Into the Wild!

Lane Goodkind is a Southern California native, raised in North County San Diego’s Del Mar, the son of a UCSD physics professor dad and classical violinist/amateur naturalist mother. He can be shy, he can be prickly. He is super-interesting and definitely passionate about our natural habitat — both preservation as well as incorporating native plants and grasses into manmade environments.

His mother, Alice, formed the “Friends of the San Dieguito River Valley,” which subconsciously nurtured her son’s interest in native plants. Growing up near the beach and surrounded by chaparral and Torrey pines also intrinsically inspired the surfer/designer, who later designed a park in his mother’s memory.

He was kicked out of the landscape architecture program at Colorado State for “having trouble following orthodoxy,” then found himself at the Rhode Island School of Design, struggling to choose between physics and fine arts studies. Fortunately, the now 50-year-old, married father of two found his perfect environment at RISD, where he enjoyed “the best creative four years” of his life and excelled at drawing, painting, and studies that kept his creativity blossoming.

After college he worked in the Bay area, spending three years on the development of the 134,000-square-foot Central Garden at the Getty Center, designed by artist Robert Irwin. Goodkind then became interested in how storm water management could influence his designs, creating low-impact development requirements to improve water quality long before they were a federal and state mandate. He then moved to Portland, Oregon, where he learned about managing storm water pollution through urban design. Next, a project to create mass transit for the south rim of the Grand Canyon.

After that, prompted in part by 35 days of nonstop rain in Portland, Goodkind decided to make a “lifestyle” change. “I missed surfing, California, the weather,” he recalled of his move to Santa Barbara in 2000.

He opened his practice, Goodkind and Associates, in 2003 and has been “working away ever since.” Currently about 80 percent of Goodkind’s work is out of the area and 20 percent is here. The firm has ranged from four to five employees to just himself (like now), hiring contractors to help handle larger jobs.

“Landscape architecture is interdisciplinary,” Goodkind said. “We delve into architecture at times. It’s not just plants and irrigation, it’s a very diverse field.”

Current projects include the redevelopment of the Los Angeles Times print facility in Costa Mesa, with a food pavilion similar to our Public Market in the works, and a two-acre park associated with that.

Goodkind is a man of strong opinions. For example:

“When projects fail, it’s because of a disconnect between planting and hardscaping. In Bauhaus design, Walter Gropius advocated that design is a language. The discipline, the conversations are the same. A good designer should be able to design everything, as long as they do the research. Problems arise when a crucial component of the project, like a building, is considered primary and foremost in the absence of environmental and social context. I don’t work on projects where I’m just expected to fill in green space with a colored pencil!”

Also: “Everything is changing over the years with the needs of culture. We are losing wildness and wild space. As a result, people are becoming more disconnected with the natural environment that sustains us.”

Goodkind’s goal is to figure out how he can connect people with coastal sage scrub that they’ve maybe never seen. He also finds fault with the installation and management of landscapes that are limited in native and rare plants that are not respected in our culture or cared for by skilled tradespeople, as they are in Japanese and other cultures.

“The reality is that the caretakers just come in with gas-powered equipment to mow and blow and rake and then what’s left in a year or two is a landscape that doesn’t support any life,” he said. “How do we introduce habitat that’s beneficial to not only all life but to humans in our environments?”

He also laments the loss of serendipity. “I would be fine if a lot of my landscapes were left alone and became weeds!” Goodkind asserted. “So much is over-maintained and generally there’s no life left on commercial landscapes. We’ve gone so far in control, we need a release, where there are unanswered questions and wildness. Nature is definitely disorderly.”

The Santa Barbara Botanic Garden, which he visited before moving here, continues to inform the landscape architect. He and his family reside down the street from San Marcos Growers, which has also provided inspiration over the years.

“The potential for gardens in this part of our world to really inspire people is always there,” Goodkind said. “I tell some of my smaller clients, whose gardens I don’t always have the time to revisit, to go to the Santa Barbara Botanic Gardens and draw inspiration from the little bits and pieces of wildness that are left. Nothing is permanent. If we humans want to have a planet worth living on for generations, it takes hard work and a bit of edginess to persevere.”

www.lanegoodkind.com 805-845-5707

By Leslie A. Westbrook

Photography by Andri Beachamp