Practice Landscape works with the living environment as designers, researchers, and gardeners. We believe that landscape is a process not a product, and that the most meaningful landscapes emerge from a strategy of working with plants first. Our work encompasses a range of scales and landscape types, from regional landscape adaptations to large public parks, to intimate gardens and private landscapes. Landscape gardening is a kind of applied research that deserves notice because adaptation is informed not just by cultural desire but by the novel ecology of the land itself.

Practice Landscape was started in 2006 by Rosetta S. Elkin and has prioritized garden-making, public exhibition, open access publishing, and horticultural research for nearly two decades.

Working with us

Rosetta S. Elkin, MLA, FAAR, PHD (RSE Bio)

Rosetta is a landscape architect dedicated to expanding the relationship between people and plants. She is the Principle of Practice Landscape, a professor at Pratt Institute’s School of Architecture where she started the Master’s in Landscape Architecture (MLA) program, and an Associate of The Arnold Arboretum at Harvard University. 

She is author and co-author of books, articles, book chapters, and monographs including Plant Life: The Entangled Politics of Afforestation (University of Minnesota 2022), how afforestation reveals the often-concealed politics between humans and plants. Landscapes of Retreat (K.Verlag 2023), portraits of climate adaptation. Tiny Taxonomy (Actar 2017), a publication that reflects on the scale of individual plants in practice through a reading of three gardens.

Emily Hicks, MLA

Emily Hicks is a Partner and Project Manager at Practice Landscape. Emily is the recipient of the Landscape Architecture Thesis Prize at Harvard Graduate School of Design for her co-authored thesis “Wild Rice Waters." An article expanding on the subject was published in Places Journal. 

Emily is also the President and co-founder of the nonprofit Practice Foundation. For more information please visit the Practice Grant page.

Sarah Diamond, MLA

Sarah Diamond is a Project Manager and Head Gardener at Practice Landscape.  Sarah a Landscape Architecture Foundation Olmsted Scholar from the Harvard Graduate School of Design, a former co-chair of Womxn in Design. She continues her longstanding art practice, working in oil to reconcile the spatial and the imagined.

Joanna Lombard, AIA, LEED AP

Joanna Lombard is a registered architect (Florida) and Professor at the University of Miami School of Architecture with a joint appointment in the Department of Public Health Sciences at the Miller School of Medicine. 

For more about Joanna please visit her faculty page

Collaborators present and past: 

Lauren Kim, Connor Jacobs, Chloe Kellner, Lindsey Dannenberg, Chrissy Lifton, Teal Nottage, Catherine Auger, Daniella Slowik, Marissa Angell, Dane Carlson, Juna Pfeifer, Emily Beach, Elena Thoman, Melissa Eloshway, Gracie Villa, Dana Hills, Parawee Wachirabuntoon.

Practice Landscape is a registered Women Business Enterprise (WBE) in the state of Massachusetts.