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Karin Reber
Sustainable Landscape Desig�er By Melinda Thompson
Karin Reber is a sustainable landscape designer. In 2016, she designed the Kensington Library Literary Garden as a place for people to relax while reading their books. The garden is the home to a variety of native plants found around the region. She also works as a landscape designer for Campbell and Ferrara in Alexandria, VA. Q: Can you share a little bit about your background? A: I am from Kensington, MD, which is why this site means so much to me—this is my hometown. I grew up here. I live in Arlington, VA, right now, but my parents still live in Kensington. They are only a few blocks away. And as part of my master’s thesis through George Washington University (GW), I needed to pick a watershed site and plan to make a landscape master plan at a location within that watershed. For a year, I was walking down Rock Creek Park and studying all the wildlife that was going on, all the plant life that I could see, drainage issues, just the general climate . . . I incorporated everything that I learned and came up with a master plan for the library. The full plan is for all three acres of the 8
WASHINGTON GARDENER
SEPTEMBER 2021
library grounds, but we quickly came to realize that unless we got some kind of huge donation [that was beyond our means]. At some point, maybe we could do more, but with the reality of the situation, this is what we ended up with. I’m grateful that we have this little plot of land, and it really makes an impact on the surrounding neighborhood. Q: How does the Kensington Library Literary Garden affect the local community? A: It started out as just grass—the walnut trees and the dogwood were here, but everything else was just lawn. It wasn’t until two years after we first broke ground on the garden that we got a paved walkway. Once the walkway went in, people started noticing it—folks who had never been here before. It changed everything. All of a sudden, it made it look like a destination. Since then, almost every time I’m here, someone will stop and talk to me and say how much they appreciate the garden. People have told me that they come here to meditate. They do yoga out here. We started doing events normally in the library, like children’s reading
hour, outside—especially with the pandemic. It’s been nice to have a place outside that people can go. People come here and they take inspiration for their own gardens as well by reading all the plant labels. To me, one of the most obvious things, but one of the best things, is that people come out here and read their books after they’ve just gone into the library. They’ll come and they’ll pick a bench, and they’ll start reading their book. Q: Why did you choose to use all native plants? A: I had always kind of been interested in native plants, but it wasn’t until my last year of grad school at GW that I really started feeling passionate about them. The entire last year of the program revolved around stormwater management and taking care of erosion problems and keeping stormwater on your property—things like rain gardens and bioswales—but the part that I liked most about that last year was the indepth study of native plants and the wildlife that depends on them—if you plant this, then this animal will come, and you know if you have Black-eyed
