We design ecological landscapes + gardens at a variety of scales: from reimagining a family’s front yard as a pollinator bonanza, to planting a savanna on a city lot, to developing a plan for biodiverse habitat hedgerows on a 50 acre farm.

Based in Ithaca, New York, we work across the bioregion* known as Laurentia—which roughly includes the Northeast, Mid-Atlantic, and the states bordering the Great Lakes.

We work with homeowners, architects and landscape architects, institutions, and municipalities. Sometimes we’re the lead designers; sometimes we’re consultants.

Thicket Workshop? Thicket: because they are complex entanglements of species and time and environment, which is the type of thinking we need more of today. Workshop: because that’s how we think about design: that it requires collaboration, interaction with the material (plants, soil, etc.), and a good bit of tinkering.

Founded by Matt Dallos, Thicket Workshop merges his design and research to create plant-focused, ecological public and private landscapes. Matt has studied design, plants, and landscape history at both Penn State and Cornell.

A few years ago he wrote an article in Places that’s partially about thickets. In 2023, he published a book about the Adirondacks.

*Bioregionalism influences us in two ways. First, it situates our practice within the region’s species, natural and cultural histories, and plant communities. The Adirondacks is quite different than Ridge and Valley in Pennsylvania—but they share echoes, rhythms, histories, repetitions, and processes. We are inspired by what’s the same and by what’s different. Second, it is a reminder to us to not, by default, hew to any dogmatic sense of locality in our projects. We believe strongly in the ecological and cultural values of locally native plants. We also believe the challenges of the twenty-first century demand that we draw inspiration and plant species from a broader geography.