The College of Environment and Design is proud to share that a team of landscape architecture students and faculty have received a 2026 American Society of Landscape Architecture Student Award. The team won a National Honor Award in the Communications category for the project “Root and Relationship: Sharing the Complexities of Planting Design.”
ASLA Professional and Student awards are considered the profession’s highest celebration of innovation, stewardship and design excellence. The awards honor the leading landscape architecture practitioners, designers, and students.
The project, in collaboration with Experience UGA and the Center for Community Design and Preservation, translated planting design research into a hands-on active learning exercise for local Clarke County School District high school students during annual Experience UGA field trips to the college.
For Associate Professor Jessica Fernandez, the project’s strength lies in how the team made its research meaningful and accessible to a younger audience.
“I am proud of this project because it reflects both rigor and generosity,” Fernandez said. “The students translated careful planting research into an experience that helped others see landscapes differently.”
“Root and Relationship” was developed in the LAND 3030 Planting Design Studio and the LAND 6020 Site Application Studio. Advisors for the project were Associate Professor Jessica Fernandez, PhD student Ruiqi Yang and Outreach Director Jennifer Lewis. Students involved in the project include MLA students Emmie Harvard, Aedan Rosolia, Marne Smith, and Abby Burts; MLA alum Rachel Dingley; and now BLA alumni Dailey Jackson and Jessica Spires.
Drawing from months of research conducted across six planting design studios, the team created an interactive exercise to help 10th-grade students understand biodiversity and the relationships connecting plants and pollinators. Illustrated boards featured native flora and fauna, and participants used yarn to connect each plant with its associated pollinator. As the activity progressed, the strands formed a visual web representing the complex, symbiotic relationships among species.
Yang played a key role in translating the team’s ecological research into an approachable visual experience.
“One of the most rewarding parts of the project for me was developing the visualizations and translating complex ecological data into an engaging experience for students,” Yang said. “I’m incredibly proud of what our team accomplished and of the impact the project had on the students who participated.”
Throughout the exercise, CED volunteers encouraged students to look beyond the visual qualities of plants and consider the ecological roles of the plantings they encounter in daily life. Preparing the activity required the team to examine nearly 90 planting combinations and approximately 350 plant species. This year, 275 high school students participated in Experience UGA field trips at CED.
The national awards jury praised both the project’s visual presentation and its ability to engage young learners.
“The presentation of the materials is very clear and beautiful, and the approach to teaching high school students was fun and engaging,” the jury said.
Learn more about our ASLA National Student Honor Award
Learn more about Experience UGA and how you can get involved!
