We’re very excited that Fieldday 2026 will take place at the brand new “Treehouse,” an anchor along the new Greenway in Allston…

Evan Abramson, Landscape Interactions

Rubén Parilla, NOFA/Mass

Anna Gilbert-Muhammad, Pocasset Pokanoket Land Trust

This project addresses some of the limitations of conventional landscape planning as well as the cost prohibitive nature of landscape architecture by offering a series of scalable, replicable design models for biodiversity and climate resilience that can be implemented on a wide range of landscapes. Attendees will explore the nexus between below and aboveground biodiversity and learn practical methods for collaborating with scientists on research and data collection, interpreting science and putting it into practice on a regional scale. We’ll examine how designed native ecosystems offer solutions to both the biodiversity and climate crises; our process of identifying community partners for collaborative planning, design, outreach and implementation; and how we worked with farmers and urban gardeners to build consensus and convert their landscapes to habitat. Two seasons of data on soil health and plant-pollinator networks will be presented, as well as our methods for identifying over 150 native pollinator species at risk of local extinction and the plants that support them. Finally, we’ll showcase a series of scalable, replicable designs that support these species. A wide range of community engagement strategies will be reviewed, as well as our plans for scaling implementation and outreach 2-5 years on.

Nicholas Watkins, CDM Smith 

Michael Dodson, CDM Smith

Tyler Glode, City of Watertown

Two fields of practice, public open space planning and green stormwater infrastructure design, require the same basic ingredient: open space. This presentation will explore two case studies in community design, first from the community planning level, and second at the individual site design level. In New Bedford, MA, the new city-wide green infrastructure implementation strategy uses existing land patterns, life-cycle costs, and environmental justice considerations to develop a prioritized implementation roadmap to maximize stormwater control, improve neighborhoods, and create more resilient, equitable communities. A green infrastructure tool kit was developed to standardize and assist in site selection and implementation of public right-of-way and on-site green infrastructure designs. At Arsenal Park in Watertown, MA, an historic existing public park has undergone a complete redesign under the stewardship of the Watertown Conservation Commission to enhance its heavily programmed public open space amenities while addressing and showcasing the city’s new stormwater ordinance in the process. While the departmental oversite and funding of these two projects began in separate places, the end goals are dynamic, multi-functioning public open spaces that prioritize both public stormwater utility and open space amenities for their respective communities.

Jon Bronenkant, ASLA, City of Sommerville 

Aaron Kraemer, Town of Brookline

Cathy Baker-Eclipse, City of Boston

Cortney Kirk, ASLA, City of Cambridge 

New England power lies in its many cities and towns. The Community Engagement in the Public Sector Panel brings together representatives from four urban municipalities—Boston, Cambridge, Somerville, and the Town of Brookline, Massachusetts—to share their lessons learned from engagement in their communities with public open space projects and community events. Panelists will present four different projects that required extensive public outreach and collaboration. They will illustrate how community engagement and participation influenced the project outcomes, design decisions, and long-term community support after construction.

Through real-world examples, speakers will highlight the outreach tools and engagement strategies they used, discussing what was effective and what was not. The panel will explore common challenges, including reaching all members of the communities to assure equitable representation, what is effective in promoting meetings and events, how to ensure all feedback is received, sustaining engagement throughout a project, handling high levels of participation at events, and growing large annual community programs. Attendees will gain practical insights into building trust and fostering meaningful participation in public-sector park and open space planning, community events, stewardship days, and long-term stewardship of public parks and open spaces.

Kate Kennen, FASLA, Offshoots Inc

Rebecca Kagle, Larry Weaner Landscape Associates

Offshoots and Larry Weaner Landscape Associates share real-world lessons from Boston-area projects that transformed lawn monocultures into thriving, biodiverse meadows. Featuring both public and residential sites—including Blessing of the Bay Park  (Somerville- Offshoots & LWLA), New England Biolabs  (Ipswich- Offshoots & LWLA), Wellesley College Botanic Garden  (LWLA & Offshoots), Mount Auburn Cemetery (LWLA & Parterre), and private landscapes—this session walks through installation, management, and long-term success.

Topics include:

+Saying goodbye to grass (with herbicides—and without)

+Smart seeding: mix design and sourcing

+Live planting approaches

+Soil fundamentals

+Key installation decisions

+Maintenance and adaptive management

+Writing specifications that set projects up to succeed

Kathleen Ogden Fasser, Toole Design

Stephanie Weyer, Toole Design

Designing multimodal streets requires balancing safety, accessibility, user experience, and environmental goals while accommodating diverse travel needs. At the sidewalk level, pedestrians increasingly move across bike lanes and transit spaces in addition to interacting with motor vehicles. This can create challenging conditions, especially for those with mobility, sensory, or developmental disabilities. This session presents best practices for designing sidewalks that support intuitive movement and pedestrian comfort in dynamic multimodal environments.

The presentation begins with a brief overview of how street use has evolved from car-oriented corridors to shared, multimodal places. It draws from the latest national and regional guidance, including PROWAG and three guides that Toole Design authored: the AASHTO Guide for the Development of Bicycle Facilities, the Montgomery County Accessibility Guide, and the Montgomery County Curbless and Shared Street Design Guide. These resources provide deeper insight into pedestrian needs than many local or state standards. Speakers will highlight the unique accessibility challenges faced by people with low vision, mobility devices, and developmental disabilities on streets shared by multiple user types.

Using project examples, speakers will explore tradeoffs within street cross sections and demonstrate how design details can balance operational requirements with social space and environmental goals. 

Haipeng Zhu, ASLA, moderator 

Tao Zhang, FASLA, Sasaki

Kishore Varanasi, cbt

tbd, MASS

As design practitioners, and as immigrants (many of us), we use our imagination and technical skills to offer people of all cultures a better world to live in.

Today, in the midst of economic uncertainty, political pressure globally, and challenges from new technologies, one might wonder: what doesn’t change in design? The answer is simple and enduring: people. People who design, and people we design for.

This discussion will highlight the process of exchange that weaves alongside physical design, to discuss, approaches, thoughts, experiences, challenges, and surprises from design leaders of three local and global design firms about their work with people in and from different areas of the world. 

Cheri Ruane, FASLA, Weston & Sampson

Cassie Bethoney, ASLA, Weston & Sampson

Jennifer Johnson, Nitsch Engineering

Jen Martel, ASLA, Copley Wolff

Laura Knosp, ASLA, Ryan Associates

Senior women leaders share candid, practice-based insights on leading A/E firms through moments of transition. The session names the emotional and invisible labor that sustains firm culture, addresses leadership headwinds, and offers practical strategies for building resilient teams and durable leadership pipelines.

Scott Wunderle, ASLA, Terrigenous

Blake Sanborn, Richardson & Associates

The village of Chester, Vermont has been systematically upgrading its village center with many small projects led by landscape architects that together have had significant impacts on the quality of the community. The village leveraged its own funds, combined with numerous grants and volunteer efforts to create a new pocket park, add to the tree canopy, and install other local amenities.  

Similarly, Maine based landscape architects are helping coastal communities address climate change and sea level rise over time. No matter the size or location, the scope of resilience projects is not solved within one lot line; effective strategies rely on incremental improvement enacted by public and private sector entities over many years. 

This conversation features two landscape architecture practices helping communities plan beyond lot lines, providing tangible, inspiring, and real examples of how many small projects in some of our smaller New England places are adding up to something big.

Christopher Miczek, STIMSON

Leland Wheeler, STIMSON

Arlene Murphy, STIMSON

Stephen Schneider, Northeastern

What begins as a simple circle on a piece of paper ends with a living tree in the ground. That circle represents years of decisions most designers never see— and, possibly, a long list of problems that could have been avoided.

Early collaboration among designers, contractors, and growers leads to more resilient landscapes. Aligning design intent to supply realities can improve tree selection and communicating clear specifications can facilitate installation success.

We'll explore how improved planting practices and early interventions through monitoring protocols create healthier, more resilient sites: how to inspect root systems at delivery, recognize and advocate for trees with good structure, understand what planting depth really means, identify common installation issues and what to monitor for during plant establishment.

John Truscinski, Connecticut Institute for Climate Resilience and Adaptation

Andrew Bohne, Fuss & O'Neill

Beth Kirmmse, Fuss & O'Neill

This presentation examines a community-driven design framework developed through the Resilient CT program for the Fair Haven neighborhood in New Haven and Downtown Mystic in Stonington. Moving beyond standard engagement, these projects utilize a "co-development" model that melds rigorous, science-based analysis with deep local knowledge to craft nature-based solutions (NbS). We will detail how Fuss & O'Neill used multi-day community charrettes and technical modeling of flood risks to ensure adaptation strategies are both ecologically sound and responsive to a community's unique sense of place. Attendees will learn how this dual approach successfully reduces climate risk while strengthening the social and cultural identity of vulnerable urban and coastal landscapes. Rather than construct barriers to the water, the communities chose to embrace the water that is predicted to rise, and to develop transformational concepts where the sense of place will persist that is improved by the proposed adaptations and nature-based solutions.

Anita Berrizbeitia, FASLA, Harvard University Graduate School of Design

Joshua D. Kiehl, John Milner Architects

Jeremy Martin, ASLA, Reed Hilderbrand

Despite its modest footprint in a repurposed greenhouse at Longwood Gardens’ conservatory complex, Roberto Burle Marx’s Cascade Garden, his only extant garden commission in North America, was identified as a critical asset in Longwoods’ collection of gardens created by notable landscape architects.  As part of ‘Longwood Reimagined’, the institution and its team of designers seized the opportunity to protect this landscape by rebuilding the garden —stone by stone, plant by plant— in a new location and in a modern greenhouse enclosure that provides the infrastructure to support its long-term health.  

Panelists will discuss the innovative planning that led to a defensible preservation strategy, as well as the intensive technical documentation process required to carefully disassemble and reconstruct the garden using both original and contemporary construction methods within a new, state-of-the-art enclosure. The conversation will also address how modern accessibility standards were integrated without compromising the garden’s defining spatial and experiential qualities, and how the reimagined Cascade Garden now contributes to the broader fabric of landscapes within the core of the new West Conservatory complex. 

Single family residences cover 2.3 million acres of land in New England. How these landscapes are designed has enormous impacts: directly, downstream, and in the public eye - whether our clients realize these impacts or not. This panel is a conversation among landscape architects leading a variety of residential projects throughout our region: forest/coastal, urban/rural, everyday lot/expansive estate. Panelists will share strategies for integrating climate and ecological responsive solutions, such as stormwater management, native planting strategies, meadows, rewilding, and adaptations to riverine and coastal flooding as well as situations unique to the single family realm, such as: what if there are no regulations? – all the while designing for contemporary families. Drawing on examples from across New England, they will connect scales, issues, and client contexts as they discuss ecological performance, changing perceptions, and “sneaking it in.”

Genevieve Lawlor, Regenerative Design Group

Rachel Lindsay, Regenerative Design Group

Scott Guzman, Diggers Cooperative

Sean Ragan, Halvorson | Tighe & Bond

Worker-owned cooperatives are values-driven businesses that prioritize worker empowerment and democratic decision making. They differ from traditional businesses in that they give all employees, regardless of the role they play in the company, a mechanism to become business owners, participate in profit-sharing, day-to-day operations oversight, and long-term strategic planning.  

Regenerative Design Group (RDG), was founded in 2009 as an LLC with a mission of creating diverse, ecologically resilient, and productive landscapes. After a decade in business, we decided to dedicate time to the long-held goal of worker-ownership, and in 2021 RDG transitioned to a worker-owned cooperative to extend our ecological ethos to its business model. 

Since becoming worker-owned, we have grown our company, profits, and weathered significant staffing challenges. We attribute our ongoing strength in part to our collective refinement of the principles and practices that guide RDG’s governance, day-to-day operations, and studio culture. Today we have nine worker owners, and four employees on the path to ownership. We continue to be invigorated by the radical practice of worker-ownership and workplace democracy, and want to share what we’ve learned with our community.

We are currently in discussion with two other worked-owned cooperative in the landscape design/build field who we hope to welcome to the panel…

Cathy Baker-Eclipse, City of Boston

Chris Osgood, City of Boston

Brandon Kunkel, Weston & Sampson

Gracie Swansburg, Weston & Sampson

In 2018 Boston was inundated by back-to-back nor’easters defined by king tides that brought record breaking coastal surge into the downtown area and became a critical turning point in the city’s approach to urban development. These major storm events proved that urban fill and hardened edges were no longer a match for New England’s weather systems and pushed climate resilience to the forefront of the city’s plans. With guidance from Climate Ready Boston, Boston Parks and Recreation Department quickly became a leader in implementing improvements across coastal sites situated within major flood pathways, including Langone Park and Puopolo Playground, Ryan Playground, and Moakley Park, embracing innovative design strategies like cantilevered decking, creative landforms, reclaimed materials, and subsurface infiltration systems to address the challenges that arise when ever-evolving conditions clash with urbanization, past and present. Living with water is a significant shift from historic urban planning in Boston, but these projects exemplify how strong community partnerships and intentional support from federal, state, and municipal agencies can activate new practices that embrace an inclement reality. Rather than choose between recreational goals or environmental priorities, Boston parks are leading with adaptable designs that accommodate multifunctional programming and inspire more compelling, place-based public spaces.