Southern Influences

The older you get the more you think about what your beginning was like. So that I think the South has a lot of influence in my work. You can see that you’re responding to an environment that you may not have necessarily thought was still present.

I think of the color of plants, spring plants. The color and the presence of trees. Things that were outside that I discovered. If you live in Washington you discover azaleas or you see forsythia for the first time. And at some point of discovery, you think back to the first time that you noticed color in landscape. What were the colors that you see? In the South it would be evergreen, or particularly in Mississippi, that evergreen forest. And it becomes the models for instructing you to do things.