featuring Matt Dallos, a designer and environmental historian. He is the founder of Thicket Workshop, a design firm that creates plant-focused public and private landscapes in the Northeast. Dallos’ essays about plants and design have been published in Places and Chinese Landscape Architecture. Matt will kickoff the conversation with a short presentation called "Long Live the Wild Garden Society," which he envisions as a way to speak historically about culturally-situated pursuits of close-to-home wildness and also bring in aspects of his practice and recent fieldwork.

About the Presenter

Founded by Matt Dallos, Thicket Workshop merges his design and research to create plant-focused, ecological public and private landscapes. Matt has received a M.S. in landscape architecture from Penn State and a Ph.D. in environmental history from Cornell. Thicket Workshop designs ecological landscapes and gardens at a variety of scales: from reimagining a family’s front yard as a pollinator bonanza, to planting a savanna on a city lot, to developing a plan for biodiverse habitat hedgerows on a 50 acre farm. Based in Ithaca, New York, they work across the bioregion known as Laurentia—which roughly includes the Northeast, Mid-Atlantic, and the states bordering the Great Lakes. They work with homeowners, architects and landscape architects, institutions, and municipalities. Sometimes they're the lead designers; sometimes they’re consultants.

From their website: "Thicket Workshop? Thicket: because they are complex entanglements of species and time and environment, which is the type of thinking we need more of today. Workshop: because that’s how we think about design: that it requires collaboration, interaction with the material (plants, soil, etc.), and a good bit of tinkering."

About the Series

Planting Forward: Conversations on New Naturalism features designers and creatives presenting work at the intersections of horticulture, ecology, design, and curation. Guests will be chosen from around the globe, spanning diverse geography, communities, and cultural identities. Each conversation will showcase working professionals and their methods and practices with the hopes of inspiring other professionals or gardeners to approach design and management differently.