Feral: Making Wild Landscapes - 1.25 PDH (LA CES/HSW)

Recorded On: 10/10/2025

Three small, agile landscape architecture practices—representing the United States, France, and the Republic of Georgia—discuss working with wild, scruffy processes that result in unconventional landscapes and immersive spaces. Feral design focuses attention away from forms and shapes and toward gradients, atmospheres, and unexpected encounters.

Learning objectives:

Explore the possibility that releasing control in landscape design, construction, and management can foster qualities like wildness, exploration, and surprise.
Examine concrete and detailed examples of unconventional but successful a “feral” design tactics, including planting strategies, maintenance regimes, earthwork, and material reuse.
Understand the partnerships, approaches to professional practice, and implementation methods that leading practitioners are using to design, construct, and maintain feral landscapes.
Learn how a feral approach can help to balance experiential goals with ecological performance, management costs, and the longevity of a project.

David Hill, ASLA, LEED AP

Professor

Hillworks & Auburn University

David is a professor in Landscape Architecture at Auburn University and the founding principal of HILLWORKS. Grounded in the ecological and cultural complexities of the southeast, HILLWORKS revels in the spirit of craft, thrift, and resourcefulness that permeates the region. HILLWORKS recently received the 2024 Emerging Voices Award from the Architecture League of New York. Prior to HILLWORKS, David helped unearth post-industrial landscapes at D.I.R.T. studio. Borrowing from the rich lineage of experimentation and long-term management in gardening, David strives to curate immersive experiences with plant assemblages that inspire imagination and awe.

Mathieu Gontier

Partner

Wagon Landscaping

Wagon Landscaping, studio founded by Mathieu Gontier and François Vadepied, finds out and develops its project concepts in practising and gardening landscapes, and observing nature dynamics.

Mathieu Gontier, landscape architect, is Wagon landscaping co-founder. He has an initial training in Arts. With this background he graduated as landscape architect in 2007, keeping this relationships between art and landscape. He retains from his initial training the use of drawing as tool, for reflection and project.

He is a project teacher at the Versailles School of Landscape.

He is co-responsible for the development of the agency and project management.

Sarah Cowles, ASLA

Director

Ruderal

Sarah Cowles, ASLA, is founder of Ruderal LLC. Her inventive approach comes from 20 years of international experience and a localized understanding of place. Her projects address geopolitical realities to forge new relationships between ecology and culture.

Notable works include the Betania Forest Garden, Arsenal Oasis, and the Mtatsminda Afforestation Plan. Her critical writing appears in many publications, including Landscape Architecture Magazine and Art Papers.

Cowles received a Master of Landscape Architecture from Harvard GSD. She’s taught at The Ohio State University, University of Southern California, and Sam Fox School of Art and Design.