Landscape architect Susan Child created her eponymous Boston-based firm in the 1980s with two classmates from Harvard’s Graduate School of Design. As described by Anita Berrizbeitia, Professor of Landscape Architecture and Chair of the Department of Landscape Architecture at Harvard’s Graduate School of Design, Cambridge, MA, who worked with Child, it was a small, regional practice with projects in the Northeast & Midwest United States that specialized in residential work, institutions and campuses, parks and public spaces, and preservation projects.
However, before attending Harvard, Child was part of a cadre of women in the 1970s who were advocates for urban life that sought to make cities better and more equitable at a time when cities were in decline. She worked with the Boston Redevelopment Authority on the renovation of public spaces and the creation of community gardens. She authored an influential street tree guide for Boston – The Greening of Boston: Trees and Shrubs in the City – an excellent resource. Child was also involved in the restoration of the Boston Public Garden and the creation of the Friends of the Public Garden, the non-profit that raises money and sees to the maintenance of the site.
Child attended Vassar as an undergraduate focused on art history. But seminars she attended at Radcliff prompted her to enroll in graduate school. Berrizbeitia says that Child was superb with plants. Child could create a work of art with just four species of plant vegetation. Anyone can “throw plants in the ground,” Berrizbeitia observes, but it takes someone with horticultural and ecological knowledge, coupled with an artistic sensibility to make something that transcends merely planting. She notes: “With plants, Susan created art.” Child knew about perception and how, alike an artist, to manipulate space using horticulture.
Child’s legacy includes: [1] the work to which her name is not publicly attached; [2] impact on and recognition by the landscape architecture profession; and [3] being a role model for women.
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