Embracing the landscape

Clare Riley Al-Witri ’09, ’05 LS

Clare Riley Al-Witri ’09, ’05 LS has been a horticulturist for a decade, but it wasn’t until she recently moved to a new home that she got a garden of her own. “I was doing a lot of container gardening and odd patio situations,” she says, “but this is the first time that we've had earth that I could play with.”

For Clare, gardening can be a meditative experience. “I like the fact that you’re outside all day and there’s lots of physical labor involved,” she says. Her “gardening happy place” is a wild garden at Wave Hill, a 28-acre oasis in the Bronx, New York, where she interned after college. The garden is based on the writings of 19th-century Irish gardener William Robinson, who championed the idea of natural designs. Clare says, “I love creating gardens that feel like they could have just spontaneously existed, but actually there’s a lot of thought and care behind them.”

Now a newly minted landscape designer at EinwillerKuehl, a woman-owned firm in Oakland, California, Clare gets to apply these sensibilities to urban spaces. From parks and recreation areas to the green spaces of office parks and apartment complexes, urban landscaping is all about bringing nature into a city. Urban landscapes come with many benefits. They reduce pollution, protect us from extreme temperatures, provide habitat for animals, and improve general quality of life by encouraging social interaction and physical activity. Done right, they also have the benefit of connecting us to our surroundings. Clare is a proponent of using plants found in the local landscape. “It’s important to have our urban landscapes remind us that this is not some city that’s just floating outside of the land,” she says.

Gardening and landscape design weren’t always in Clare’s plans as a profession. At Santa Catalina, where she started in sixth grade, she was drawn to classes and clubs that related to social justice and world affairs. (She helped start the Model U.N. club, which is still going strong today.) Clare enrolled at the University of St. Andrews in Scotland to study sustainable development. After a year, she realized she wanted to pursue something less book-based, so she transferred to tiny Marlborough College in rural Vermont. “There were like 180 students; that’s not even Catalina sized,” she jokes. Clare studied ecology and sculpture, lived and worked on the college farm, and spent time with like-minded students who canned, made cider, and grew and processed their own food.

She also spent her summers back home in Carmel Valley, propagating plants at a local nursery. By the time she graduated from Marlborough, she knew she wanted to pursue landscape design. However, as Clare points out, “in order to do that well, I needed to actually figure out how [garden designs] work from the ground up and how things grow.” She moved with her now-husband to New York City, where she began her transformative internship at Wave Hill. Not only did the experience offer a thorough introduction to horticulture, it showed her just how wonderfully complex gardening could be. Clare marveled at the skill involved in creating perennial gardens that show off something new each week. “It was an art practice that I wasn’t aware of that was totally rooted in working with the land,” she says.

Clare Riley Al-Witri ’09 tends to a display at the UC Botanical Garden.

Photos by Ryan Tuttle '09

Clare returned to the West Coast to intern at Heronswood, a public garden in Washington state, then made her way back to California to work at Filoli, a formal English-style garden in the Bay Area. From there she found a place at the University of California Botanical Garden, which boasts one of the most diverse plant collections in the United States. Assigned to the California and Australian collections, Clare assisted in conservation projects that took her from Point Arena in the north to the Mojave Desert in the south, documenting and collecting local plants.

In 2018, with a firm horticultural foundation, she entered the graduate program at UC Berkeley’s College of Environmental Design. She graduated in the spring of 2020 with a degree in landscape architecture and started at EinwillerKuehl in June. “My goal with the projects I’m working on is to bring plant-specific, emotive, and place-rooted landscapes into the Bay Area,” she says.

In reflecting on her time at Santa Catalina, Clare appreciates the way teachers encouraged her curiosity, a practice she has maintained throughout her career. The interests she had at Catalina also fuel her free-time pursuits, especially writing. She loved English and creative writing, and was a part of Lamplighter, yearbook, and Mosaic. She continues to write these days, whether she’s writing gardener profiles, journal articles, or poetic Instagram posts.

As for work, Clare gets to contribute to projects that address the issues that are important to her. She explains thoughtfully: “I’m very concerned about the status of the things that [comprise] the landscape—water health and quality, bird life, and plant life, all these components that come together to create nature. Where we’re living, we have a lot of agency over what these landscapes look like. How water is moving through the landscape, what plants we’re planting, what chemicals we’re putting down, how much water we’re using, whether there is refuge for species other than ourselves—these are choices that we make every day in urban landscapes. We can do better. We can make better choices to help the environment.”