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A Place of Wisdom:
Interview with Elizabeth Boults
and Chip Sullivan
By Carin Chea
Landscape artists and educators Elizabeth Boults and Chip Sullivan’s newest collaboration, Wisdom of Place, is a dance between the esoteric, the spiritual, the practical, and the playful.
Wisdom of Place: A Guide to Recovering the Sacred Origins of Landscape explores the environment’s power to shape identity.
Though Boults and Sullivan are prominent figures in the fields of environmental design, their book seeks to challenge our perceptions of nature in order to re-discover our sacred bond with the world. Their approach is varied and impossible to pigeon-hole.
Perhaps the following quote from the esteemed authors can do justice to their refreshingly unconventional teachings:
“We find inspiration in science fiction, fantasy, steampunk, old libraries, fine art, fireflies, alchemy, renaissance gardens, natural history museums and other expressions of phenomenological landscape.”
I think you are some of the coolest people I’ve ever met. I know you two teach at university levels. Do you hear this often from your students?
Elizabeth Boults: From the ones that drink our Kool-Aid, yes. The others are probably like, “What are they talking about?”
Chip Sullivan: We have a pretty good rapport with our students. They’ve told us: “There are no other classes in the university like yours.” We do things like (in the spring) get ladybugs from the nursery and celebrate the birth of spring by releasing them. into the plants.
EB: Chip is a seasoned storyteller.
I wish I knew about you two when I was in undergrad.
CS: Thank you. The best thing is when we meet students years after they graduate and hear them say, “I remember what you told me”, which is amazing because I’ve forgotten half the stuff I’ve said. It shows you how critical you can be in students’ lives, how one statement you make can direct them.
EB: Chip is a seasoned storyteller.
How did you get into the field of landscape architecture and environmental design?
EB: It’s a great profession. Still, most people don’t know what landscape architects do and I get questions about rose bushes all the time.
I discovered landscape architecture through working in an architect’s office.
CS: It’s everything but the building. It’s graphic novels and movie making and other kinds of storytelling. I once had a student who’s now a chef and I told him what he was doing was landscape architecture!
EB: My first career goal was to be a high school biology teacher because I had a really influential high school biology teacher and I loved the subject matter. But then I got to college and got a D in organic chemistry and algebra. So I guess I wasn’t going to be a bio teacher!
I studied nutritional sciences as an undergrad, and right out of college worked as a dietician in a hospital. But my passion was art history, and I would read art history books in my office between rounds.
At that time, I learned through a friend about a work-study program at Boston Architectural College [BAC] and it struck me as a profession that bridged art and science.
I enrolled in their program and got a job in the field. What gave me joy was working with civil engineers and landscape architects and seeing what they were doing, rather than what the architects were doing.
So I applied to grad school for landscape architecture and it really transformed my life. It’s so broad of a discipline that you can find your way into it in many different ways. You can make it about stream restoration or environmental art installations.
CS: My dad went to Sacramento Junior College and studied graphic design. He wanted to be an animator for Disney. Growing up, I was always drawing. I’d look through my dad’s portfolios and I’d copy his drawings. I thought I wanted to work for Disney too.
During the energy crisis and the start of the ecological movement I transferred to the University of Florida from junior college because I wanted to move out of the cold northeast. I was looking through the course catalog and I came across landscape architecture.
I saw it was based in ecology, and combining ecology and art really appealed to me. It just felt like the right place to be. I just embraced it. I worked for a large firm in Miami and Boston for about a decade. I never thought I would teach.
My dad even said, “How can you teach? You’re so shy you can’t even order a hamburger!” But, my office mates were saying otherwise. I fell into it accidentally.
And how did you two find each other and become collaborators? [We’d like to leave our personal relationship out of the story if that’s OK!]
EB: To pay for grad school at Berkeley I worked five jobs when I was a student. One of them was being a TA. I really enjoyed teaching and I loved putting together lectures and finding resources and sharing knowledge with others.
So after grad school I got a tenure track job at the University of Kentucky. I was there for three years.
At that time, being a stranger in a strange land, I invited all my favorite professors from Berkeley to come talk at the University of Kentucky, and they did! Chip was one of them. He was also doing summer study abroad, and I went on one of his trips.
We became really good friends. Our creative energies are very compatible.
CS: As collaborators we work really well together. I really liked the work Liz was doing when she was in grad school. She was doing beautiful work.
After she developed her own summer study abroad course, I would come along. We’d always be drawing and talking and collaborating. We started doing research and lecturing together.
For example, when we were in Tuscany, we were fascinated by the many wayside shrines at crossroads and tried to figure out what they were. They’re always dedicated to the Madonna, but they must go back further we thought.
We found out that these shrines at the forks in the road were, at one time, dedicated to Mercury, the messenger of the gods. When you come to a fork in the road, you have to make a decision.
You have to make an offering to the deity, to assure you make the right choice and take the right path. We wrote an article about that. That was our first joint project.
We also both believe in dreams. We wrote an article with our late friend Robert Hewitt who was a landscape architect and Liz’s classmate. We did a three-way dream project and came up with a way to use dreaming as a way to inform the design process.
EB: We also worked together on a history book called Illustrated History of Landscape Architecture. That was fun and challenging. I would write and Chip would draw. We had a fellowship at MacDowell that enabled us to really focus on the work and meet our deadline.
Tell us about Wisdom of Place and what inspired this book.
EB: The foundation of landscape architecture goes way back to the time of the ancients, and the concept called genius loci, or spirit of place. We both believe in that. We really are tree huggers! We love to watch crows and fireflies, and we’re enchanted by rainbows.
Today, people are so far removed from nature. Access to nature has proven to be necessary for our wellbeing. This was really obvious during Covid, when people couldn’t wait to get outside again. We need to get back into nature on a spiritual level.
If you look at myths and legends and folklore from around the world, you can find an environmental message behind them, and that awareness of nature can lead to a better level of care and conservation. There are archetypes of nature that you can distill from folklore and traditional practices.
CS: The spiritual elements of landscape have always been an element in our work. Four or five years ago, my chair wanted me to teach grad students.
I started teaching a class called Sacred Landscapes. I wanted my students to build their own nature-based design vocabulary. I would put four rectangles on a page and ask my students to illustrate four principles that I’d want them to include in their design processes.
At the end of exercise, I looked at the work and said, “These look just like tarot cards.” They all completely agreed and we compiled their drawings into a deck. At its inception, this was to come up with a vocabulary for all these metaphysical elements that could be applied to site design.
EB: We got the idea to bring environmental consciousness through the structure of the tarot.
For example, we interpret the traditional Wheel of Fortune as the Hydrologic Cycle. You can use it to learn about ecology, inspire creativity, or as a metaphor for personal growth. In life, just like in the hydrologic cycle, there are going to be periods of flood and periods of drought.
CS: Right. There’s a whole movement to give personhood to natural features, like rivers. For thousands of years, cultures have worshipped the deities of different landscape archetypes. That impulse is still with us.
For example, you can go to the crappiest shopping mall and inside will be a fountain with coins in it. The first oracle was a sacred well and people would make offerings to it. How many of us still throw coins in fountains?
EB: If you think the river is your mother, you’re not going to pollute it.
That single statement was really effective in getting your point through.
EB: That’s what we’re trying to accomplish with Wisdom of Place. The more people who realize that we are part of the earth and the cycle of life, the healthier the planet will be.
CS: Almost all cultures share similar mythological beliefs. Bringing these out can unify us as a planet. Almost every culture, for example, has a tree of knowledge. It’s embedded in us. You see it in movies and films, like Game of Thrones.
When we look at contemporary examples, like the Hunger Games, you see Katniss Everdeen going into the forest with her bow and arrow, about to shoot a deer, but she doesn’t. Who is she? She’s Artemis. She’s Diana. I don’t even know if the screenwriters realized that.
EB: I think they did.
CS: We both have international students. When we do workshops, everybody creates their own genius loci card and brings their cultural heritage to the exercise. What does the spirit of place mean to you? We’ve learned so much from our students.
What do you think your greatest takeaway from your book is?
EB: To try to regain an understanding of the sacred language of nature. Recognize its magic and mystery and appreciate it.
CS: Re-enchantment. We’ve moved away from the magic of the landscape and mystery of the landscape. There is so much negativity in the world. Let’s reintroduce people to the magic that is around them. Just listen to the wind blowing through the trees.
There are oracles and epiphanies everywhere if we just slow down and pay attention to them.
What advice would you give for someone who is currently unhappy in their environment?
CS: Take a breath. There’s beauty in everything. There is beauty in watching a short order cook make hamburgers, and the way a waiter can move and serve. Even the way the leaves blow across the road or how the rain falls. It’s about being in the moment. Watching anyone do anything well is an art form.
EB: People are a part of nature. If you live in a high rise and can’t see a tree, you can always find community in humanity. We all live under the same sun and moon.
What’s your favorite place in the world?
EB: That changes. We love Italy, but number one on my bucket list has been to go to the Zen Gardens in Kyoto. We did that in May of 2024 and that was life-changing. We were ready to learn Japanese and move to Japan.
CS: We’re fans of Miyazaki films and going to Japan was an eye-opening experience.
We loved the shrines at Nikko. They’re lined with trees that are hundreds of years old. We wove our way up a hill and began to understand the idea of the Shinto belief system, that trees are alive and that sacred trees are conduits for the deities to move between the cosmos and the earth.
EB: In America, it’s a “me me me” mentality. But, in Japanese culture, you realize you’re not the most important being. You respect that you’re part of a community. You don’t litter.
CS: The work that we’ve been doing manifested itself in our book Wisdom of Place and subsequently the publication of the illustrations as a tarot deck and guidebook. It’s a way of opening doors.
We’re hoping that when people look at the book, they’ll become aware of the fact that the landscape is alive, that the landscape has this genius to it, and that has been celebrated throughout history. These deities have always been there.
EB: The book is sincerely from our heart, it’s honest and authentic to who we are. It means a lot to us that people are finding meaning in it.
I wish you two were my professors in college. You’re the best.
For more information, please visit www.TheWisdomOfPlace.com.
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