets, Christine shares the challenges and rewards of creating everyday, memorable places that connect urban dwellers with nature, their region, and each other.

She’ll show how to turn driveways and other forgotten, underutilized spaces into ecologically rich places that work within the existing watershed, in which the path of water can spiritually and psychologically enrich a landscaping project. She’ll share examples of how your (or your client’s) cultural background can inspire a project design, and she’ll explore techniques for creating sensory rich, restorative environments for residential living that enhance human and environmental health.

Biography: Landscape architect Christine Ten Eyck is founding principal of Ten Eyck Landscape Architects based in Austin and previously in Phoenix. During her career of over 36 years, including 21 years at her own firm, Christine has drawn upon her intuition and knowledge to build a body of work that celebrates the inherent beauty of the Southwest, the culture of its people, and the sacred path of water, pioneering contemporary regionalism in the Southwest. Her work illustrates the capacity for place-based landscape architecture to address pressing global issues such as climate, habitat, and water quality protection, while also creating restorative outdoor environments that are infused with natural beauty, encourage social interaction, and foster human healing.

Committed to advancing both landscape architectural practice and education, Christine has lectured at various conferences and institutions, including Stanford University; Universities of Georgia, Arizona, Arkansas, and Pennsylvania; and Arizona State University. She was the keynote speaker for the 2013 Washington State ASLA Conference and presented at the Australian Institute of Landscape Architects in 2011 and most recently at the 2016 conference “Paisajismo en zonas aridas” in Santiago, Chile.

September 19, 2019 – Thomas Rainer: “Planting in a Post-Wild World: Designing Plant Communities for More Resilient Landscapes”

This groundbreaking talk presents a powerful alternative to traditional horticulture – designed plantings that function like naturally-occurring plant communities. Join landscape architect Thomas Rainer, a leading voice in ecological landscape design, to learn how plants fit together in nature and how to use this knowledge to create landscapes that are resilient, beautiful, and diverse. As practical as it is inspiring, this talk explores a new synthesis of ecology and horticulture that results in an intentionally designed and managed community where population dynamics are encouraged within an aesthetic framework.

Biography: Thomas Rainer is a landscape architect, teacher, and author living in Arlington, Virginia. He’s a leader 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. 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. He is a celebrated public speaker who has garnered acclaim for his presentations to audiences across the U.S. and in Europe. Thomas teaches planting design for George Washington University, serves as co-founder and principal for the landscape architectural firm Phyto Studio in Washington, D.C., and is the co-author along with Claudia West of the award-winning book Planting in a Post-Wild World.

November 7, 2019 – Jackson Broussard: “Curiosity Informs Design: Making a One-of-a-Kind Garden with Found and Sentimental Objects”

Learn how to design and develop a personal garden that is very reflective of you and therefore one-of-a-kind. Through genuine curiosity about yourself and your surroundings, you can define your lifestyle. For example: what brings you joy or pain? How do you relax? How do you entertain yourself and others? Which objects invoke sentimental and positive memories? Where have you traveled? In short, how do you live? This definition speaks to how you engage and interact with your garden.

Defining your lifestyle solves initial design questions of organized vs. wild, rustic vs. modern, ornamental vs. functional, entertaining for 4 or 40 people, and much more. Once these initial concepts are established then an intentional design style and placement of sentimental objects/plantings, furniture, and personal details becomes much easier. A design rooted in personal reflection leads to the most successful kind of garden.

Biography: “I’ve always had an affinity for drawing, for tools, for building things, and for plants and animals. Those five things have really shaped my life and relationships. While at Texas A&M for my degree in landscape architecture I studied abroad in Italy. I loved it so much that I ended up staying almost 2 years. I worked in the kitchen at the Italian school with my two little Italian moms cooking for 100 people twice a day. I also taught 4th-year design and architectural hand graphics while studying Italian gardens, furniture, design, and architecture and traveling extensively. It was an amazing time in my life, and some of my very best friends today came from that time. After returning to Austin I went to work at Gardens. I started in the nursery, where I learned more about plants, merchandising, and display. I quickly moved to the construction side and built many of the complicated gates, furniture pieces, water features, and design elements. I started my own design-build firm, Sprout, a decade ago, focusing on garden design, found objects, terracotta imports, and construction. In 2018 I closed Sprout and opened JPB Design Studio to focus solely on garden and furniture design.” – Jackson Broussard