My Story

How I Became an Ecological Landscape Designer

I’ve been fascinated with nature for as long as I can remember. My earliest memories are of watching Steve Irwin on Animal Planet, then running into my backyard to find as many insects as possible. When my family moved to Lafayette in 2008, an entirely new world opened up. Suddenly an abundance of lizards, snakes, frogs were right outside my door!

By middle school, I knew most of the wildlife in south Louisiana by heart. But I also learned something heartbreaking: many species I expected to find were simply gone. Prairie kingsnakes, crawfish frogs, ornate box turtles, Attwater’s prairie-chickens, and whooping cranes were all animals that belonged to this land, yet were nowhere to be found.

The reason was simple and devastating:
Their habitat, the Louisiana coastal prairie, had been almost completely erased.

This realization changed me. I became obsessed with understanding what the landscape once looked like: old-growth forests, savannas, prairies full of wildflowers and pollinators, herds of bison and flocks of prairie-chickens. Learning about what we lost didn’t discourage me. It inspired a lifelong mission:

If we want these species to return, we must rebuild the habitat they depend on.
And that begins with native plants.

My First Restoration Project: Ascension Episcopal School

In high school, I started planting native wildflowers in our yard and watched pollinators flood in almost immediately. With encouragement from my photography teacher, Gerald Sierveld, I went bigger: restoring 3 acres of unused land behind Ascension Episcopal School into Cajun prairie habitat.

With support from the Cajun Prairie Habitat Preservation Society, state botanist Brian Early, and community fundraising, we planted 40+ pounds of local-genetic seed on January 29, 2017. Watching endangered prairie species return was life-changing.

The day I learned the city bulldozed half of the restoration was one of the most painful experiences of my life. But it also marked the moment I realized that I had to fight even harder for our native species.

I went on to design and build a Cajun prairie–themed pollinator garden in the center of the school’s campus, my first real landscape design project.

Landscape Architecture at LSU

I began at Louisiana State University in Baton Rouge majoring in environmental science, but quickly realized something:
I didn’t want to produce more data about ecological decline, I wanted to fix it.

So I switched to landscape architecture, a field focused on real, living solutions. In my designs I advocated for integrating native plant biodiversity into the everyday landscapes people use—neighborhoods, schools, cities, parks, utility right-of-ways, and even agricultural land.

Landscape architecture school challenged me in every way. I learned hand-drawing, model-making, Adobe creative tools, AutoCAD, Rhino, Lumion, and, most importantly, how to communicate ecological ideas through design.

My fourth year internship with Garden Environments, a native-plant design/build firm in Durham, North Carolina, gave me real-world experience that continues to shape my work today.

Permaculture: A New Lens on Abundance

In 2024–2025, I completed Ecoversity's Permaculture Design Certification program. Permaculture expanded my worldview by showing me how land, water, plants, animals, and people can function as one regenerative system.

It reaffirmed what I’d always felt:
Healthy landscapes create healthy people, healthy wildlife, and healthy communities.

My Work Today: Ecological Landscape Design

Since graduating from LSU, I’ve dedicated myself to helping people create landscapes that support biodiversity, soil health, and natural beauty. I am excited to design for biodiversity in a variety of different settings whether it be a backyard pollinator garden, a prairie restoration, or a series of native trees and shrubs.

My mission is simple:

Reconnect people with the native ecosystems that once flourished here…and can flourish again.