Renee LaGue
MLA, APLD, Certified Arborist
As a child, I didn’t pay much attention to gardens, but I did love playing outside, camping with my family, and exploring nature. I also loved writing and reading, particularly science fiction and fantasy books. I began to write stories from an early age, always striving to envision, craft, and describe my own worlds for characters to inhabit. Then when I was sixteen, I participated in a Student Conservation Association summer service trip where I built hiking trails alongside other teens in Glacier National Park. This changed my life, opened my horizons, and I discovered environmental literature.
In college, I double-majored in Environmental Studies and Creative Writing, where I studied both fiction and poetry. From my writing workshops, I learned to separate my identity and ego from my work, to be open while others discussed their reactions, and to accept and incorporate feedback, all in service of making the writing as good as possible. I won two college-wide awards in my final year: the Miroslav Holub science poetry prize and the William Battrick poetry prize.
During summers in college I led teen trail crews. After I graduated, I weathered the Great Recession by working on farms and as a fine gardener for a total of seven seasons. In 2012, I attended my first graduate program in ecological design at the Conway School. I was thrown into doing real designs for real clients from the first weeks at the school, a terrifying prospect. It was a challenging and transformational year. During this time I began to devote myself seriously to plant identification, starting with the native trees of New England, where I was living. Afterward, I was fortunate to get a year-long Americorps fellowship with the outreach arm of the National Park Service and apply many of my new skills in an office setting.
After some informational interviews with landscape architects, I decided that it would be beneficial to go back to grad school to finish the “full” three-year Master’s of Landscape Architecture degree. I graduated with my MLA from the University of Maryland. Atypically for landscape designers but unsurprisingly for me, I loved researching and writing my thesis, titled “Wild to Wildscape: Designing the Urban Wild.” It is about postindustrial sites that have been abandoned and overgrown by novel or spontaneous vegetation and draws from literature in urban ecology, landscape architecture, urban planning, and architecture. You can find it here!
After graduation, I worked at several design firms but disappointingly, the work was rote and I grew bored. I began to wonder whether this was the right field for me after all. In February 2020 I quit a job that was taking a big toll on my mental health, intending to travel, but as it sometimes happens, life had other plans. On Friday March 13th, my last day of work, the entire company was packing up to work from home!
A few months into COVID, I ran into a neighbor with her own residential design firm. By that point, people were stuck at home and business was booming. She needed help. Finally, someone was asking me to design, and we provided each other with collaborative feedback and support. The projects were small, conceptual, and quick, and the pace of learning was rapid. I was encouraged to communicate with clients and jump in wherever needed. This was more what I had imagined design to be like. I watched my neighborsuccessfully run her own business and began to imagine I might be capable of the same.
I continued to work for her and contracted for another firm to provide some stability while starting my own. At the same time, I decided to become a certified arborist and applied myself to studying for the exam, which I passed with a 90% score. I’ve now had over 50 clients (many with multiple stages of design and construction admin) and have designed projects of all shapes and sizes, from a 15’ x 21’ rowhouse yard to an overgrown and dilapidated mansion.
One of the joys of working for myself is that I can attend as many conferences and educational sessions as I like. Over the past year, I've attended the Woody Plant Conference, the Perennial Plant Conference, the Greenscapes symposium, the Heritage Orchard Conference, the North American Fruit Explorers annual conference and lectures, and have kept up on my continuing education credits for my arborist certification. This year I’ve also been going to the National Arboretum and Brookside Gardens every week in order to develop a spreadsheet of what’s in bloom throughout the season. I’m already using this data to design better gardens and planting plans!
Personal Mission
In the past I’ve thought that writing, outdoor work, and design have been parallel but unconnected tracks throughout my life. After some deep reflection (with the help of Maia Duerr's book Work that Matters- I highly recommend it), I realized that they’re all aspects of my core mission, which is to envision, design, and create new spaces and places in order to inspire people to reconnect with the natural world and rethink their relationship with nature. The process of writing is one of envisioning and creating imaginary places through description, metaphor, and narrative. The process of landscape design is one of envisioning and creating physical spaces through drawings, construction techniques, and tangible materials.
I love that I can simultaneously restore ecological function to landscapes while reconnecting people with the world around them. Western thought separates people from nature; in all of my work I aim to reground people in the landscape. If we are not at home here, then where do we belong?
A Few Topics of interest:
- Native pollinator and habitat gardens
- Meadow/prairie restoration and lawn conversions
- Cold-hardy succulents and cactuses, rock gardens
- Contorted/twisted plants
- Fruit and nut trees and shrubs
- Oddball/unloved plants like the Osage orange
- The relationship between indigenous peoples and plants
- California-inspired gardens for the East Coast
- Environmental literature and philosophy, nature writing
- Beech hedges, formal landscape design with native plants
- The dynamic tension that occurs when wild, "messy" plants are grown in/around a very structured space
- "Old fashioned" gardens with showy blooms, including historic irises
- Rain gardens and bioretention areas
- Edible plants including native edible plants and forest gardens
- Foraging for wild edible plants and mushrooms
- Plants with silver, bluish, and purple foliage
- Dye and fiber/textile plants
Education & Certifications:
- Certified Arborist, International Society of Arboriculture (ISA)
- M.L.A. University of Maryland, Landscape Architecture
- M.A. Conway School, Ecological Design and Planning
- B.A. Oberlin College, Environmental Studies and Creative Writing
