Rosetta S. Elkin, Associate of the Arnold Arboretum

Biography

I am a Professor at Pratt Institute, where I founded and Directed the Program in landscape architecture. My research, writing and teaching explore the relationship between people and plants. As a practiced-based scholar, my work is always grounded in first-hand experience through fieldwork, survey, documentation and archival work with communities who care for and steward land. And most often, this brings me back to plants and gardens. As a designer, I founded Practice Landscape to further blur the traditional boundaries between scientific and professional worlds.

My interest in interdisciplinarity is best conveyed by the publications that I author and design: Plant Life: The Entangled Politics of Afforestation (University of Minnesota Press, 2022), Landscapes of Retreat (K.Verlag, 2023), Tiny Taxonomy: Individual Plants in Landscape Architecture (Actar, 2017), Live Matter: Designing Plants (Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Studies, 2015) and Platform 6: A Year at Harvard Graduate School of Design (Actar, 2013). I also publish widely in magazine, journals and other media; but believe in open access publishing, so all titles are available for free download here.