Information about the inaugural Terry Harkness "Plants in Design" Lecture and Fund
As a Principal for Phyto Studio and as a leading voice in ecological landscape design, Thomas Rainer applies innovative planting concepts to create ecologically-functional designed landscapes. His recent work focuses on the artful interpretation of wild plant communities into designed plantings that thrive in towns and cities.
Rainer has designed landscapes for the U.S. Capitol grounds, the Martin Luther King, Jr., Memorial, and the New York Botanical Garden, as well as over 100 gardens from Maine to Florida. His work and ideas have been featured in the New York Times, Landscape Architecture Magazine, and many other prominent publications, and his book Planting in a Post-Wild World (2015), co-authored with Claudia West, was selected by the American Horticultural Society as one of the 2016 books of the year.
Established through the generosity of alumni and friends, the Terry Harkness “Plants in Design” endowed fund honors Harkness’s extraordinary, sustained impact as a designer and educator by helping to foreground planting design in our curriculum and events programming—including an annual lecture to be held each fall semester.