Southern Home (SH): Tell us about your early memories of being in the garden.
Gavin Duke (GD): I grew up in rural Arkansas, and in the summers, my parents would create a vegetable garden, which I helped tend. It wasn’t big, although it seemed so to me as a child. Each grandparent also had a plot at their houses. We were growing a lot of our own food, canning, and storing things in season. My maternal grandfather was a carpenter, and I also developed a curiosity about building blocks and nailing things together at an early age. Combining all that together eventually brought me to landscape architecture.
SH: When was your “aha,” when you truly knew landscape architecture would become a career?
In college. I was in architecture school, and at that time, everything was about post-modernism. I became disenchanted because a lot of the buildings we were studying weren’t the greatest, in my opinion. One night, I slipped
