Visiting home
At the beginning of summer quarter, I returned home in Eastern Washington for a week before summer began to take a calming break before things ramped up again back in Seattle. My parents scheduled a lot of fun things for me, including a visit to a beautiful spa on the Columbia River (or N'chi-wána) Gorge. I enjoyed spending time with my family and seeing the beautiful vistas of one of my favorite places in the world - both familiar with its shrub steppe ecology and uniquely inspiring with its forested canyons and stark ridges. Unfortunately, I felt anxious during a lot of the trip, and was looking forward to returning to Seattle.
Rutheo designs internship
This quarter, I had the wonderful opportunity to intern with a local Seattle landscaping design-build firm, Rutheo Designs. Rutheo Designs is a small landscaping company that values native ecosystems and natural materials - I reached out because the founder (Teddy Rutberg) has similar values to me. The founder also has a similar background - he began his landscaping journey redoing his family's yard, like myself (although I've got a lot left to do on that project). I spent much of my time on this internship doing landscape installs - tearing out weeds, laying stones, planting plants, and running errands at hardware stores and material lots.
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This was gratifying for me in many ways - the work was physical and fun, and I got to see different parts of the city. I returned from my internship sweaty and dirty many days, and had to spend a few hours relaxing and recuperating. However, I felt accomplished and knew I had done something worthwhile.
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My coworkers were all fun people, and my oldest coworker (in his 30s) shared a little of his life history. Hearing from people who are further along in life and have weathered challenges, changed careers, and persist is inspiring to me and helps calm my anxieties about my own career and challenges I may face. Life is not easy for anyone - everyone has their own challenges (though some far more than others). People find a way, sometimes despite unthinkable hardship. Seeing these truths in other people helps me feel closer to others and less preoccupied with my own little world. The world is vast, containing far more terror and beauty than I can ever perceive, and people make their own meaning out of it.
Of course, the internship was not just personally rewarding - I learned a lot from it about landscape careers. I got to see behind-the-scenes aspects of running a business and sat in on a business meeting - the logistics are daunting but the founder's success in just one year of running a business was inspiring, as is his commitment to fair wages and sustainability. I also got more experience with hands-on landscape installation and landscape design, and see some relevant issues with landscape management. I got a better sense of the costs of various aspects of design and the difficulties of providing for employees and oneself while charging costs that clients can afford. I'm grateful for this opportunity and am glad to have made more connections in my field.
World culinary garden design
Toward the end of Spring quarter, a social media connection with some mutual friends, Keya Roy, reached out to me, asking me if I was interested in collaborating with them on a project - they wanted to do a project with landscape architecture components but had limited experience with landscape architecture. I said I'd like to, and we decided to do a project for the UW Farm - the UW Farm's World Culinary Garden. The World Culinary Garden is an offshoot of the farm's new World Cultural Kitchen (designed and built by architecture students in Spring 2023), intended to attract rental clients from diverse groups from throughout Seattle. The culinary garden is intended to provide herbs for people using the kitchen and occasional farm CSAs.
Both Keya and I were excited about the project's ability to expand our knowledge of culinary herbs (for myself, those beyond the limited list of Mediterranean herbs that most Americans are familiar with - rosemary, thyme, oregano, etc.) and the availability of culinary herbs to those in the UW community, associated groups, and nearby residents. We were committed to doing the research necessary to execute this project as best we could, and dedicated a significant amount of the project's overall time to initial research. Keya began the research portion of our project by finding statistics which describe Seattle's demography and the cultural background of Seattle residents - nationality and language spoken at home were the most helpful metrics we found. We then narrowed this to a list of most populous nationalities, and researched the important herbs of those nations or regions. We pored over resources - I looked at a lot of web pages about culturally relevant herbs and Keya looked at some web pages and skimmed many books for important information. We created a spreadsheet of plants with many, many entries (over 150!). While researching, we had to exclude all the plants that were outside of Seattle's USDA plant hardiness zones - those plants cannot be grown outdoors without additional protection in our climate. I created a map showing similar climates to Seattle's to get a sense of what plants from which regions would be most likely to thrive in Seattle's climate. Given the paltry availability of non-European edible plants in Seattle's plant market (at least, marketed and grown for their edible qualities), I believe this map also prompts people to question why certain plants are grown in Seattle more often than others given the wide range of potential plants that could be grown in this climate.
Our research also included visiting a number of community gardens around Seattle to ask gardeners what plants they grow. This allowed us to find plants for our plant list (though most were already on our list) and find precedents in Seattle for the cultivation of some of the plants we researched. This was very inspiring and fun, and the gardeners were so sweet - some even gifted us plant starts or food.
However, this was only the beginning of our plant research. Next, we narrowed the list of plants by separating plants in three categories - green, yellow, and red (in essence - priority, desired, and undesired). We sorted plants due to a variety of reasons - cultural importance and viability were the two major reasons. We put some quite culturally important plants in red due to the significant challenges to growing them (ex. extreme size or aggressive tendencies) but some plants with some difficulties to growing in our context were put in yellow due to their high cultural importance.
From there, we analyzed the project site and created schematic designs for the future garden. We created a joint final design that combined some of our ideas and considerations, and then created graphics to communicate the project. We presented our work to our clients at the UW Farm (who we met with throughout the project - they were very pleased with the final product!).
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This project was a rewarding opportunity to practice my design skills, learn about a lot of plants I didn't know about previously, and work with an inspiring like-minded individual. I'm proud of the work Keya and I did in this project and I hope it is a helpful resource to those who will carry the project forward from design into implementation. My only regret with this project is that we weren't able to work with many of the groups that may use the culinary garden in the future. We did meet with someone from the UW's wǝɫǝbʔaltxʷ – Intellectual House (a First Nations center on campus), but unfortunately we had scheduling conflicts and were only able to meet after we had already placed the plants on the design (nevertheless, she was pleased with the design). Ideally, we would have met with future clients several times through design workshops, and used clients' needs and ideas to guide the design. We were limited in our ability to do that due to the restrictions of Keya's capstone project (only one quarter long) and the difficulties of meeting with others over the summer (many involved with the university are out of town). Despite that, we hope this design and our research can be useful to future users of the site and others engaged in similar work.
the need for community
The first half of this summer was a lot of fun - I enjoyed my internship, spending time with friends, and biking around Seattle. However, at the tail-end of the summer I caught COVID19 and my internship hit a lull as Rutheo Designs didn't have a lot of clients. Two of my roommates also left for study abroad trips in Europe, and the other left for a week back home. I spent a lot of time at my apartment, missing my friends and the outside world. My illness faded and I enjoyed seeing some more friends and going to a fun concert. However, I caught another illness shortly after, and I had a gnarly cough and a lot of congestion that persisted for weeks. Over the last two weeks, these symptoms have waned a lot since the worst time, but still persist on and off. The isolation of this time, compounded by my illnesses, reminded me of my need for community. Spending time with friends one-on-one can be very rewarding, and I also had great times talking with my mentor Polly Olsen for my job with the Burke Museum's Meadow. However, I missed the social elements of my job and spending time with groups of friends on campus. As the fall quarter begins, I'm excited to go to more events with my friends and return to the campus community(/ies). This fall quarter, I hope to foster a stronger sense of community and engagement and take healthy risks and push my comfort zone (as my fall studio professor said, we learn most from doing what may be unfamiliar or uncomfortable for us).