Thank you for your interest in ThriveRoots Design. I started out loving plants as a young kid, as I was lucky enough to grow up in the foothills of the Ozark Mountains where there is a rather large and diverse group of native vegetation. Our house sat in the middle of a nice stand of mixed hardwoods (pretty standard for the Ozarks) above a nice intermittent creek which led down to a quiet cove in Greers Ferry Lake. My wonderful Mother who was a Master Gardener back then, and still has a huge passion and a vast knowledge of plants, and is just a natural at growing things and creating gorgeous spaces in general, never skipped a beat adding to our ever-growing garden(s). Some people just “have it”, and she’s one of them. So as a teenager, I spent many of my summer days helping her create new spaces outdoors. I can’t tell you how many wheel-barrows full of mulch I spread around that property…even down to the creek side. Eventually she turned me loose and let me create my own flower beds. I always went straight for the moss covered rocks, driftwood, and anything that I could find to emulate nature within those garden areas. It always appeared “off” to me when anything was designed otherwise, or “against nature” so to speak. So I’m not saying you can be a Biophilic Designer as a kid…but I’m also not saying you can’t ;)

I eventually graduated from Arkansas State University with a B.S. in Wildlife Ecology and Management doing some bat studies (which are also a passion of mine) as well as a small amount of insect trapping. Upon graduation, I got a job with the Natural Resources Conservation Service as a temporary Wildlife Biologist and then got a permanent position as a Soil Conservationist. I worked with them for about 8 years, and even to this day I miss it at times. It’s an amazing agency that does a lot of great things for farmers and landowners, and are very conservation oriented. During this time I developed even more of a passion for pollinators, and always pushed to design as much pollinator habitat as I could in our conservation plans with NRCS. I still do this with my ThriveRoots projects. Even green walls. We need more pollinator habitat!! However, that job eventually landed me back home in the Ozark mountains…and as I spent more time hiking, camping, and exploring new territories in this amazing area, my passion for plants, animals, and nature in general was growing again. I was reminded of the obvious, and significant difference it made in the way I felt when I would immerse myself in nature. It has a way of forcing you to forget about the every day hustle and bustle and just…be. As I’m currently based in Northwest Arkansas, where I continuously watch it grow at an incredible rate, there is only so much that can be done with the modern day design techniques to foster daily interaction with nature. I was even noticing it in the building I worked in…it was a dark space, with no plants and half the windows had the blinds shut so there was little natural light. Brick exterior with no personality. This, for the most part, is the modern day design world we live in. Concrete squares and rectangles with little to no natural geometry. The more time I spend surrounding myself with nature, the more I started realizing that…it just makes you happy. THIS…is Biophilia!! So I made the decision to quit my career as a Soil Conservationist and use the soil health and plant knowledge I had gained throughout my career, in conjunction with my lifelong passion for designing and creating natural spaces, to open ThriveRoots Design: A Biophilic Design company, to create natural, unique, and comfortable spaces in the modern built environment for people to love enjoy for many years to come!!

“Biophilic design is, thus, viewed as the largely missing ling in prevailing approaches to sustainable design”. -Stephen Kellert-