A garden is a slow argument with a place

Lara trained as a painter at the Rhode Island School of Design and spent a decade in the studio before she ever drew a planting plan.

That training never left. She still works in tone and interval — the weight of a yew mass against open lawn, the pause between a terrace and the meadow beyond. Plans begin on paper, in pencil, and are revised on site until the drawing agrees with the ground.

Her practice runs from Washington, DC to the central California coast, with gardens in between: walled town courtyards of a few hundred square feet, working estates of several hundred acres, and coastal properties where the design brief is mostly restraint.

She keeps her studio small on purpose. No more than five gardens are in construction at once, and Lara is on every site herself — during survey, during planting, and for years afterwards as the garden settles into what it will become.