Phoebe Lickwar is an Associate Professor of Landscape Architecture at The University of Texas at Austin School of Architecture and director of FORGE Landscape Architecture, a practice working at the intersection of agriculture, carbon, and design. Her first book, Farmscape: The Design of Productive Landscapes (Routledge, 2020), co-authored with Roxi Thoren, is a study of landscape architecture’s ties to agricultural practice across a range of historical and contemporary case studies. Her current book project, Promiscuous Cultures, turns to the Italian peninsula, tracing a continuous tradition of mixed farming from the Etruscans to the postwar mechanization of the countryside.

Landscape architecture and garden design developed through productive landscapes, taking their pattern of order and repetition from cultivation itself. Several authors point to the ancient Egyptian garden as an early template for this. From there through the Italian Renaissance countryside, the form changed little, until the industrialization of agriculture broke the continuity between the two. We spoke with Lickwar about her work, and, importantly, about expanding the concept of designed landscapes towards agroecology.

How would you describe the reciprocity between productive landscape and designed landscape?

Regarding the relationship between landscape architecture and agriculture, I think we really need to challenge how we conceptualize productive and designed landscapes as separate and distinct. A central argument of my first book, Farmscape: The Design of Productive Landscapes (Routledge 2020), co-authored with Roxi Thoren, is that landscape architecture’s point of origin lies not in the picturesque, but in agriculture, and that agricultural processes, technologies, and cycles have long shaped landscape architectural projects, even if this engagement has been marginalized by mainstream practice. While Farmscape explores landscape architecture as a practice engaging agriculture, my current book project, Promiscuous Cultures, examines agriculture as a form of design with the potential to reshape the discipline of landscape architecture.

Considering the Italian agrarian landscape as a case study, Promiscuous Cultures identifies a throughline of mixed farming across an expansive period of history. This type of farming is described in agricultural treatises and confirmed by archeological studies as being a closed system of cultivation based on principles of renewability and interdependence. Agrarian landscapes across the Italian peninsula, from the time of the Etruscans until the modernization of agriculture post-WWII, were cultivated as highly architectural, temporally dynamic polycultures that we might consider to be both productive and designed. In this tradition, which was adapted and transformed across millennia, people shaped small parcels of land as productive gardens, growing many different crops in spatial arrangements that were highly stratified and choreographed to offer sustenance across the year. No external inputs were required, and as in a symphonic arrangement, the garden was orchestrated to optimize interactions between trees, vines, arable crops, and livestock.

Despite the modernization of agriculture, which rapidly transformed the countryside of Italy in the post-WWII period to the system of specialized agriculture that we see today, there are remnants of this polycultural tradition still being actively farmed. These landscapes are fascinating not only from the point of view of agricultural history, but also as designed landscapes worthy of study and preservation. Furthermore, in the context of our contemporary era of climate change, they offer many lessons relevant to the future development of a climate resilient agriculture.

Historic agrarian landscapes like the ones I am describing prompt a reconsideration of contemporary landscape architecture by focusing the discipline on the development of new regenerative approaches and practices. Bodies of knowledge, sets of traditions, and enduring resilient practices of cultivation that shape land to sustain people and place, all of which fall under the umbrella of agroecology, have been largely ignored by contemporary designers of the built environment. Agroecology has been understudied and undervalued by the discipline of landscape architecture in favor of ecological restoration, even though agroecology is arguably better suited to addressing the economic, environmental, and social challenges of rapid land use change, land disturbance, and the disruptions of a changing climate. I seek to recognize the important contributions of small-holder farmers who have developed critical practices of regenerative design, and to facilitate an expansive conversation about the role of design, and landscape architecture, in our future agrarian landscapes.

Why are farmscapes not more ingrained into the spaces we design and use?

The urban-rural divide has prevented us from seeing agriculture as part of the urban landscapes we design, particularly in peri-urban zone where there is so much potential. There are many reasons why agriculture is not typically integrated into contemporary urban spaces, but I will outline three of them here:

First: Cultivating food in the city is not seen as a necessity. We have become accustomed to being distanced from our food production and urban farms are most often seen as an amenity rather than a legitimate need. The integration of agriculture into a design project can be costly and can require a level of stewardship and care that clients and developers are not willing to support. It takes stakeholders who are willing to fight for food security to develop projects that include it. I hope that one day urban farming will be valued as a necessity equal to parks, playgrounds, and school yards, but currently that is not the case.

Second: There are many challenges to urban agriculture that make it more difficult than farming in rural places, for instance, the prevalence of sealed soils, soil and water contamination, air pollution, the high cost of land, restrictive zoning, conflicting land use, and lack of infrastructure. However, as the history of urban farming demonstrates, these challenges can be overcome. Consider, for example, how rapidly urban spaces were transformed into food gardens during WWII; where there is a will, there is a way.

Third: A lack of knowledge of the incredible diversity of agrarian traditions and practices that have evolved over millennia means that designers often lack the vocabulary to create contemporary agricultural spaces that are architecturally unique. There is no typology of garden less examined, architecturally speaking, than the typical community garden, with its generic grid of raised beds. Designing agricultural spaces requires precision. There are requirements in farming that must be addressed in the design process. While landscape architects can work with agricultural consultants to develop their proposals, there is more to design than simply translating specifications into form. To be well-positioned to engage agroecology, landscape architects need to have a strong grasp on agricultural history, theory, and practice.

When you talk about agroecology, what are the key aspects where landscape architecture can be instrumental?

The Farmscape case studies demonstrate that landscape architects have a unique capacity to shape agricultural projects as hybrid landscapes responsive to contemporary needs and challenges. The major contribution of landscape architecture goes way beyond aesthetics, encompassing the conceptualization, spatial organization, and material resolution of multifunctional landscapes, where various systems, structures, and programs are interrelated and mutually sustaining. As a synthetic discipline, landscape architecture is well positioned to envision agriculture as education, remediation, conservation, and preservation, thus enhancing the economic, ecological, and cultural value of our agrarian lands.

For example, at Shenyang Architectural University, a project completed by Kongjian Yu’s Turenscape, agricultural and educational programs overlap to create a learning environment informed by agricultural heritage. The integration of rice fields in a campus landscape adapts the local agricultural tradition to an urbanizing context, preserving the former agricultural use of the land and connecting students and faculty to the sensual and practical aspects of rice cultivation throughout the academic year.

At Winslow Farms Conservancy, Martha Schwartz Partners reimagines farming as an act of remediation, capitalizing on cycles of renewability to reshape land at multiple scales. In this project, new uses – field trials, land art, agriculture – are composed as reciprocal gardens through their spatial organization and material recycling. Forest corridors and clearings create spaces for trails and agriculture while providing the material used to remediate the soils of a former clay quarry. The cultivation of beach grass, used in coastal landscape restoration, expands the activity of remediation to the regional scale.

Other case studies illustrate how landscape architects are uniquely skilled to adapt historic agricultural landscapes for contemporary use and long-term stewardship. At Los Poblanos Historic Inn and Organic Farm, OLIN Studio adapts an historic site to sensitively accommodate an expansive program of hospitality and lavender production. At Overlook, Nelson Byrd Woltz Landscape Architects redefines an historic Olmsted Brothers estate as a site of agricultural, cultural, and ecological exchange. Informed by a deep study of the cultural landscape and guided by their collaborations with biologists and agriculturalists, NBW demonstrates how expertise across multiple disciplines can be synthesized to develop an innovative long-term stewardship plan.

With FORGE, you work on a project, Canard Brake in Louisiana. Please tell us about the landscape there and what you are experimenting with.

Through my practice, FORGE, I investigate how landscape architecture can amplify the restorative power of design through agroecological principles and methods. My intent is to test agroecological design as a theoretical approach and to demonstrate the relevance and promise of agroecology as a set of cultural practices that can sustain life while safeguarding resources and promoting land stewardship.

Canard Brake is a model forest carbon project on 940 acres of land in the Louisiana Delta. The project demonstrates the role marginal farmland can play in mitigating climate change while also contributing to a regional conservation plan. Located within the Lower Mississippi Alluvial Valley (LMAV), the project is part of an ambitious undertaking to reforest the largest floodplain in the United States, spanning ten million hectares across seven states. The LMAV once laid claim to some of the richest alluvial soils in the world, supporting vast areas of bottomland hardwood forest, grasslands, and wetland habitat important to indigenous cultures, migratory birds, mammals, and aquatic life. It was exploited first for timber, then by agriculture, and finally by oil, gas, and chemical refinement. By the end of the 20th century, only twenty-five percent of 24 million acres of forest remained, an incredible loss of natural resources and biodiversity.

The site selection for this project was guided by the opportunity to capitalize on adjacencies with existing large areas of conserved land, including the Dewey Wills Wildlife Management Area, the Catahoula National Wildlife Refuge, and Catahoula Lake, the largest freshwater lake in Louisiana. The lake is a renowned Ramsar wetland that is critical habitat for migratory waterfowl and other birds.

Canard Brake was once managed for timber, as a holding of the Chicago Lumber Company. In the 1960’s it was purchased by the owners of the 100,000-acre Louisiana Delta Plantation Farm, the largest contiguous crop farm in the US at the time. The land was deforested and transitioned to commodity crops including soybeans, cotton, and rice. For over sixty years, the land was farmed conventionally. Despite a system of intensive flood control levees, gates, and ditches, Canard Brake remained perennially susceptible to seasonal flooding, making it an ideal candidate for reforestation and habitat restoration.

The 1990 Farm Bill launched the Wetlands Reserve Program, which allowed the USDA Natural Resources Conservation Service (NRCS) to establish conservation easements on marginal or degraded farmland with potential for habitat restoration. Over the last 30 years, the program, now called the Wetland Reserve Easements program or WRE, has placed 2.9 million acres of wetland habitat under easement to reduce claims on the Federal Crop Insurance Program. Research shows that in the early years, the WRE had limited success and our ground truthing at local sites confirmed both a lack of diversity and an unacceptable level of tree mortality.

Our goal to optimize carbon storage while demonstrating an economically sustainable model required an approach that balanced cost sharing with design control. The NRCS paid a portion of the project costs, including hydrological restoration. Our team developed and managed the overall design and planting of the site. The design includes a trail system, camps for recreation and research, shallow water areas for migratory birds, a green-tree reservoir, food plots for wildlife, an herbaceous nurse crop, and 310,000 trees.

The seasonally flooded soils of Canard Brake are particularly vulnerable to erosion and colonization by aggressive species, and the design sought to address these issues through site preparation and planting. Strategies included subsoiling and a seeded nurse crop of grasses, rushes, sedges, and forbs in varying compositions, designed to consider pollinator, wildlife, and waterfowl habitat needs. The nurse crop, whose deep root systems extend up to twelve feet underground, achieves rapid carbon storage and provides valuable wildlife habitat while also improving and protecting soils from erosion, shading out aggressive species, and creating an environment that is optimal for tree seedlings.

In the spring of 2024, we planted 240,000 tree seedlings – four different mixes of tree species tailored to soil moisture and soil type along a fine gradient across the site. An additional 72,000 trees were planted in the spring of 2025 to complete the initial planting.

It has been amazing to see wildlife – and people – return to Canard Brake. This land now supports a community of recreational hunters who are active conservationists. Food plots, including rice and perennial forage, have attracted a variety of wildlife, including migratory birds and mammals such as the Louisiana Black Bear. Situated in the heart of the Mississippi Flyway, Canard Brake is critical for waterfowl, but also an important stopping point and feeding ground for a host of other birds including the bald eagle.

A big part of this project is the research that will extend into the coming decades as we monitor how carbon is cycled through the soils and stored in the trees. Prior to seeding, we conducted a baseline soil organic carbon survey to establish a starting point for future carbon monitoring. Our first post-planting survey will be completed this fall. The long-term research we conduct at Canard Brake will enable us to understand the true carbon potential of reforested marginal farmland in the LMAV while also improving the WRE program, ultimately shaping a movement that could transform the Louisiana Delta and other strategic regions across the LMAV. (Read more)

You propose massive shifts in both educational programmes and the practice of landscape architecture to bridge the gap between garden and farm, productive landscape and landscape architecture …

The changes that I have proposed in various forums are intended to address what I perceive as a concerning lack of knowledge about living systems – how soils, plants, fungi, water, insects, animals, and humans interact in a dynamic process of growth and transformation – coupled with significant denial about the real ecological cost of a typical landscape architecture project. While my own interests are focused on how the study of agroecology and the development of agroecological design can address these concerns, leading to new forms of landscape architectural design that are less destructive and less resource intensive, I think we need to reevaluate broadly the clear gap in teaching and learning that exists in landscape architecture education. Students are often not gaining the literacy in the physical, material world that is required for basic competency in landscape architecture, and as a result I see an overall decline in design across academic programs.

Change in education is urgent and we need to find the space to experiment with our students to connect more directly to the land and to each other. I recently collaborated with Rosetta Elkin to explore how studio learning can be strengthened by land-based learning in design education. Across the spring 2024 semester, we worked with our students at Pratt Institute and the University of Texas at Austin to develop short prompts for learning through direct engagement with the physical environment, using video to record our experiments in the field. Our work, including the booklet Everything Change: Instructions for Land-Based Learning, was presented in the exhibition of the 11th International Architecture Biennale Rotterdam: Nature of Hope. We distributed 10,000 copies of Everything Change to visitors and offered the booklet free for download at land-basedlearning.com, inviting educators and readers to join us in our collaborative learning experiment.

Your practice extends to art, prints, photography – inspired by nature patterns, leaves, found objects. Please tell us about the material that engages you in your art and design work.

I have a background in photography, so the medium has always been fundamental to my work. I use photography in a way that is both observational and generative: a process of visual thinking, a method of research, and a means of connection.

When I was a Rome Prize fellow at the American Academy in Rome, I started shooting film again, loading reels in the bathroom and processing the film in my studio sink. It was wonderful to return to my roots, to rediscover the magic of seeing the image emerge on film. It never gets old. I was using a Hasselblad camera to photograph historic agrarian sites and the process of looking down through the viewfinder prompted me to reconsider how I was holding the camera in relation to the landscape. I became very interested in a way of seeing where the camera is positioned to create a sectional view, rather than a perspectival one. Using photography in this way, almost as a form of architectural analysis, is something that I have continued to explore as a way of relating photographic seeing with architectural thinking.

Over the years, I have used a suite of photographic tools, both digital and analog, in my research and teaching, including cyanotype, which is a very accessible process for students. I make site imprints, often of plant life, to engage with the landscapes I am studying. Sometimes these imprints are quite abstract, which I find to be a generative part of my creative process. I teach a course for landscape architecture, architecture, and urban design students called Pencil of Nature, where we use cyanotype in the field to engage the dynamic living systems of urban lowlands. It gets the students out in the landscape, making work, week after week, in a process that is both intuitive and analytical. I feel that too often in design education today there is an unhelpful separation between research and design. Students can really struggle to make the translation. Pencil of Nature shows students how generative fieldwork, merging research with creative practice, can be fertile ground for design.