Plants Beyond Latin: Un-Memorize the Names

3 units

This course offers a radical departure from conventional landscape architecture pedagogy, which remains rooted in colonial taxonomies and confined regional frameworks. Such approaches fragment ecological understanding by reducing plants to memorized lists, erasing cultural and ecological diversity, disregarding diverse student perspectives, and failing to prepare future designers for global practice. As a result, students often struggle to comprehend plants as integral to global environmental systems, overlooking evolutionary histories and ancestral ties. These approaches ignore colonialism’s impact on plant knowledge, perpetuating disruptions of lifecycles and contributing to the displacement and reintroduction of species reshaping ecosystems and cultural connections. This course instead fosters a critical holistic critical understanding of plants, emphasizing systems across scales. It integrates Indigenous knowledge, enabling students to deconstruct colonial learning, rethink plants beyond taxonomies, and contextualize plant names within territories, and cultural significance. Through lectures, research, and storytelling, students will explore plants’ roles in soil, water, food systems, medicine, making, and construction, as well as their role in climate resilience and ecological restoration. Guest lecturers, both Indigenous and non-Indigenous, will share direct experience working with plants. A core outcome of the course is for students to build a collective, living archive database of plant profiles integrating functions, cultural uses, and interactions. Students will practice creative modes of plant representation through drawing and mapping. By the end of the course, students will be able to contribute to and utilize this archive to support ecological restoration. They will develop plant narratives that emphasize relationships and systems, rather than focusing on traditional taxonomy.