"The relationship between plants and people is one of symbiosis... a reciprocal relationship in which plants have been altered as much by humans as humans have been by plants."
– Michael Pollan, The Botany of Desire
On reading ‘A Botany of Desire’ by Michael Pollan, I was inspired to reflect on the plants that have shaped our lives here at Studio Outside. The essay below is a culmination of four conversations with the people who have taught me so much about plants, Principals Brian Halsell and Amy Bartell, Senior Associate Mark Thomas, and Project Leader Declan Devine.
Collecting a rainbow of plant detritus was one of my favorite ways to pay attention to the plants around me.
Amy Bartell was driving down to the office in 2015 when she happened to listen to an interview on NPR. Two sisters, the founders of Cat Spring Yaupon spoke of yaupon holly (Ilex vomitoria), the only naturally caffeinated plant native to Texas. The company’s mission was to make yaupon tea from local, wild-grown, hand harvested trees.
Cat Spring is about twenty miles away from New Ulm, where Amy had been designing Tylee Farm, and where a thicket of Yaupon holly trees was scheduled to be cleared in favor of a natural meadow. “The very first thing I did when I got to my desk that morning was to look them up and call them,” said Amy. “They asked me a few questions, like, ’have you sprayed any herbicides?’ And I told them we hadn’t.”
Amy and her team connect with the vegetation at Tylee Farm.
Soon after confirming that these trees were a good fit, Cat Spring Yaupon began the process of harvesting the yaupon hollies at Tylee Farm. A few weeks later, Amy received a package. “They sent over the Yaupon Holly tea in the form of tea bags. That tea was from Tylee Farm - they number every batch and where it came from. It was incredible.”
We often focus on a plant's ecological role and aesthetics, but sometimes a simple act—a call, a clearing, or a gift—reminds us how deeply plants connect us to each other. Yaupon holly has now made itself a part of Amy’s story, and through her, it has become a part of mine. “Every now and then I just order a big batch of yaupon tea and give it out as gifts,” she tells me.
“We don’t just cultivate plants; we cultivate meanings around them. A tulip is not just a flower—it’s a symbol of wealth, of beauty, of fleeting perfection.”
In sharing plants, their offerings, and our stories, we tap into an ancient cycle of generosity and reciprocity. Plants have traveled with people across time and geography, attaching themselves to our lives through meaning and memory. “I still have irises from my grandmother’s garden from twenty years ago,” Brian Halsell recalls. “Irises were a popular plant in residential gardens. They’re easily shared because they’re tubers - just break them up and hand them to people.”
Amy also remembers her grandmother's irises. “Irises are a memory plant, they’re so prolific.” She adds, “We have an emotional connection to plants - I’ve had clients ask for trees to be planted in remembrance of someone close to their heart. Other clients ask for plants that have cultural significance. I’ve spent a lot of time in California trying to find night blooming jasmine for several clients from India.” Even as she’s saying it, I am filled with memories associated with the scent of jasmine - my mother, draped in a saree, adorning the flowers in her hair at every festival.
I think about other plants that live in my memory - chrysanthemums and hibiscus flowers in every celebration, coconut trees lining the streets, an African tulip tree, looming large in the front yard of my childhood home, its fallen fruits woven into memories of playing with my brother. We would squish them until our mother ushered us in, calling after us to wash our sticky hands and feet.
"Our first encounters with plants are almost always tactile and sensory; they invite us to touch, to taste, to smell—and through these acts, we discover the world around us."
The fruit of the Osage Orange, ‘snowballs’ to Declan and his friends.
Declan Devine recalls a tree from his own childhood - the Osage Orange (Maclura pomifera) with its fruits strewn across the ground when fall turns to winter. Declan spent many of his after-school evenings at Lakewood Park with his friends, climbing the sprawling branches of the old Osage orange trees and hurling the fruits at each other in a ‘snowball fight.’ “You have to throw them really hard because they're pretty dense,” he reminisces. “They’re like large, grotesque apples. Green, the same color as a Granny Smith apple, but with a rough, gnarly skin.”
For Mark Thomas, memories of childhood trees are just as vivid though set in a different landscape. “I grew up in Memphis, with a lot of hollies and crepe myrtles,” he recalls. “I would visit my grandparents in Baton Rouge, and the scale and textures of the plants there really stood out to me. I remember this huge magnolia, it was probably a hundred years old, and it was the best climbing tree, with branches that curved down and came to the ground.”
These early interactions with plants invite our curiosity and foster our spirit of discovery. Childhood play - squishing berries, tossing fruits, climbing branches - taught us all to notice plants more keenly, even subconsciously, before we knew their names, long before we became landscape architects.
"Plants tell their stories not in words but in colors, scents, and forms, each one designed to catch our eye, seduce our senses, and draw us into their world."
“A big experience that informed my love of plants (and this is probably true for anybody who’s stepped foot in [the Redwood] forest) was walking through the Giant Sequoias and Redwoods” Mark reflects. These trees, so striking in their height and presence, are impossible to miss - even to the most plant-blind among us. “In Star Wars: The Return of the Jedi, the Redwood forests are the planet of the Ewoks, and it really does have an otherworld feel to it.”
Brian echoes the sentiment, “Any movie or TV show that's set in the forests of the Pacific Northwest is beautiful, I always notice there's something very magnificent about the scale of the trees. The plants on the west coast are so different, they feel alien.”
I’ve felt this myself, hiking through a trail in Point Lobos earlier this year, the shifting fog blurring, then bringing into focus the silhouettes of Monterey cypress trees draped in flaming orange algae and lace lichens. “I feel like I’m in Middle Earth” my friend proclaimed, and I found myself agreeing. Plants create a sense of wonder, and mystery, or familiarity - they are vital to the world-building not only in stories but also in our lived experiences.
Monterey Cypress trees at Point Lobos, the distinct vegetation creates an other-worldly atmosphere.
Days later, while staring up at the redwoods in Muir Woods, the same friend asked me, “Do you think there are good trees and evil trees?” At first, the answer seemed obvious: of course, all trees are good, like the Giving Tree. But then I think of more examples, the Tree of Souls in Avatar, the Ents from the Lord of the Rings, the Whomping Willow from Harry Potter and I realize - how deeply we anthropomorphize plants! In our stories, plants are not just botanical beings; they are protagonists, antagonists, and symbols of everything from resilience to menace.
“What we see in plants often says more about us than about them. They reflect our dreams, our fears, and our shifting sense of what is valuable.”
In our profession, we grapple with cultural perceptions of plants in numerous ways. Mark highlights the bias against cedar elms, explaining, “The word cedar is so unpopular in Texas that a lot of clients object to a cedar elm on a plant palette, even though cedar elms have nothing to do with cedar fever.” Sometimes, the biases we face are our own. I’m always inclined to include Blue Grama ‘Blonde Ambition’ (a cultivar of Bouteloua gracilis) in my projects because its name feels like a clever nod to Madonna. It’s a testament to the power of marketing.
At Studio Outside, even our internal studio names reflect how we perceive plants. We are Team Oak, Team Elm and Team Cypress. When I ask Brian why these were specifically chosen, he sums it up, “Oaks are strong, mighty. Elms are refined, lithe. Cypresses are stately trees.”
The stories we tell also influence the commercial success of plants; we want to support monarch migrations and so every nursery grows a plethora of milkweed. Native sedges and grasses, once mostly contract-grown, have had a lot of commercial success in the last couple of decades with an increased focus on drought-tolerant landscapes. Tropical house plants have had their moment since the pandemic, in the age of plant influencers.
“The seeds of a plant, like the stories we tell about them, are dispersed by the wind of time and circumstance.”
The plants we see in today’s landscapes are all results of cultural shifts. Brian explains, “If you're driving in rural Texas and you see a crepe myrtle or an iris, there was a house there decades ago. On the other hand, if you see a Mexican sycamore, it was probably put there in the last ten years.” My own taste reflects this - I have had no hesitation in removing crepe myrtles from my projects because they are so ubiquitous and feel ‘outdated’, and I favor species that feel more in line with contemporary ecological values.
But this raises a deeper question: Are cultural narratives enough to decide that one tree is more important than another? Beyond trends, factors such as a tree's health, age, ecological associations, etc. play critical roles in how we determine its value and decide whether it deserves protection.
Mark and his team tag and inventory Live Oak trees for transplantation.
In 2015, Mark explored these themes when he worked on Legacy West in North Plano, a massive streetscape development that was surrounded by the new headquarters of several corporations including JCPenney. “The old JCPenney campus was not too far, and it was filled with some really beautiful live oaks,” he recalls. “They probably would have been cut down at some point, but the client was intent on protecting them.”
These live oaks, measuring 15 to 25 inches in caliper, were meticulously tagged, and inventoried by Mark’s team. They were relocated to a holding area before being integrated into the streetscapes and buffers of the new development. “If you're driving down the tollway, you'll see huge Live Oaks between the tollway and the parking garage.” He adds, “The client was willing to spend a million dollars to bring in the trees, it was one of my favorite projects.”
“In every rose we see perfection, in every dandelion, a weed. These judgments are less about the plant than about the stories we’ve told ourselves about what belongs and what doesn’t.”
The importance of plants, the meanings we assign to them and our decisions on whether they belong are ones we will contemplate throughout our careers, and perhaps our lives. Declan reflects on the Osage Orange trees of his childhood. “Those trees have been there a long time. I don’t know if they were planted there or they just popped up along fence lines, like hackberries,” he says. This species was widely planted as living fences across the Midwest in the Dust Bowl era. Decades later, their role in the landscape is less clear. “I don’t think a lot of people are looking at Osage Orange trees and thinking, ‘This is a really beautiful tree that I want in my backyard,’” Declan observes. “At the same time, no one’s really exploiting it for its wood actively.
This ambiguity reveals the resilience of plants and their ability to adapt through cultural and environmental shifts, even when its story no longer aligns with human priorities. It serves as a reminder that the plants we work with far outlive us, carrying with them the stories of the past while entwining us into the narratives they will continue to shape in the future.
---
“Every plant tells a story, not just about itself, but about the people who found it useful, beautiful, or strange.”