Landscape Architecture Portfolio by Diana Nightingale

Landscape Architecture

Portfolio Diana Nightingale

A little bit about me . . .

With my background and training in plant sciences, horticulture, interpretation, and landscape architecture, it is my dream to design and steward a diverse range of landscapes that make our world safer for our communities, invites people back into the habitats that support and heal them, and protect local flora and fauna while teaching about the wonder they can inspire in our lives. Stewardship is a journey and an adventure, and it is a blessing to have the opportunity to bring others along the way.

Selected Works 3

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Learning from Animal Adaptations to Wildfire

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Rain Garden, Descanso Gardens

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Waterscape

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Leavey Lawn

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Ranching in the New West

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Cemetery ‘Moo’-sicologies

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Clarifying Wetlands

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Sacred Datura

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Camellia Displays, Descanso Gardens

Learning from Animal Adaptations to Wildfire Awarded a 2022 ASLA Student Honor Award in Analysis and Planning Presented at the 2023 American Public Gardens Association Conference

Over the past century, wildfires have become more frequent and severe than the historic fire regimes of the San Gabriel Mountains of Los Angeles County, California, causing biodiversity loss of fire-sensitive species, debris flows that severely damage or obliterate rare, local aquatic habitats, and habitat type conversion to non-native dominated grasslands fueling even larger and more frequent fires. With increasingly high budgets dedicated to protecting our communities and reducing fire severity and frequency through firefighting, community hardening, fuel breaks, and fuel clearance, we are still not able to keep pace with this increasingly severe hazard. We need to seek alternative strategies.

We started wondering how wildllife respond to and have adapted with wildfire over millenia, and we were intrigued by the diversity of adaptations we found all over the world. Narrowing in on species native to our study region, we likewise found that each species responds in slightly different ways during and after a wildfire. This research is still new and forthcoming, but this made us wonder what our native fauna could teach us on how our

Design Team Location Project Type Instructors Project Years

Diana Nightingale and Andrea Binz Monrovia Community Wilderness Preserve, San Gabriel Mtns, CA Research, Landscape Design, Land Stewardship Aja Bulla-Richards and Greg Kochanowski 2021-2022, MLA+U Capstone Project

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interactions with our local habitats could alter fire severity and habitat recovery.

After a semester of research and analysis, we decided to focus in on four ecosystem engineers: beavers, woodpeckers, fire-following beetles, and ground squirrels, each of which has profound impacts on their local habitats before, during, and after wildfires.

But more than just studying them from afar, we also wanted to try to see the landscape through their eyes. We wanted to try to think like them.

While not native to the San Gabriel Mountains specifically, but historically native to the state, beavers’ dam-building activities reshape streams and rivers into vaster percolating wetlands that studies have shown resist burning during wildfires.

Woodpeckers are some of the first animals to return to a burned site as they forage for fire-following beetles. They create nesting cavities in the damaged and dying trees that are later used by secondary nesters, helping to repopulate and jumpstart habitat recovery.

Fire-following beetles’ reproductive cycles are timed with local fire seasons, and they can sense smoke or heat from burning trees miles away, following it to the still burning sites. They then mate and lay eggs in the still smoldering ashes or colonize badly burned and dying trees. Their tunneling activities help to break down the dead timber and recycle the nutrients back into the soil.

Ground squirrels’ extensive burrowing turns over soil and mixes nutrients throughout

the soil layers. This activity and the burrows themselves allow for better stormwater capture, percolation, and soil water holding capacity. And like the cavities woodpeckers create, their burrows are used by secondary occupants who cannot burrow themselves, providing them with shelter, nesting space, and protection during future fires.

The seed caches they store all add to the soil seed bank that sprouts after a fire.

From this research, we asked how could we learn from these animals’ adaptations and responses to wildfire to reimagine the postfire landscape as an opportunity and catalyze regeneration of habitat niches to support ecological resilience before, during, and after future fires?

We developed a series of goals inspired by these ecosystem engineers to develop a new framework for coexisting with fire. The beavers taught us the importance of increasing and retaining soil moisture. The woodpeckers taught us the value of creating a mosaic of different ecosystem types to support different species. The beetles taught us the importance of supporting a cycle of destruction and rebirth a dynamic stability. And ground squirrels taught us to focus on supporting the soil ecosystem.

We chose the Monrovia Hillside Wilderness Preserve as a test site for how to develop site-appropriate strategies guided by our design and land management goals.

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This is a beloved community-managed preserve that was partially burned in the massive 2020 Bobcat Fire. While burned sites remained closed, we were able to access a small valley called Cloverleaf which is at the intersection of several key habitat types including chaparral, oak woodlands, and grasslands. It is also characterized by a cross-section of topographic conditions and site challenges representative of the larger San Gabriels.

These include steep slopes, narrow canyons, degrading roads and trails, and valleys. For each of these topographies, we wanted to reduce heavy erosion, capture and percolate stormwater, provide some natural protection against the worst ravages of future fires, and create niche habitat opportunities above and below ground.

Wildfires create huge amounts of “waste” materials in the

form of soil, boulders, and burned timber which are traditionally removed off site, but we wanted to find a way to reuse those waste materials on site within our strategies.

It was also important to us that this project engaged local community groups and organizations in the installation, management, longterm monitoring and maintenance, and reassessment of these strategies. Groups would include the already large volunteer base, the city of Monrovia, local fire departments, Forest Service, CalFire, local native nurseries, and many others.

The seven strategies we created key into the different challenges of each topography, reuse waste materials, and reshape the land through natural processes over time.

On the upper, very steep slopes and narrow canyons, zeedyk structures and infiltration matrixes are installed using reutilized boulders.

They reduce erosion and slow stormwater while capturing it behind the zeedyks for increased percolation. Seeds that get trapped behind them germinate, helping to further minimize erosion and improve water capture and uptake.

Currently degrading roads and trails are redesigned to serve multiple purposes including maximizing percolation and reducing severe erosion that they traditionally receive during heavy storms. The roads are lined by mulched and planted bioswales that capture water running off the slopes, allowing the water to infiltrate into a carefully designed percolating road typology. The steep slopes are braced by reused timber terracing offset to disperse and slow water runoff. They provide nesting niches while native seeds germinate in the cracks and crevice, stabilizing the slopes as the timber disintegrates. Meanwhile, planted berms on the outer edge improve user safety, channel water into the bioswales, and attract burrowing animals.

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Downslope from the roads, installations of burned timber are dug into the soil column to increase percolation and serve as niche opportunities for animals returning to an otherwise barren landscape. As the wood breaks down, it absorbs water, returns organic matter to the soil column, and feeds soil organisms while providing habitat for timber-nesting and sheltering animals.

Further downslope, percolation corridors are created through small processes of cut and fill, disrupting small areas of otherwise hydrophobic top soil layers. Small meandering berms are constructed with the mixed soils and are planted. They are braced by reused boulders. The new topography collects water as it moves downshill and attracts wildlife including burrowing animals who further improve water capture. And as plant roots grow, they hold soil in place, absorb additional water, and support a redeveloping soil ecosystem.

In the valleys, the huge amount of soil and debris from debris flows could be reused to create winding, planted mounds that would slow and disperse fast-moving stormwater. As the plants grow, they will attract more wildlife while their roots stabilize the soil and absorb additional water. The fluctuating topographies create ideal places for burrowing animals to create their new underground tunnel systems where they store collected seeds adding to the soil seedbank. Their tunnels are used by many secondary occupants for years into the future while also aiding in water capture.

Also in some of the valleys with more regular creeks, sequences of post-assisted log structure could slow and infiltrate water during heavy winter storms, raising the groundwater table and protecting the area from future burns creating safe havens for some animals during fires. The widened streams and creeks enhance habitat for waterfowl and amphibians such as the endangered yellow-legged frogs. Eddies and pools that form around the log structures create breeding habitat for animals like dragonflies and newts.

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Rain Garden A California-Native Plant Palette For a New Bioretention Basin That Also Provides for Wildlife

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Designer Location Project Type Project Years

Diana Nightingale Descanso Gardens Planting Design and Landscape Stewardship October 2022 - present

Waterscape Protecting Oakwood Against Future Sea Level Rise

Location Project Type Instructors Course

Oakwood, Venice, CA Urban Design Esther Margulies, Christof Jantzen Arch Studio 531, Fall 2020

Oakwood, a small community located in Venice, CA, is one of

projected that by the dawn of the 22nd century, the sea level

the few historic communities where African Americans were

may rise up to 10 ft which would regularly inundate at least

able to settle in the early days of Los Angeles’ development

a third of the community. Current residents have noted that

and create a safe community of their own. Today, many

since they were children in the post-war decades they have

families still call it home having lived there for generations, but

seen Oakwood suffer from high water tables and occasional

their community, their memories, and their ability to hold onto

tidal flooding. As climate change could also encourage

their ancestral homes are threatened by numerous factors

stronger storms, tidal surging could cause much greater

one of the most ominous being a rapidly rising sea level. It is

inundation than projected.

This project seeks to bolster the community against these future disasters by taking inspiration from the neighborhing Venice Canals and the hypothesis that we are able to find a way to live with water.

A network of circulating canals will allow sea water to regularly rise into the community in a contained manner, while a second system of upland green canals and wetland parks will provide additional infrastructure to absorb the rising waters of storm surges.

A parallel system of bioswales will also collect rainwater runoff which will be captured, filtered, and recycled for additional grey water uses such as irrigation. But if this bioswale system reaches its maximum capacity, it is able to release additional water into the upland wetland parks.

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Leavey Lawn New Design for an Underutilized Campus Green Space

Generations Fountain

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Location Project Type Instructor Course

Leavey Lawn, USC Landscape Design Esther Margulies Planting Design, Fall 2021

A large, underutilized grassy lawn that is partially fenced off throughout the year is reimagined as a student recreational space that also provides for greater stormwater capture. Largely native plantings border the edges of grassy areas used for gatherings and recreation, and a central bioswale captures and percolates stormwater runoff. New pathways are installed to improve access and allow people to easily cross over the bioswales throughout the seasons.

Ranching in the New West Exploring the Relationships Between Soil Health, Ranching, Oil Drilling and Habitat Conservation in Monterey and San Benito Counties, California

In landscape architecture, we are often preoccupied with designing for the immediately visible elements of the landscape, and may not think as deeply about how to design for what lies deep below. In this second year studio we were asked to look below the surface of the soil and to design with and for longterm soil health. We began this studio with a long research inquiry. Each student was asked to choose a lens through which to explore soils and soil health.

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I chose to look at it through the lens of economics and how it influences land use.

My background training and experience is in botany, horticulture, and environmental history. These lenses allowed me to ask how major territorial wars, landscape management practices, legislative decisions, and philosophical movements over approximately 400 years of

Project Type Instructor Course

the United States’ currently known history likely impacted our nation’s soil health. I sought to represent this somewhat abstractly as a kind of moving timeline where these different events, decisions, and changing ideals came together to influence the ways in which we either caused harm to or provided protection for soil biota and diversity found throughout the country.

Research and Analysis Aroussiak Gabrielian, PhD Studio 542b, Spring 2020

Drawing upon this foundational knowledge, I decided to focus my next inquiry on the agricultural and ranching communities around Monterey Bay, a region that has special importance to me as well as an incredible diversity of land uses.

The Challenges of Ranching in a Changing Landscape

California has a rich history of ranching, and dairy continues to be one of the state’s largest agricultural products. Cattle grazing can impact soil health in a variety of ways depending on the strategy used with regenerative and intensive rotational grazing methods proving to be much better for both soil and the cattle’s health. Ranchers are increasingly trying to switch to these healthier grazing strategies, but are doing so in an increasingly harsh market in which most are barely able to survive. To make ends meet without losing their ranches, many have to look for outside work or lease their land for other uses including oil drilling or development. Williamson Contracts and Conservation Easements are helping many by reducing their expenses, preserving their lands, and encouraging habitat-conserving grazing methods.

Risks of Soil and Water Pollution

The Salinas Valley Watershed is home to one of the most productive agricultural and ranching corridors in the nation. This vast watershed feeds the remarkably diverse ecosystems off Monterey Bay which were designated a National Marine Sanctuary in 1992. But by that time, these marine habitats had already experienced some major degradation due to years of pollutant runoff. To better protect these habitats, a Memorandum of Agreement was signed the same year between 8 state and federal agencies to develop the Water Quality Protection Plan. This plan created a network of organizations that established protocols for reducing and regulating point and non-point sources of pollution. This map shows how sources of pollutants coincide with areas prone to high erosion and flood risks that increase chances of environmental damage.

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Drilling Activity May Threaten Agricultural and Ranchland Preservation

Below this landscape lies the vast Monterey Shale encompassing one of the largest oil reserves in the United States. It formed around 6 mya when this portion of California was a part of a large sea floor. Over thousands of years, diatoms fell to this sea floor creating thick layers of their skeletons which were gradually covered with a rich silt. As that silt built up to a thinkness of around 10,000 ft it created such high pressure and heat that their skeletons turned into the hydrocarbons we now depend on. This deposit was discovered in the late 19th century, but due to its geological complexity it was not possible to extract much oil from it until the early 2000s when new technologies and methods including fracking and acidization made it more accessible. As a result, it is now more profitable to sell or lease lands for drilling purposes.

Well-Stewarded Ranchland Can Help Preserve Critical Habitat

The ranchlands that still cover significant portions of Salinas, San Benito, and Monterey Counties overlap with habitats critical to many threatened and endangered plant and animal species such as the Kit Fox (Vulpes macrotus mutica) and the Purple Amole (Chlorogalum purpureum). Contrary to popular thinking, ranching when carried out strategically can actually protect critical habitat and promote soil health. But when these same lands are sold or leased out to be converted to other purposes such as development or oil drilling, these habitats are at risk of being lost. Some ranches such as the TomKat Ranch are grazing their land strategically and monitoring how it affects soil health and biology.

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Soil Health and Deep Section of a Changing Landscape

The owners of grazing lands are less and less able to hold onto their lands, and therefore, more likely to sell or lease their lands to others that would convert them to development, intensive agriculture, or oil drilling which would disrupt remaining habitats and damage soil health and fertility. Cattle grazing when carried out regeneratively carries on the ungulate niche habitat role by breaking up the soil surface with their hoofs, allowing increased water percolation and the mixing of cattle waste and organic plant materials into the soil column, improving C and N sequestration and water capture and retention during the driest of seasons. Similarly, the burrowing keystone species of local native habitats support a richer soil biodiversity and higher levels of organic matter content, C and N sequestration, and water retention.

Cemetery ‘Moo’-sicologies Protecting Central Californian Ranchers’ Livelihoods Through the Integration of Regenerative Ranching

Strategies, Green Burials, and Acoustic Landscape Design

Location Project Type Instructor Course

Salinas Valley, CA Design and Stewardship Aroussiak Gabrielian, PhD Studio 542b, Spring 2020

Drawing upon the research we had been conducting in our chosen region up to this point, we were asked to think about how alternative burial ceremonies and rites could be implemented to help promote soil health and engage with local communities and economies. In this changing landscape, I wanted to find ways to help ranchers retain their lands, livelihoods, and ways of life while further incentivizing them to pursue more regenerative land stewardship strategies such as rotational-intensive grazing.

Salinas Valley is one of the most productive

Green burials allow us to return our bodies to the local ecosystem in a manner that safely and gradually releases nutrients, salts and moisture which enrich the soil ecosystem.

My project looks at how a green burial system can be integrated into a long term holistic, rotational grazing system to improve the health of local grazing land, in return, the financial stability of local ranchers and the continued protection and responsible stewardship of the habitats that call these lands home.

My project design further explores how an

agricultural regions in California, but it is riddled with obstacles in controlling soil erosion and water pollution which endanger our food supply, local ecosystems, and the neighboring Monterey Bay National Marine Sanctuary. And as the valley’s population grows, conventional ways of preserving and burying the deceased only compounds the region’s pollution problems and habitat loss.

Cattle ranching also has a long history and heritage in this valley and may prove to be an important part of the solution to this region’s growing pollution and environmental concerns. When properly managed, grazing livestock help enrich and maintain a healthy soil ecosystem and grassland biodiversity. But between an unpredictable market and escalating property values, cattle ranchers are struggling to hold onto their land and way of life.

acoustically performative landscape can improve the experience of music during the mourning process, create memorable and beloved community spaces, while tapping into a growing awareness of the power of music to improve cattle health and dairy production.

The Process

Residents of local communities could invest in their local ranches by being part of Community Beef and Dairy Co-ops.

This engagement and financial and emotional investment in the ranches improves local ranchers’ security. They will be building a community they know wants to see them succeed.

Ranchers could further encourage this investment by offering additional resources such as tours, workshops, maintained

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hiking trails, and newly designed sites to lay their deceased loved ones and celebrate their memory.

With this growing income and outside investment, these new burial ground sites would take shape in the form of a terraced landscape shaped out of a previously very steep and largely underutilized hillside on ranch land. This form of landscape design has been used for millenia all around the world to make similarly steep landscapes highly accessible for a wide range of uses.

Each terrace provides secure places for green burials and multiple routes to improve accessibility for different individuals and for cattle in the future. The infrastructural design of the terraces includes concave regions to maximize its acoustical qualities.

While not necessary for the security of the terraces, improving the acoustic qualities of the site can encourage family members of the deceased to celebrate and remember their loved ones through music and song. This need not be a landscape of sorrow, but one of joy, celebration, and memorycreation.

An additional benefit of this acoustical design is that it can also benefit the health of the cattle grazing below. It has been known for centuries that cattle have a particular interest in the music that we create. It intrigues them, and some studies have shown that regular exposure to music can improve their health and, in turn, the quality of milk they produce.

After the construction of the site is complete, the soil is stabilized, and initial plantings of native flora are beginning to establish, the site will be open for community members to begin to visit and lay their deceased loved ones following a green burial practice so as to ensure their return to the earth is safe for the local environment and decomposition will 29

take place quickly. Loved ones have the opportunity to plant additional native plants on their loved one’s grave and return and pick flowers from them in the future to take home.

For the first 10 years, the site will be open for receiving burials.

The site will then close to burials for the next 5 to 10 years to allow for complete decomposition of the bodies, while the site remains open for visitors.

Approximately 20 years into the site’s lifespan it will then be integrated into the rancher’s holistic, rotational grazing system. Only portions of the site will be grazed if deemed appropriate. The more gentle side slopes (maxing out at 30 degree slopes) leading up to each terrace makes it a more agreeable space for all cattle to traverse the site. The site will be integrated into this rotational system for around 10 years. Between short grazing periods, community members can return to the site to visit their loved ones or hold events including concerts which the cattle would enjoy as well!

After this period of integration into the rotational grazing system, the site will be reopened to receive new burials for another 10 to 15 years.

With each of these cycles, the soil ecosystem is maintained and habitat is created to support local wildlife. In the meantime, the ranchers’ livelihood is made more secure, their cattle live healthier lives, and they play an integral role in creating new sacred community spaces for residents to remember their loved ones and celebrate the gift of love and the cycle of life, death, and rebirth.

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Acoustically-Performative Terraces

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Clarifying Wetlands A Topographical Exercise in Creating Clarifying

Wetlands that Provide Much Needed Bird Habitat

Location Project Type Instructor Course

Exide Plant, Vernon, CA Post-Remediation Wetland Design Takako Tajima Arch Studio, Spring 2019

In this first year studio, we were learning how to read and create new types of topographies that served different purposes. Our professor asked each of us to create new topographies that reflected a word or phrase we drew from a hat. Mine was ‘waves and ripples.’ I was inspired by the kinetic energy inherent in waves and ripples, and the forms left behind from the force of this energy on different materials. Working by hand with textiles and allowing them to layer, wrinkle, collide, and ripple evoked similar forms I see in different landscapes as a result of this kind of energy enacted on soil and rock. I translated these different textile pieces into new topographies, zooming into the fine details of some to see their intriguing microtopographies.

Drawing upon these topographies, we were asked to create a wetland habitat for aquatic birds on the site of the future, post-remediated site of the Exide Plant in Vernon, California. In an earlier project, we were asked to find ways to remediate the soil on this site. Now we looked decades into the future and asked how could the topographies we created inspire a new wetland habitat on this site.

Water currently flows through the site on a north-south trajectory through an underground channel. Stormwater would continue to pass through this future site in the same direction. I drew upon these four topographies to create as much filtration and soil-to-water contact as I could in creating a series of rising and falling bioretention basins that would each serve to clean the stormwater entering the site along its journey. The shallow, planted banks of the basins and islands each provide a wealth of habitat niches to support different native plants and bird species.

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Sacred Datura A New Design for USC’s Crocker Plaza Inspired by

the Landscapes and History of the Channel Islands

Crocker Plaza, USC Courtyard Design Alexander Robinson Studio, Fall 2018

Crocker Plaza is a quaint, but heavily underutilized courtyard

new courtyard design, celebrating this shared cultural and

that sits outside USC’s Law School. It consists of a central

environmental heritage among these lands.

fountain surrounded by benches. During times of water

I envisioned expanding upon the already present

shortages, this fountain is often turned off. It’s full sun

water infrastructure of the courtyard by creating a shallow

exposure also makes it an uncomfortable space to sit in much

wading pool over which would be scattered raised planting

of the day. With these issues in mind, our professor asked us

beds representing the different islands. These would be

to imagine a new design for the plaza inspired by recent visits,

framed by a wall fountain to the south, and a series of tiered

research, and design experience we had in relation to Catalina

and expansive planting beds to the north representing the

Island, California.

coast and inland of California. Connecting these different

Catalina Island is one of 8 islands off the coast of

planting areas and providing areas for walking, sitting, and

California that make up the Channel Islands. In my research

mingling would be intertwined stone and timber platforms

about this island chain, I was touched by the stories the

that descend successionally between the ground level of the

Gabrielino-Tongva and Chumash shared of the historical

surrounding campus walkways and the lower pool.

voyages they would regularly make between the islands and the main land. I wanted to share a little bit of that story in this

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Location Project Type Instructor Course

A thin layer of water no deeper than 1 or 1.5 inches would run along the base of the wading pool. Water would be

fed to the pool through two wall fountains to the north and

spiritual and ceremonial purposes. Just like datura, these

south, and would exit through thin grates running along the

different beds representing the islands and mainland

edges. These wall fountains could include mosaics, tiles, or

California would include plant species native to each. But they

other pieces of artwork made water and weather resistant

would also include species that are endemic only to certain

and which could be created and chosen by members of the

islands or regions of coastal California. In this botanical way,

Gabrielino-Tongva and Chumash communities to represent

they are both distinct and interconnected.

stories and histories that they wished to share.

As a kind of botanical symbol to guide a planting

Shade is such an important public safety feature in all design projects in Southern California, and therefore,

palette, I chose the beautiful and sacred Datura plant (Datura

it was important that tree beds be designated strategically

wrightii) which is one species that can be found growing on

throughout the plaza design to ensure comfortable places to

almost all the islands and the mainland. It was used skillfully

sit at all times of the year.

and carefully by the Gabrielino-Tongva and Chumash for

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Camellia Displays Yearly Displays and Mini-Exhibits that Interpret Evolving

Stories of Descanso Gardens’ Historic Camellia Collections

Location Project Type Project Years

Descanso Gardens Display/Exhibit 2021-2023

2023

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2022

The Ecology and Diversity of Camellias

Drawing together a wide diversity of recently donated species (with deep gratitude to Nuccio’s Nurseries), I explored the wide range of habitats camellias come from, new discoveries, new hybridizing pursuits, and current conservation concerns.

Camellia Flower Forms

In this display I introduced our visitors to the incredible diversity of camellia flowers, identification categories used to define them, and fun anomalies.

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Diana Nightingale

Landscape Architecture Portfolio Contact dianalnightingale@gmail.com