Landscapes of Retreat

Rosetta is a landscape architect dedicated to expanding the relationship between people and plants. She is the Principle of Practice Landscape, academic director of Pratt Institute’s School of Architecture Master’s in Landscape Architecture (MLA) program, and an Associate of The Arnold Arboretum at Harvard University. Rosetta’s work considers living environments with a particular focus on plant life and climate change. Rosetta teaches planting design, fieldwork, and seminars that advance a theory of plant life between ecology and horticulture. In her work, Rosetta engenders access to plant knowledge by prioritizing public exhibitions, living installations, maintenance plans and open access publishing. Among her awards, Rosetta is the recipient of the 2018 Garden Club of America Rome Prize in landscape architecture, The Harvard University Climate Change Award, and has received support ranging from The Graham Foundation for the Arts to the Rockefeller Foundation.

She is author and co-author of books, articles, book chapters, and monographs including Plant Life: The Entangled Politics of Afforestation (University of Minnesota 2022), how afforestation reveals the often-concealed politics between humans and plants. Landscapes of Retreat (K.Verlag 2023), portraits of climate adaptation. Tiny Taxonomy (Actar 2017), a publication that reflects on the scale of individual plants in practice through a reading of three gardens.

Her design work is exhibited at the Victoria and Albert Museum, Les Jardins de Metis, Chelsea Garden Festival, and the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum, and featured in a range of publications including Journal of Landscape Architecture, New Geographies, and Lotus International. She is committed to design as a means to address the risk, injustice, and instability brought about by the shifts in our shared climate and welcomes projects that heighten the awareness of plant life.

Rosetta is currently starting a new program in landscape architecture at Pratt Institute where she also teaches landscape studies and fieldwork courses.

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