Staff Spotlight: Allyson Gibson, UVA MLA 2025

For the last three years, A-School graduate student Allyson Gibson has been the key to the success of the annual book awards hosted through the Center‘s Landscape Studies Initiative. During this time period, all communication and queries related to the J. B. Jackson Book Prize and the David Coffin publication grant were Allyson’s domain. Allyson worked closely with the book awards jury chair, Beth Meyer. Together we established our schedule, review structure, and communications plan for this long-standing award program that landscape historian Elizabeth Barlow Rogers transferred to the UVA Center for Cultural Landscapes in 2021. With Allyson’s attention to detail and good nature, the award jurors, who live across the North American continent received all our books, found common times to meet, and deliberated efficiently and with good cheer.

Allyson sought out the Center and our programs early in her studies at UVA. We are grateful for her contributions and research interests which so closely align with cultural landscape studies. Allyson, like many graduate students in landscape architecture, brought varied interests to her studies. Her undergraduate degree in psychology and work at both an urban farm and retail nursery aligned with an understanding of landscapes that are shaped through living materials and systems. It also resonated with an appreciation for designed and vernacular landscapes that shape the experiences of the human and more than human species that depend on them for delight, retreat, resilience and community.

During the three years Allyson worked with us, she also found time to: care for Monticello’s gardens and trees as a summer intern; participate in the City of Charlottesville’s Downtown Mall Committee that created a 50 year action plan for the Mall’s willow oaks; lead the UVA Living Trees Initiative; and undertake fieldwork on disturbance indicator plant species with Assistant Professor Michael Luegering at UVA’s Morven Sustainability Lab. Given the breadth of her interests and experiences, it was no surprise to us that Allyson was awarded the Garden Club of America’s Corliss Knapp Engle Scholarship in Horticulture to support her MLA thesis on pine forest research and adaptive management. Allyson’s research is contributing to Morven Faculty Director Beth Meyer’s understanding of the Morven land cover transition to a more diverse experimental forest that will occur over the next three years.

As Allyson prepares to graduate in May, we celebrate the many contributions she has made to the care, interpretation and awareness of the actual landscape and landscape studies. We are eager to watch how Allyson Gibson impacts landscape architecture as a cultural practice. All the best, Allyson, and biggest thanks!

— Beth Meyer, Founding Director, Landscape Studies Initiative/Center for Cultural Landscapes