About

I grew up on Cape Ann, Massachusetts, the son of an artist and an editor who had arrived there by way of Chicago and NYC. My parents cleared an invasive-choked thicket on the acre of land they had bought where my father built a house by hand on an old granite foundation that had a previous life as a meeting hall for quarry workers. I spent huge swaths of my childhood walking the wilds of Cape Ann and swimming in quarries and the ocean. 

Seeing the tide pools of my childhood dwindle as a result of chemical runoff from properties abutting the coastline had a profound, albeit delayed effect on me. As an adult I lived primarily in cities, working in a broad array of professional and creative jobs. I went to Hunter College starting in my late twenties and worked at Metropolis magazine as a researcher for six years. Both of these experiences instilled in me a civic sensibility and a profound desire to "give back" somehow but I felt adrift in the increasingly technocratic zeitgeist. 

When I found my way to working on public land for the NYC Parks Department and related conservancies, I finally felt that I had an opportunity to measurably "give back" both to people and the biosphere. But I became increasingly frustrated with the horticultural discourse which felt cloying, moralistic, rule-bound, and overly wedded to science.

In 2019 I moved back to Cape Ann where I work as an arborist, land consultant and "ecological maximalist" from the premise of "what would it look like to plant for the climate/biodiversity crisis with adequate urgency?" For me this means stripping away most of the exoticism, science, connoisseurship, and discursive noise from contemporary horticulture. I work in the land with charismatic, native plants that reproduce so bountifully that I use them as infinitely renewable, natural resources that can do much of the work of "land building" and space making for themselves. In effect, this means that they enact the same process of ecological succession that has transformed the quarries of Cape Ann from post-industrial wastelands into cherished oases in less than a century.