Garden Ecologies: Environmental Transformation and Care is a two-day symposium on urban ecology, landscape practice and management, and climate adaptation hosted by the Rice University School of Architecture and the John Fairey Garden Conservation Foundation.
The symposium will provide a critical perspective on gardens not simply as private retreats but also as trans-scalar spaces that can engage issues of urban expansion, environmental transformation, and climate change. Garden Ecologies will expand on traditional notions of the garden and gardening through three areas of focus: garden history, landscape design practice, and land management. Through these topics, the symposium will reflect on the garden as a test bed for novel ecological entanglements and as a medium for exploring such contemporary topics as settler colonial histories, labor, domesticity, industrialization, ecological conservation and restoration, and models for intervention, stewardship, and practice.
Taking place in Houston, at the heart of the Gulf Coast region, where extraction and ecology collide, the symposium invites discussion from both academia and practice on the garden as a potential space of environmental transformation and care.
Garden Ecologies is organized by Maggie Tsang, assistant professor at Rice University, with Randy Twaddle, executive director at the John Fairey Garden Conservation Foundation in Hempstead, Texas, in partnership with Rice Architecture, the Rice Center for Environmental Studies, and the Rice Office for Research.
For complete event details and RSVP information, visit the event page here.
Participants include:
Hortense Blanchard, Estudio Ome
Mariel Collard, Pratt Institute; Collard Tranquilino
Emily Detrick, Cornell Botanic Gardens; Cornell University
Mary Kuhn, Department of English, University of Virginia
Phoebe Lickwar, FORGE Landscape Architecture; University of Texas at Austin
Kathryn E. O’Rourke, Department of Art and Art History, Trinity University
Susana Rojas Saviñón, Estudio Ome
Gabriela Sosa, Buffalo Bayou Partnership
Isaac Stein, Dept.
Kate Thomas, Literatures in English, Bryn Mawr College
Jen Toy, Test Plot; University of Southern California
Maggie Tsang, Rice Architecture; Dept.
Brittany Utting, Rice Architecture; HOME-OFFICE
Toshi Yano, Perfect Earth Project
This program is made possible through the generous support of the Betty R. and George F. Pierce Jr., FAIA, Fund; the William B. Coleman Jr. Colloquium Fund for Architecture; and the Wm. W. Caudill Lecture Series Fund. The symposium is supported by the John Fairey Garden, the Rice Center for Environmental Studies, and a Rice Office for Research Subvention Grant.
About the John Fairey Garden Conservation Foundation
The John Fairey Garden Conservation Foundation is an extraordinary garden and cultural landscape featuring a wide variety of plant species collected by John Fairey that are well-adapted to the climate of central Texas and the Gulf Coast. Mr. Fairey, an artist by training, considered the garden his studio and continually experimented with plants, focusing both on their aesthetic qualities and their adaptability to the climate. He made more than one hundred botanizing trips to Mexico beginning in 1998, and the John Fairey Garden is known for its collection of Mexican Oaks and woody lilies collected in Mexico. It features more than three thousand plants (one thousand unique taxa) from Mexico, Asia, and the United States. Mr. Fairey also collected Mexican folk art and donated his extensive collection to the Art Museum of Southeast Texas in Beaumont, Texas.