The Vital Dance Between Culture and Ecology: A Conversation with Thomas Woltz

Robert Pogue Harrison speaks to Thomas Woltz, one of the nation’s leading landscape architects.

December 6, 2021

“The metric for success or failure is beyond my lifetime.” 

Thomas Woltz takes a long view — a very long view. As one of America’s leading landscape architects, that’s precisely his job: to think on the scale of stones and trees. He calls it “the vocation of care.” In a world where few people think beyond the threshold of their own deaths, he must take himself “out of the equation” and ensure that he’s giving the landscape “the best tools to survive for centuries ahead.”

The results can be striking — for example, the Aga Khan Garden he developed at the University of Alberta Botanic Garden in Edmonton more than a decade ago. The Aga Khan had invited him to create it and then presented him with a challenge: to envision a 21st century interpretation of the Islamic Garden of Paradise. The Imam of the Ismaili people sent Woltz to Africa and India to explore the history of Islamic gardens — which began as gardens for survival and were eventually stylized into gardens of pleasure. “He wanted me to read temperature, smells, fragrance, stones, scale, and really metabolize this history,” Woltz recalled, adding that he became fascinated by “the calibration of water in arid climates.” The result was a 12-acre garden, a careful balance of water and form. The garden took a decade to plan and a year-and-a-half to construct, before finally opening to the public in 2018. 

In his Entitled Opinions conversation with Robert Pogue Harrison, Woltz said that he sees envisions the earth as a living system with humans woven into it. He said that he doesn’t wish to erase the difficult and dark stories that our landscapes hold: “I don’t aspire to some Edenic perfection, some original stasis. I think celebrating the scars of damage, revealing the scars of what we have done to the land, becomes a cautionary tale.” 

“Our job has a moral mandate of stewardship, both in culture and ecology.”