Consultant
Owner of Two Branches Consulting, LLC
I am a Certified Planner (AICP No. 022106) under the auspices of the American Institute of Certified Planners, offering land use consulting services. My work experience includes 14 years as an environmental consultant, 12 years as a municipal planner for both cities and counties, six years as a forestry land use administrator, and seven years as a land use consultancy owner. Since I have extensive experience on both sides of the public counter, I know how best to help you with the preparation and filing of land analyses and development permits and I can guide you through local, state, and federal application labyrinths. My clients include land trusts, public agencies, developers, and people like you.
Author
Be Happy Forever? Make a Garden!
A Quirky Plant-Based Memoir and Guide to Making Gardens and Understanding Plants
Published March 15, 2021. Available in paperback at Amazon.com
If you have ever planted more than your foot in a garden, then you are ready to go beyond everyday gardening books and landscaping manuals, which tend to just stick to the facts. Be Happy Forever? Make a Garden! is certainly informative, but is entertaining, humorous, and irreverent and will inspire you to stretch the limits of your imagination. It provides the most important technical information about creating gardens and landscapes, but also spins tales and espouses philosophy intended to foster deeper and more rewarding connections to the world of plants, all light-heartedly couched in eccentric and self-deprecating humor.
I speak from more than 40 years of professional experience making, renovating, and tending gardens in highly diverse climates and settings, including Hawaii, six states on both U.S. coasts, and New South Wales, Australia. I have worked as a landscape gardener, designer, arborist, consultant, teacher, lecturer, garden-show radio personality, and garden-club writer. I studied classical Bonsai under Yuji Yoshimura at the Bronx Botanical Garden for three years, and I was an ISA Certified Arborist for 10 years, with Tree Risk Assessment Qualification. I also earned a master’s degree in geography from the University of California at Davis with a specialty in plant geography, which involves the myriad relationships between people and plants (I not only talk to the trees but also teach them to read maps;)
After Be Happy Forever? Make a Garden!, my next book in progress traces the roots of tree-dwarfing far deeper than anyone has yet ventured. You can come along on my odyssey and you don’t even have to get dirt under your fingernails. Since I will be revealing how bonsai got so tiny, it may be a relatively small book…