![]() ![]() He has brought me here, to Seven Ponds Farm, to show me the birthplace, some fifteen years ago, of the Conservation Agriculture Studio, his name for the firm’s multifaceted program for designing “working land.” The ConAg approach differs from region to region, but generally, Woltz seeks to make farmland healthier and more productive and, as a result, more beautiful. ![]() ![]() “We design for ecological excellence,” Woltz says. He and his mentor and business partner, Warren Byrd, both Southerners raised to revere nature, exude passion not only for plants but also for the complex biological systems in which they thrive. At forty-five, with not quite two decades of client experience under his belt, he has emerged as a leader among a new breed of landscape architects who put as much stock in science as in art. Landscape architecture has its share of self-important designers who impose their singular vision on nature-who hate being considered glorified gardeners, wear their indifference to horticulture like a badge of honor, and don’t much care what plant you use as long as it can be sheared into a hedge or arranged in a geometric grid. “This idea of decorating the outdoors is not what we do,” he explains. Looks matter, but in his broader, more scientific view of aesthetics, beauty springs from the ecological health of the land. Unlike most, he redesigns farms-working farms-though his chief aim isn’t to pretty them up. Like other landscape architects, Woltz rearranges nature to reflect the hand of man. Before I know it, he’s off again, crunching through the meadow grass to show me something else. His entire ensemble, in fact, appears tailor-made for the overcast day, which heightens the impression that everything I’m seeing is part of Woltz’s master plan. He’s bundled in a three-buttoned topcoat whose gray herringbone perfectly complements not only his purple tie but also the dash of gray at his temples. Woltz, who devised the system, one of many ways he decodes nature, looks on admiringly. I crouch, sight across a steel nib poking up from the center, and identify one of the peaks by aligning it with a scale drawing etched on the map. We walk over to a circular metal map of the horizon perched on a post, like something you’d see at a national park. We pivot west and, for two beats more, absorb the pastoral view below: white Georgian Revival manor house winking from a grove of trees, barn, rolling meadows ringed by woodlands, and, in the distance, the saw-toothed silhouette of the Blue Ridge Mountains. At the top, we pause for two beats to admire atlas cedar native to Algeria and Japanese black pine. ![]()
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