Young Building

Host: Jill DesiminiLocation: YNG 132Webex:s.uconn.edu/psla_seminars (http://s.uconn.edu/psla_seminars)   Before a Plant Arrives on Site: Politics, Migrations, and Possibilities of the Plant Nursery Trade   It's a familiar scene: A tree arrives to the construction site, swaddled in burlap, wrapped with twine, and strapped down to the bed of an eighteen-wheeler after a thousand-mile journey to site. The landscape designer who carefully selected every aspect of it— its genus and species, its caliper, maybe even down to the proprietary cultivar???works with the landscape crew to carefully place the tree— rootball and all—into place, just so. But what geographic relationships, market forces, federal policies, horticultural ideologies, and labor preceded this plant's arrival on site? How are plants in the nursery industry tended, marketed, and transported, and in what ways do those processes delineate who gets to be comfortable and at whose expense? Thinking through a Philadelphia street tree and its expansive terrains of carbon and temperature, this talk traces the uneven heat geographies and politics of exposure inherent to the industrial US nursery trade. Case studies for growing otherwise are analyzed along the axes of labor, carbonized freight geographies, and ecosystem genetics. Leah Kahler is a landscape designer and researcher whose work probes the socioecological legacies of the plantation landscape, focused on urban-rural connections through sites of labor, extraction, and production. Their work attends to the often-invisible dynamics of power, resource, and politics that shape the material processes of the built environment and produce meaning across space. Leah's current project, conducted with support from the Ian L. McHarg Center for Urbanism and Ecology, investigates the socio-ecological geographies of the global plant nursery trade through ethnographic fieldwork and archival methods. Leah earned a Masters of Landscape Architecture from the University of Virginia, where their research as a Benjamin C. Howland Fellow explored the possibilities of an abolition ecology through speculative fictions at the site currently known as the Louisiana State Penitentiary. While at UVA, Leah co-edited the 15 th volume of LUNCH design journal, themed THICK. They were a 2021 Landscape Architecture Foundation Olmsted Scholar finalist, and she received the LAF Honor Scholarship in Memory of Joe Lalli, FASLA. Kahler practiced with Reed Hilderbrand's Cambridge studio, where they played a key role in the design and construction of a 24-acre public park on the Tennessee River in Knoxville. Kahler has taught at the Boston Architectural College and more recently at University of Pennsylvania as the 2024-2025 McHarg Fellow where they received the G. Holmes Perkins Distinguished Teaching Award. They hold a Bachelor of Arts in Anthropology and the Growth and Structure of Cities from Bryn Mawr College.

Conferences & Speakers