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57 Woltz, 52, has been building these gardens for more than 20 years, and has lived in Charlottesville on and off since he was a student at the University of Virginia. He and his former wife bought the house in 1998, right after they married. "I remember when the hornbeam hedges all arrived — hundreds of plants," he says. "We couldn't afford masonry, so we made walls out of the hedges. We planted them, and they looked like hundreds of brown pencils jabbed into the ground." Decades later, thick hedges of hornbeam form the garden's structure, coming to life again slowly as winter gives way to spring, buds cracking open in a tracery of pale green. For the first time in more than a decade — due to circumstances no one wanted or expected — Woltz has time to tend his own gardens. "Because of my intense travel schedule, I'm rarely at home, and the gardens have suffered," he says. Now he spends two hours each evening weeding, pruning, shearing. "There's a deep reassurance of having hands in soil that has really carried me, buoyed my spirits enormously through the past few weeks," he says. "It's been both cathartic and healing." A lthough Woltz has created some of the most exquisite and sculptural gardens in the world, he does much more than make pretty outdoor spaces. His firm, Nelson Byrd Woltz Landscape Architects, is known for an "ecologically regenerative" approach to landscape architecture. Woltz coaxes beauty from the land by first focusing on its health, and frequently collaborates with biologists, soil scientists, and ornithologists to lay the groundwork needed to do his work. The firm has completed projects in 25 states and 10 countries, specializing in designing and rejuvenating civic gardens, public parks, communities, and even agricultural landscapes such as farms. Woltz often takes on badly damaged areas, such as defunct quarries and former industrial sites, rebuilding the land so that nature can thrive again. Some are monumental undertakings, like Orongo Station, a 3,000-acre sheep and cattle ranch on New Zealand's North Island. There, the firm designed massive reforestation, reconstructed wetlands, and restored migratory bird habitats. At Hudson Yards in New York, which opened last year, Woltz's public square and gardens are a feat of technology and horticulture. Built on a six-acre platform above a working rail yard, they include a small forest and wildflower gardens. Because heat rising from the rail yards reaches 150 degrees, roots are protected by a complex web of cooling tubes under the platform. Woltz, who has offices in Charlottes- ville and New York, opened an office in Houston in 2018, and he's currently working on two projects here, including new green spaces and a meditation garden for Rothko Chapel. The first phase of the renovations is tentatively slated for completion this summer. But Woltz's massive revamp of Memorial Park is the project that will change the face of Houston. Woltz was hired in 2013 to restore and revitalize the park after a devastating drought killed more than half its trees. It just might be his most ambitious project yet: With 1,500 acres of wilderness and recreation hubs, it's double the size of Manhattan's Central Park and one of the country's largest urban park restorations. "It's exhilarating to be able to work on something at this scale," Woltz says. Kick-started by a $70 million lead gift from the Kinder Foundation, the 10-year project is overseen by a public-private partnership including Memorial Park Conservancy, Houston Parks a n d R e c re a t i o n D e p a r t m e n t , Kinder Foundation, and Uptown Development Authority. Memorial Park sits on a prime swath of land running through the heart of Houston, from Buffalo Bayou and Uptown to the Crestwood, Camp Logan, and River Oaks neighborhoods. Set in the middle of the 4th largest city in the country, its land value is priceless. Real estate aside, the park's true worth Thomas Woltz Woltz's plans for Houston's Rothko Chapel include a meditation garden. Barnett Newman's Broken Obelisk sculpture has undergone restoration and will be reinstalled.