When I was younger we had two trampolines. Our parents bought one of them from the second hand store down the road and the other was gifted to us by First Baptist Church when the first one ripped clean down the middle. I think giving us trampolines was an attempt to keep me and my seven siblings out of the Piggly Wiggly parking lot located across the street and away from the busy highway 431 that our small town was built around. The trampolines were at the far end of our back yard, which was an oasis in the middle of our asphalt town. We were always barefoot, so to get from the porch to the trampolines we had to hop across the sharp edges of a natural stone pathway that meandered between two satsuma trees, tip toe through long weedy grass to avoid stepping on sandburs and, depending on the season, stop mid-journey at the sand pear tree for a quick, gritty snack. The back half of our yard was shaded by old pecan trees. Squirrels loved to sit high in the trees munching on nuts, making a maze for us down below with their discarded nut husks. Some people say stepping on Legos is the worst kind of pain, but I believe that jumping on broken pecan shells is much less desirable.

 

My childhood backyard, cloistered by mountains of untamable kudzu in the middle of our hustling, bustling little town, is the crux of my design decisions, of my opinion of nature and man, of me. It’s a reminder of how things should be—how they could be. Even today—especially today—our back yard stands as a symbol of exploration, team work, good will, sustainability, and health. So many people believe successful landscape design is getting Mother Nature to bite the bit, which seems increasingly less responsible as our world progresses. To this day, I can still smell the pecan catkins crushed between our calloused feet and the trampoline mat.  I know what the buzzing of bees sounds like against the roar of highway traffic just two houses down.

 

Currently, I am working towards a Bachelors degree in Environmental Design and ultimately a Masters in Landscape Architecture.  After graduation, I plan to work diligently to promote the seamless coexistence of nature and man. In other words, I hope to obliterate the dated, imaginary system of boundaries we have categorized ourselves into. Landscape architecture is the profession which applies creativity to "How to" and "Why." Therefore, a successful landscape should always promote human activity and a healthy natural world equally; a design that caters to one more than the other is simply unfinished. We have distanced ourselves from nature so much so that the only places we can truly find her are out beyond the limits of our cities and towns. Shouldn’t we be building our niche within the earth instead of bringing counterfeit samples of it into our vast, synthetic spaces?