Annual Create Beauty Design Conference
Each year, Tree of Life Landscapes hosts its Create Beauty Design Conference, Colorado’s premier conference exploring the intersection of beauty, sustainability and biodiversity for residential and community outdoor spaces. With speakers like Rick Darke, Roy Diblik, Thomas Rainer, and Kevin Williams, the conference showcases leading voices and ideas in landscape design and Horticulture.
Apiary Studio 2025
Martha Keen and Hans Hesslein of the Philadelphia based design firm have been vanguards of regenerative landscaping in recent years with their creative approach to sustainability. With a focus on environmental stewardship, their thoughtful approach to garden design often makes use of otherwise discarded materials
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OUR SPEAKERS:
Carrie Preston
2024
Orchestrating the Garden: Using Space to Tell a Story
Carrie Preston is a landscape designer based in the Netherlands. Awarded “Designer of the Year” in 2016 by the Association of Professional Landscape Designers, Carrie specializes in spacial organization, creating aesthetic, cohesive and yet highly functional spaces. Despite her international accolades, Carrie’s gardens are intimate and nuanced both in shared and private spaces.
Thomas Rainer
2023
Rebuilding Abundance: Creating Dynamic Plant Systems
Thomas Rainer is a registered landscape architect, teacher, and author living in Arlington, Virginia. Thomas, a leading voice in ecological landscape design, has designed landscapes for the U.S. Capitol grounds, the Martin Luther King, Jr. Memorial, and The New York Botanical Garden, as well as over 100 gardens from Maine to Florida. He is a celebrated public speaker who has garnered acclaim for his passionate presentations to audiences across the U.S. and in Europe. Thomas serves as a Principal for the landscape architectural and consulting firm Phyto Studio in Washington, D.C.
Thomas received his Masters Degree from the University of Georgia. Thomas has worked for the firms Oehme, van Sweden and Associates, and was most recently a Principal at the landscape architectural and planning firm, Rhodeside & Harwell. He has a broad range of experience in project types ranging from intimate residential gardens to expansive estates, rooftop gardens, botanical gardens, large-scale green infrastructure design & implementation, and national memorials. His work has been featured in numerous publications, including The New York Times, Landscape Architecture Magazine, The Washington Post, The Chicago Tribune, and Architectural Digest.
Kevin Williams
2022
New Visions for Colorado Gardens: A Workshop on Plants, Seeds and Wild Systems
Denver Botanic Gardens Assistant Curator, Kevin Williams will speak and lead a workshop on designing a wild-systems driven approach to Colorado plant design and installation.
At Denver Botanic Gardens, Williams stewards The Steppe Garden, Conservation Garden, Lilac Collection, Dwarf Conifer Collection, The Josephine Streetscape (a two-block long, hypernaturalistic steppe garden), Summerhome Garden (a xeric, high-design pocket park) and is a coordinator for the Horticulture Internship Program.
Williams holds an MS in Public Horticulture from the Longwood Graduate Program in Public Horticulture at The University of Delaware and a BA in the History and Philosophy of Science from Bard College. Williams worked as a Gardener on The High Line in Manhattan and studied as a Horticulture Intern at Brooklyn Botanic Garden.
Williams has been exploring, hiking, designing, and plant collecting in Western North America since 2015.
Thomas Rainer
2021
Making Sense of Our Place: Plant Design in a Local Context: Coming June 26, 2021
A leading voice in contemporary landscape design, Rainer spoke on designing, creating and managing dynamic herbaceous plantings within a local context. He will discuss concepts such as using stress as an asset, vertically layered plantings, how to both mingle and mass plants and much more.
Rainer's 2015 book, "Planting in a Post-Wild World: Designing Plant Communities for Resilient Landscapes," co-authored with Claudia West, was selected by the American Horticultural Society as one of the 2016 books of the year.
Rainer is a Principal with landscape architecture firm Phyto Studio in Washington D.C. and also teaches plant design at George Washington University. Rainer is known for his designs of the U.S. Capitol grounds, the Martin Luther King Jr. Memorial, the New York Botanical Gardens, and many sites throughout the Eastern U.S.
Roy Diblik
2019
Intimacy by Design: Exploring the Relationship of Plants and People
At the 2019 conference, Roy Diblik discussed the intimate relationships between plants, design, and people and shared the workings of his own design process. He is an author, designer, and plantsman who owns Northwind Perennial Farm and is known for his design work at the Art Institute of Chicago, the Shed Aquarium, and the Lurie Gardens at Millennium Park, co-designed with Piet Oudolf. His garden designs emphasize plant relationships to stewardship strategies and costs, and his book, “The Know Maintenance Perennial Garden” explore these theories further.
Film Showing // Five Seasons: The Gardens of Piet Oudolf — To kick off the conference, this documentary explored the gardens and approach of renowned landscape designer, Piet Oudolf, who is best known for his work on the High Line in New York City and the Millennium Park in Chicago.
Rick Darke
2018
Elevating the Nature of Modern Landscapes
This workshop drew its title from Rick Darke’s book “Gardens of the High Line: Elevating the Nature of Modern Landscapes,” co-authored by renowned garden designer, Piet Oudolf. The conference explored the principles of designing for wildness and beauty while attending to regional environmental concerns as the population booms.
Rick Darke is a design consultant, author and photographer. His work is grounded in an observational ethic, blending art, ecology, horticulture and cultural geography. His projects include parks, post-industrial sites, transportation corridors, conservation developments, botanic gardens and residential landscapes. Darke’s additional books include, “The Encyclopedia of Grasses for Livable Landscapes,” “The Living Landscape: Designing for Beauty and Biodiversity in the Home Garden,” co-authored with Doug Tallamy.