“The only thing we insist on is listening to the land and letting that guide the project.” “We’re not very dogmatic about any of it,” he adds. “It wasn’t this plotted plan to leave and do our own thing, but we did have a few Chinese-food lunches where we discussed the possibility of doing landscape architecture differently,” Peauroi says. Godshall and Peauroi first met in San Francisco, where they were working at the same landscape architecture firm. The garden at the early 20th-century hacienda at Scribe Winery in Sonoma incorporates dramatic native trees among the vineyards. Jones, meanwhile, describes herself as a “dirty hippy” at heart, and wears a similar baseball cap atop her long, blonde braids. Godshall is soft-spoken, bearded, and wears a worn Terremoto baseball cap along with an approachable “we’re just chatting about stuff we love” demeanor. In person, he comes across as anything but strident. When I find Godshall and one of his partners, Jenny Jones, they’re sitting on mismatched chairs in a nook that’s walled off by lots and lots of plants.
In that way, gardenmaking is an inherently political act and a reflection of our individual and collective priorities and values.” In other words, Terremoto is here not only to do what they refer to as “gardenmaking,” but also to make the world a better place, one garden at a time. Like the syllabi you may have gotten in college, theirs is organized by subject: “Climate Change and Ecology,” “Land and Labor,” and “Community, Context, and History.” It’s a document that says things like, “Terremoto believes mirrors of our wider society, reflecting the complex social, ecological, and economic forces that shape our past, present, and future. They give potential clients a “syllabus” on how they work. But they’re also deadly serious about being cool to plants and animals and people, which, yes, makes them even cooler. When someone with a Schindler, Eichler, or Neutra needs a garden, Terremoto is often who they call. They also excel at prestige projects like the historic residential architectural experiment Sea Ranch Lodge, 100 miles south of San Francisco. Terremoto does everything from residential gardens for the creative working class to photo-shoot-ready landscapes for celebrities like Kirsten Dunst and the Beastie Boys’ Adam Horovitz, to corporate jobs such as a 650,000-square-foot project for Dropbox (which was completed right before the COVID-19 shutdown of March 2020), along with the gardens at Platform Park in Culver City. They’ve twice made the AD 100-a list of the top interior and garden designers in the country, while their projects are a heady mix of the humble and the high-end. Godshall and Peauroi have taken on two more partners, Jenny Jones and Story Wiggins, and their offices in Los Angeles and San Francisco employ some 24 staffers, and complete approximately 25 residential and commercial gardens each year.
Sexy gardening combined with seemingly unsexy principles has made Terremoto a huge success. Native bunch grass, Australian shrubs, and other drought-tolerant plants in actor Kirsten Dunst’s Los Angeles garden. This, I find out later, is where Godshall likes to bathe. Meanwhile, in one corner, a clawfoot cast- iron bathtub sits on a humble wood-plank base. A fashionable composter ( yes, there is such a thing) sits under the eaves of a house that’s been painted black. Cross-sawn timber planks from fallen local trees that otherwise would’ve been pulped weave through the yard like mini-bridges for his kids to play on. A dirt path is surrounded by bursts of unruly pitcher sage, sprawling California buckwheat, and Ceanothus ‘Ray Hartman’, all flourishing under the canopy of a Western sycamore. Rather than the composed plants and austere rigor of the poolside landscaping Terremoto designed for actor Mandy Moore, for example, Godshall’s own garden is a tangle of mostly native and low-water plants, placed in a way that seemed haphazard but that the plants seemed to love. What I find is not quite what I was expecting, yet it makes perfect sense.
The day I meet David Godshall, one of the founding members of the progressive landscape architecture firm known as Terremoto, I climb the concrete steps outside his home in East Los Angeles, open a worn hinged gate, and see his garden for the first time.
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