David Godshall on Grief, Garden-Making and Generosity

David Godshall is principal at TERREMOTO, an award winning California-based landscape architecture studio he started in 2012 with his late business partner Alain Peauroi. TERREMOTO’s work, and David’s intelligent and irreverent voice (as both contributor and editorial advisor), have regularly appeared in Wonderground over the last decade.

In January this year Alain Peauroi passed away after a long battle with cancer.

David and I speak in early February 2025, weeks after Alain’s death and the devastation of the Los Angeles fires. This is a raw and generous conversation, and as always, David’s enthusiasm for garden-making and thinking about land in ways that are restorative and live-affirming is boundless. We talk about Alain’s legacy, how David became a landscape architect, and his vision of omni-positive gardens for all.

David will be speaking at the Australian Landscape Conference in Melbourne (March 20-22, 2025).

GR: Hi David, gosh, what a month it’s been for you. I am so grateful to you for speaking with me. I don’t think it’s possible to not start our conversation by talking about Alain, if that’s OK with you? I’m wondering if you can tell us who he was to TERREMOTO, and how he shaped the studio?

DG: George! It’s always nice to speak with you. Alain was such a badass landscape architect, and the team loves him and misses him so much.

Alain never put himself at the centre of anything, but he somehow inevitably always ended up at the centre of everything. I’m coming to realize this was perhaps his superpower. He was the backbone and foundation builder of TERREMOTO, and I and many others will be forever thankful for who he was and what he created.

So much of what defines our practice – our disinterest in fussy details en lieu of all things elemental, honouring the integrity of materials through not imposing too much detail upon them, and our choice to be kind to labourers, which later manifested in our LAND AND LABOUR initiative – were just things that Alain felt, lived and practiced.

As a team, we have distilled, evolved and elongated our ideas upon these matters and issues, but they kinda just emerged from how Alain intuitively went about being a landscape architect and the sweet and hardcore person (his wife’s words to describe him that I adore) that he was. Fuck, we miss him so much. 

GR: Death seems to be hovering nearby, David. In the first six weeks of this year, you’ve had Alain’s passing, then the wildfires in Los Angeles and the new, weird and dangerous governmental administration. It’s a lot. How, and perhaps where, are you finding steady ground?

DG: Oh boy George. I do my grieving, crying and emotionally hard work while I drive alone, because I have no other time to do it. I’m a dad and a boss and live in a city that is terribly defined by the automobile so… this is how we do grief in LA (laughing).

I listen to a lot of Ram Dass – his teachings have helped my understanding of death in a way I carry with me always. I walk at sunrise almost every morning with a friend (while wearing a punishingly heavy weight vest on), so I do my suffering while the sun rises. This is very dorky middle-aged Dad stuff, but it gives me stability.

And for better or worse, Alain was a working-class dude who loved his job and wrested a lot of joy and meaning from it. He built our infrastructure, mission and set us on our path. I had the incredibly good fortune of saying goodbye (and I love you! Four hundred times) to him,  and built into all of these final interactions with myself and many other Motos was a very present and clear understanding that the office was to continue to push forward without him.

I found myself in my stupid car driving to a meeting with a potential client the day after he passed and I thought to myself … This is crazy! Why in the hell am I chasing a new project right now? But then I took a moment, and I realized that if it was I who had passed, he would have been doing exactly same thing. And I would have wanted him to.

In working on his eulogy with his wife I discovered that Alain had told her that his love language was work… and so to honour him as a team and to continue his love…we must work. And the urgency of all of it feels sharper than ever right now.

GR: What do you mean by that?

DG: The urgency to find kinder, better models and ways of building gardens that are in service of the whole seems more pressing than ever. The Los Angeles wildfires, to me, make a clear case that the way we’ve been going about building our homes, cities and regions is failing us and isn’t working. Late-stage capitalism paired with inane housing development standards paired with inadequate Western models of forest management paired with invasive species run amok paired with climate change has created a complete shitshow of a situation.

Adding insult to injury is that, in California, we’re required to comply by incredibly difficult and obtuse building, environmental, structural and landscape regulations, but simultaneous to this, we have an omni-present housing shortage that never gets better, a real estate market whose prices exclude everyone but the wealthy from home ownership while also……houses are bursting into fucking flames. It’s a grotesquely broken system that is to the detriment of all life.

This tragedy, if handled well, could result in a period of radical experimentation towards alternative modes of building, development, landscape-making and being. Our present models of design, permitting, governance and finance/real estate blatantly suck and need radical change. And there is potential for building codes to re-emerge in small, community and neighbourhood-oriented, decentralized ways that could generate radically positive change.

But! I’m a little beaten up because life has recently delivered me a series of painful uppercuts, and my fear is that we will rebuild as we did before, perhaps with larger building footprints and with cheaper and crappier materials. And because bureaucracies love to get bigger, I suspect the power of building departments and engineering will continue to be centralized into nonsensically larger and larger power silos. So, yeah, we’re all doomed [laughs].

GR: Yes, I know those feelings, but you and I both know we can’t stay in that place. It’s hard to find ground that is steady and generative at the moment, though it feels so important. For me, steadiness is found in places – it’s a right-here thing rather than an out-there thing – if that makes sense?

DG: Steadiness is a good word. That’s all I’m trying to maintain right now. The team is yearning for the same. As an office, our plan for this coming year is “No Big Moves.” We’re just going to link arms, come together, stay intact, productive and together as best we can.

GR: Let’s zoom out for a bit. We always end up talking about ideas, but I want you to share your origin story. How did you become a landscape architect?

DG: I was working at a retail clothing company after my undergraduate degree [in art history]. Because I knew how to use a drill, spoke Spanish and was willing to work hard, they gave me a lot of responsibility. That was when I first bumped into the world of construction. I fell in love with the process of making things. At the same time, I started a little potted garden in my apartment in Los Angeles and I fell in love with gardening.

At some point, my Mom said ‘have you considered landscape architecture?’ I had never heard the term before. I looked it up, and it’s a beautiful combination of two words put together – even though as I get older and become a curmudgeon, I increasingly take issue with the fact that it’s also a kind of gatekeeping mechanism. But I digress.

It sounded compelling. I looked up the program offered at UC Berkeley, which is where I ended up going, and their website at the time recommended potential landscape architecture students read a book by Michael Hough, called City Form and Natural Process, which talked about how the majority of urban wildlife activity was not happening in designed gardens, but rather, in feral, vacant spaces. That was so cool and just hit me like a ton of bricks. I was fascinated – it seemed very rich and deep. So, I applied to school. I’m grateful I didn’t do an exhaustive study of the profession. I just went in naively.

GR: Are you saying that if you’d have done more research, you may have chosen not to study landscape architecture?

DG: Yeah. I’m thankful for my naivety or impulsiveness. I decided I wanted to be a landscape architect, but I didn’t know what it meant.

GR: I know you take issue with the title of landscape architect because of the ways in which it creates a hierarchy of land-carers, and is also used as a gatekeeping device. So, tell me, what is your vision of what you do, whatever you call it?

DG: The reason TERREMOTO exists is to improve land and human connection to it. At the end of the day, that’s it. When I say improve land, I guess I should add that I’m referring to land that’s been treated poorly, or land that deserves or requires more thoughtfulness than the ways it’s been recently treated.

Recent historical notions of garden making and landscape architecture are mostly concerned with the imposition of form on land for human delight and utility. At TERREMOTO, we’re of the mindset that we need to be exploring alternative models, because our present models serve us poorly. If we don’t want to make gardens that dominate land anymore nor prioritize a human supremacist-program … might an alternative vision of design and construction exist?

We’re exploring what it means to build gardens that prioritize ecology, kindness to materials, respect to garden builders and labourers. And concurrent to that…..we’re finding out that if we do all those things, beauty emerges in a different way. A longer conversation for another day!

GR: You mentioned earlier that you find a lot of meaning in your work. What’s the part of your job that makes you sing inside?

DG: My job has changed a lot in the last ten years. I (along with my business partners Jenny and Story) primarily manage other designers. I use the word manage very gently, and I sincerely hope I manage very gently. What is most meaningful or joyful to me is when someone at our office designs a garden or a landscape that I never would have designed myself; that in its form and horticultural expression is incredibly beautiful, productive and generous, but also unique to the voice and vision of the person on our team. Letting talented people sing better than me is how I sing.

I steer a ship now. Of course, I miss shopping for boulders, and I feel a little bit of sadness about being distant from the plants and the gravel and the intimacy of the install. My job is different. I still love it, it’s just different.

GR: You steer the ship in terms of communication too which, to me, seems to be integral to TERREMOTO’S success as a practice. Lots of firms make incredible gardens, like you, but equally impactful, and perhaps more broadly accessible is your voice. TERREMOTO has things to say, and says them in a way that is accessible, irreverent and intelligent. How much do you think your voice (communication, expression, language) has shaped your success as a practice?

DG: A lot! The gardens and landscapes we build as a team I’d like to arrogantly think are great, but yes – there are many beautiful landscapes and gardens being made and there’s lots of incredibly talented people who make them. I often worry that we talk too much and say too much, because there’s something attractive and mysterious about under-explaining. If anything, we kind of over-explain, but I hope not in a way that’s annoying?! Oh well, we are who we are…

GR: Ok, David, let’s say you’re the head gardener of Earth (imagine such a title?!). What’s you’re rallying call, the grand vision?

DG: I’m a broken record here, but the rallying call is that we need to figure out how to make gardens and landscapes (and by proxy, homes and communities) that are in service of the whole of life; that are omni-positive in their relationships to ecology, humanity and land.

What’s fascinating to me is that the gardens, landscapes and homes built with these principles will have great diversity and look totally different from place to place. If I were to try and build a garden with this lofty aspiration in California, it will manifest totally differently that if you were to do it in Sydney, George. And that’s where the potential is – that we might elegantly return to a world in which both our human and ecological diversity and interconnectedness are celebrated.

GR: Lots of people look up to TERREMOTO as a practice, and you as a leader. Considering this, can you share some guidance for fledgling gardeners, land-carers and landscape architects?

DG: Thank you for the compliment, as a start. I’d say be gentle on yourself, get a good education (whether institutional or other), absorb everything and be kind to everyone around you. Being an environmentalist to me is like being an artist in that it’s about the life and journey rather than any single deliverable.

I always tell young people coming into the field to find an office or studio that somewhat aligns with their ethical or philosophical values, knowing that it will never be a perfect fit. Do your best to glean as much wisdom as you can from that experience, both good and bad. If you are so inclined to start your own practice alone or with others, then you can make that leap to building work that is more deeply in alignment with who you are as a human being and your values. I should also say that not every project can be all things – so, back to being gentle on yourself.

TERREMOTO aspires to many things, and we want to make gardens that are kind and generous in all these different ways, but not every project checks every single box, nor can it. Because we can’t snap our fingers and change the world, we have to figure out the best ways of working within this paradigm to get to the next paradigm.

GR: Gosh, you’re getting wise in your old age, David.

DG: Thanks George, that’s kind of you. I mostly feel tired. And I miss Alain. A lot. 

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