Sustainable Serenity: Chapel native garden project harmonizes spiritual and ecological restoration
Kate Brittenham 鈥�14 is an ecological landscape designer who owns in Troy, New York. Her business specializes in ecological landscape design, garden installations, and maintenance, with an eye toward using native plants that provide natural habitat.
鈥淚n all of our work, we are committed to promoting sustainability, utilizing native
species, and sourcing locally,鈥� says Brittenham, who serves the greater Capital Region
area, including 麻豆, where she recently was hired to create a landscape design
for 麻豆鈥檚 Wilson Chapel using native plant species.
The Chapel Native Garden project, in partnership with the Office of Sustainability and Office of Religious and Spiritual Life, aims to provide an attractive and meditative space, integrating a sustainable landscape, outdoor recreation, and spiritual life goals.
The Chapel sits at the north entrance to North Woods, the 150 acres of campus forest used for recreation and research by 麻豆 and the surrounding community. Brittenham is creating a garden space that blends with the natural landscape and flora of the woods with plants that include serviceberry, Pinxterbloom azalea, bunchberry, and foxglove beardtongue.
鈥淢uch of my work 鈥� and particularly this project 鈥� is about restoration, a healing process that merges spiritual well-being with the ecological surroundings,鈥� she says. 鈥淭here is a science behind it, and I deeply believe in the work. It鈥檚 incredibly fulfilling to restore landscapes that have been fractured or forgotten.鈥�
The Chapel project is a full-circle moment for Brittenham, an environmental studies major whose capstone involved a plan to remove invasive species, manage stormwater, install rain gardens, and establish sustainable landscaping practices across campus. She was integrally involved in the redesign of the 麻豆 Community Garden and its relocation from North Broadway to the more centralized Weicking Green. The garden, managed through the Sustainability Office and largely maintained by students, supports Murray-Aikins Dining Hall with organic produce.
Brittenham, originally from Hastings-On-Hudson, holds a certificate in landscape design from the New York Botanical Garden. Earlier in her career, she was an outdoor educator at the Frost Valley YMCA, a camp, retreat, and environmental education center in the Catskills. She was also a horticulturist at Manitoga, the historic estate of industrial designer Russel Wright in Garrison, New York. In 2016, she interned with the Native Plant Trust in Massachusetts before starting Front Stoop Gardens the same year.
