Thomas L. Woltz, FASLA, is the owner and Senior Principal of Nelson Byrd Woltz Landscape Architects (NBW), where he leads the firm in the creation and revitalization of public landscapes across the United States, Canada, Europe, and New Zealand. The NBW offices are located in Charlottesville, Virginia and New York City. He holds bachelor’s and master’s degrees in architecture and landscape architecture from the University of Virginia, as well as an honorary Doctor of Science from the State University of New York, Environmental Science and Forestry. He and NBW’s work have been recognized with honors including induction into the ASLA Council of Fellows, the Wall Street Journal Design Innovator of the Year, Fast Company’s most creative people in business, the Trust for Public Land’s Land for People Award, and the Frederic Church Award. Woltz also serves on the Board of Directors of The Cultural Landscape Foundation.
As a landscape architect and a firm owner, what is your core problem in practice?
Inadequate maintenance planning. Those who tend the landscape, and those who commission it rarely prepare sufficiently for long-term maintenance. We end up reminding and convincing them, again and again, to think carefully—as we design and build—about who will maintain the project, what the maintenance regime will be, and why it matters to follow our suggestions in designing for maintenance from the very beginning.
What do you consider to be a breakthrough in your work?
I consider the primary breakthrough in our work to be the decision, twelve years ago, to take the financial risk of hiring our first full-time scientists. They were conservation biologists, and later a PhD-level restoration ecologist. In addition, we hired full-time cultural landscape historians—one specializing in Indigenous cultures, the other in landscapes of bondage and enslavement. Much of our work takes place in colonial countries such as Australia and New Zealand, or in regions with a history of enslavement across the United States. If you’re working in North America, you will almost inevitably be in one or both of these landscapes: landscapes of enslavement or of Indigenous culture.
It was a major breakthrough because it was a significant financial risk, but it aligned with what we believed was necessary to build the right culture in our office and the right way to work. We needed experts in research—ecological and cultural—embedded directly in the design process. It became a turning point because it formalized research-driven design. Our design ideas now emerge from a deep understanding of the site itself, rather than from elsewhere.
What are the things you understand now that you didn’t see five years ago?
The power of mayors and politicians to transform the public landscape. Working on public sites means you’re in constant dialogue with city council members, mayors, and elected representatives. They can apply a useful, sometimes genuinely helpful urgency to get something accomplished during their term. But if a project is underway, a new mayor can also remove your funding or stop the project entirely. In the United States we’ve seen this at the national scale as well: many projects responding to climate issues or to extremes of social disenfranchisement have been halted by elected officials who suddenly disagree with the kind of work accomplished by landscape architects. This vulnerability was not something I fully understood five years ago.
What constraints do you find most generative or even productive in your work?
I find all constraints inspire creativity. And when someone asks you to achieve five or six things on a very small site, you have to be extra creative to make sure that each intervention performs three, four or five functions. And I like that very much. I like the economy of that kind of landscape response. And I like the challenge of it.
Name an important landscape reference—person or place—that influenced you.
Important landscape influences for me are agricultural landscapes. The very intentional agricultural landscapes that include woodlots, hedgerows, fields of crops, meadows, terracing. Places where you can read the hydrology of a creek or river cutting through the bold pattern—a pattern that reflects boundaries and ownership, but also often corresponds to soils and hydrologic systems. It’s a fascinating vocabulary of human intent in dialogue with the land. For me, seeing farmland was the first time I truly understood landscape as a design act, as an intentional landscape.
And what about other influences, such as artists?
Giovanni Bellini, Paul Klee, and Joan Miró.
There’s an altarpiece of the Madonna by Giovanni Bellini that I find very interesting. She is close, very present, and behind her you see Conegliano—the little village near Treviso—in the distance. This simultaneity of her detailed presence with the carefully designed fabric, almost like a stage set, and then the natural world and the village beyond. The continuum of space where you can’t see the in-between. She is present with you, yet you know where she comes from. There’s a sense of past and present held together.
With Paul Klee, I love the geometric portraits—faces composed of geometric forms that remain beautiful and harmonic. I like the idea that you can recognize the human body in such an abstract form. That has always drawn me to Klee. And with Miró, his interventions at all scales, seemingly unrelated yet forming extraordinary compositions, make me think of the way nature works.
How do you define what landscape architecture is doing today—at its essential level—and what it should do?
I think what it’s doing today, and what it should be doing, is filling a widening gap left by civil engineers and urban planners. Landscape thinking—unlike civil engineering—always includes the human experience, the wildlife experience, the biodiversity needs of a site, while also solving issues of transportation, circulation, hydrology, and drainage.
So the landscape architect, operating between urban planning and civil engineering, holds a unique and potentially impactful position if allowed to lead that discourse. You can always tell when it’s an engineered solution that brought in a landscape architect afterwards, and when it’s a landscape architect who brought in a civil engineer.
Name a blind spot of landscape architecture.
I sometimes sense a lack of interest in historic sites. A building or fragment of architecture may be carefully preserved, but the landscape around it is often silent. If we can awaken those layers of history and bring them into the twenty-first century, I think we’ve done something remarkable. The idea that an existing fragment of landscape is less interesting because you don’t have free rein (tabula rasa)—if that’s the phrase—is wrong. It’s more interesting because of the palimpsest, because of the historic depth.
And is this also because you hire historians, who have a special way of articulating those findings?
Maybe so—the discoveries of our historians bring these places to life. But we’re not designing historic gardens or recreating historic landscapes. We’re working within historic contexts to carry their stories into the twenty-first century. And I love doing that.
The Land Is Full: Nelson Byrd Woltz Landscape Architects, Monacelli, 2024
Which part of the profession remains under-theorized?
I think the financial impact of design and well-maintained landscapes in cities is under-theorized. In every public project I’m asking how the site can be cared for, maintained, and valued for generations. When maintenance stops and a landscape becomes derelict, it immediately becomes vulnerable—at risk of destruction, demolition, or development. Theory could help cities understand how well-maintained landscapes contribute to the viability of the city, its profitability, its tax income, its real-estate value, and public health through access to high-quality public space. Many of these factors, if monetized, could demonstrate the value of investment. Some cities—Barcelona is a clear example—have realized that investing in streets and public spaces transforms the city and draws the world in. More theory around how to monetize, argue for, and protect maintenance would strengthen the profession.
We need scholarship on this because I increasingly see municipalities arguing that public landscapes must earn their own income. If you require public landscapes to generate revenue, you end up selling things and experiences to the public, which means corrupting public land with commercial enterprise. That limits access for people who can’t or don’t want to buy something. Over-monetize public space, and you effectively privatize it.
We have to find different ways to acknowledge the income a public park generates for a city—through tax revenue, tourism, quality of life, reduced medical costs. If we can recognize and account for these forms of value in budgeting and planning, we might keep parks free from excessive commercialization. That’s why the issue is urgent.
How do you train people who come into your office to deal with uncertainty and conflict?
Getting recent graduates onto project sites and quickly embedding them in the arc of design and construction is the best way to teach them uncertainty in the landscape. Uncertainty is the inevitable result of experience. Sometimes recent graduates arrive with a remarkable degree of certainty about their knowledge and abilities. We try to expose them immediately to project implementation, construction, and maintenance.
It’s remarkable how quickly they begin to understand how vulnerable our profession is—to drought, flood, storms. With every step of every project, with every layer of experience, you begin to grasp how uncertain the world is, and how uncertain and unpredictable our partner in this work—Nature—can be. The sooner you embrace that and embed it into your design process, the more resilient your work will be.
What should we unlearn as landscape architects?
I would like to see the profession step back from two extremes: design as pure pattern-making, and science (data) emphasized at the expense of art. The best landscape architecture is a fusion of art and science, serving the public realm and the preservation of the planet.
If we reduce landscape architecture to stripes, bands, and blobs, we are making land art—a fascinating field, but not the full scope of our discipline. When landscape architecture tries to be land art, we fail to use the range of tools we have. When we deny messiness, deny uncertainty, deny ecology in favor of holding an unchanging pattern, we avoid the real richness of the profession.
Conversely, when we treat landscape architecture only as restoration ecology, we lose the poetics of design—the part that makes restoration visible, measurable, and meaningful to human experience. That is the role of design. Too often, I see projects that are either purely graphic or purely scientific. The strongest work combines both.
What would be your advice to young landscape architects?
Draw every day by hand, and learn your plants. Learn horticulture—wherever you go, learn horticulture.
Where would you consider to be your natural habitat?
The mountains, forests, and streams of western North Carolina.
How did you find your way into landscape architecture?
Simply put: from farm, to architecture, to Venice, to landscape architecture, to designing farms. That’s a full circle.
As a child, I grew up on a 500-acre working cattle and tobacco farm. I was involved in daily farm chores after school. I went to architecture school only because I didn’t know landscape architecture existed as a profession. I went to architecture school only because I didn’t know landscape architecture existed as a profession. After earning my architecture degree, I moved to Venice, where I worked for an architect for five years. That is where I encountered powerful landscape experiences in an urban environment—one that had none of the elements I thought defined “landscape”: no meadows, forests, farms, or fields. Instead, there were piazzas, campi, streets, bridges, and canals. And I realized you could design the human experience outdoors with meaning and poetics. That was the epiphany that brought me to landscape architecture.
When I returned to the United States to complete my master’s in architecture, I also completed a master’s in landscape architecture—and I’ve never looked back. And interestingly, as the practice has evolved, we’re designing many farms again through regenerative agriculture. I’ve ended up right back in the landscape of my childhood.
