Kate Kennen has been working with plants since she was 5 years old.
The Massachusetts-based landscape architect and owner of Offshoots grew up at her family’s garden center, and all the while, she was watching: watching the gallons of water and the pounds of fertilizer used to keep plants alive, watching the ever-compounding vehicle miles it took to ship plants across the country. She also watched people come to her family’s center and call themselves landscape architects without understanding the plants they were asking for or the land they were working with.
“I was just like, this is crazy,” Kennen said. “There’s just so much that plants have to offer us. I’ve been seeing that for a really long time.”
Inspired by a Cornell graduate working at her family’s garden center, Kennen attended the Ithaca, New York, university to study horticulture “and then moved into landscape architecture when I soon realized I could do so much more with design than just sell plants,” she said. But it was a bit later, as she earned her degree from Harvard’s Graduate School of Design, that the enormity of everything she saw growing up hit her anew. It “kind of sent me off the deep end a little bit,” Kennen recalled.
“This idea of almost all of us getting our plants through Home Depot and Lowe's and all of these global networks [bringing] bugs all the way across the country, [bringing] pests,” she explained. “Then you're planting a plant to take up CO2 from the environment, but you're putting [out] all that CO2 driving it all the way here from Oregon.”
To Kennan, it just didn’t make sense. So, she started her own firm, Kennen Landscape Architecture, in 2004, and then Offshoots in 2012, focusing her work on environmental design that relies on local growers, local garden centers and ecotypic plants — or vegetation adapted to its surroundings — that are more supportive of pollinators and insects.
In the over two decades since Kennen began her practice, however, she said she’s seen the profession evolve, shifting from something “often very much about aesthetics and form” to something “much more about ecological systems than it ever was before.”
“If you are a landscape architect not focusing on sustainability and climate change right now, like that would be ridiculous, right?” she asked. “Every single landscape architect is thinking about climate change and thinking about our system, how our plants are changing, how water and flooding is changing, how the amount of precipitation is changing, how the animal movements are changing.”
Work that ranges from single-family meadows to pollinator action plans
A career as a landscape architect comes with a certain amount of purpose, Kennen tells her students at Boston's Northeastern University, where she teaches a course on issues in designed urban environments. Whether designing a single-family landscape or municipal scheme, landscape architects work to create “incredible places for people to come together.”
“It’s a profession where you feel like you have a purpose because you truly can change the world,” she said. “You can [focus on] climate change and all this, but then create something beautiful and get it constructed at the same time.”
Her work with Offshoots ranges from rewilding a coastal meadow for a single-family home to crafting a pollinator action plan for the city of Somerville, where she is based. The firm helped author a free booklet for residents containing about 40 different plug-and-play gardens they can copy and plant in their own yards to support pollinators local to the Boston suburb.
“It's everything from a small pot, like the size of a 2-foot diameter pot, to a large yard,” Kennen said. “They're laid out on a grid, and we give you the plants, and you can pick the color scheme, and we thought out all the design details and the ideas about supporting pollinators and insects.”
Offshoots also created demonstration gardens around Somerville’s city hall so residents can see the plantings in action.
Kennen is launching a composting program at her daughter’s elementary school, where she said she hopes to instill the importance of building soil for the next generation. She also planted an open herb garden around the border of her home.
“Almost every plant in my garden has some sort of edible component,” she noted. “My entire front border is all herbs, and I put it on the street so that all of my neighbors can pick the herbs.”
It’s a community mindset that makes sense for Kennen, who reminds her students that “if you're frustrated, like, act locally. Do something different.”