Leah Pine

PRINCIPAL

Landscape Architect, and Arborist— brings the skills and experience of ecologist, artist, writer, and teacher to the practice.

An expert in the use of meadow, woodland, and wetland plant communities in landscape design; she is also necessarily knowledgable about exotic invasive plants and current management practices.

She is an illustrator, oil painter and classically trained musician.  Knowledge of color, graphic design, and music structure shape her designs.

As an arborist for Fulton County, GA, she identified and protected specimen trees at all stages of development and expanded and clarified stream buffer replanting standards in 1995 that are still in use today.

She has designed master plans for private nature trails and public parks and hundreds of residential gardens in the Atlanta area, for Pike Design Group, for contractors, and under her own name. All designs have incorporated sustainable techniques and native plant communities wherever possible.

She photographed native landscapes to illustrate their design potential, as a graduate student for then-dean Darrel Morrison,  a national authority and designer of such public landscapes as Storm King Art Center and Lady Bird Johnson Wildflower Center, Austin TX.  These themes of ecological design, art, and spiritual health were developed in her thesis (“The Wild Garden in the 20th Century”).

As an educator, she has taught accredited courses in advanced (native) planting design for the University of Georgia and for the garden design/landscape architecture programs at the University of Greenwich in London, UK. She has lectured at the Cullowhee Native Plant Conference (NC); she began the first adult education courses in garden design and taught for many years at the UGA Center for Continuing Education. She holds a B. Music in Music Education/English (K-12).

She has compiled stories and written a daily blog for CNN.com; edited philosophy, religion, and history for Mercer University Press; and laid out pages, written headlines, and edited stories for the Macon Telegraph and News.

In studying Rudolph Steiner, she became interested in bio-dynamic gardening and the precepts of Waldorf education; She has visited Findhorn Community in Scotland, attended a “Gardening with Elementals” workshop at Perelandra Center for Nature Research in Virginia and has practiced a spiritual program for more than twenty years.

She has traveled extensively in Europe and lived in London for 6 years.

  • Georgia Landscape Architect Registration No. LA001165
  • International Society of Arboriculture Certification No. SO-6165A
  • Commercial Pesticide Applicator License No. 04503
  • MLA, University of Georgia (Athens) School of Environmental Design,1991