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Erin Addison

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Erin Addison

Landscape Architect | Writer | Researcher

Professional Profile

Erin Addison is a landscape architect, writer, and scholar with over 30 years of experience in cultural and natural heritage conservation focused on sustainable landscape design and planning for arid lands. Addison’s work as a landscape architect is informed by her background as an historian of the eastern Mediterranean world and her passion for the conservation of dryland environments. That work is expressed in site analyses, garden design, scholarship, and fiction. Her career has included extensive professional work in Jordan and the region, consulting on UNDP, USAID, Government of Jordan, UNESCO, and private-sector projects.

Education & Academic Research

Addison’s academic background spans history, research, and landscape architecture. Her doctoral research in Religious Studies (UC Santa Barbara) focused on apocalypticism in the ancient Mediterranean world. She later earned an MLA from the University of Arizona, Tucson. She has published over a dozen scholarly articles, and her MLA research was published as Documenting Deforestation in the Petra Region (2011).

Landscape Architecture & Conservation

Addison’s professional focus includes the conservation and management of cultural and natural landscapes, particularly in arid environments. Her experience includes rangeland management, urban open spaces, national parks, botanic gardens, and UNESCO World Heritage Sites such as Petra and atTuraif.

Writing

Whether in technical reports, site analyses, theses, her dissertation, or scholarship, Addison’s career has been expressed in writing. An award-winning prose writer and poet at Pomona College, she is now returning to fiction writing, and like anything else it takes thousands of hours to get it right. Her first novel, The Intervals, was longlisted for the Page Turner Prize in 2021. She is querying (and querying and querying) agents for her recently completed novel, The Servant of Dreams.

Addison Usufruct

Addison Usufruct is a conceptual framework integrating Addison’s landscape architecture, conservation, research, and writing. The ancient legal construct of usufruct undergirds the privilege of using land entrusted to us with the responsibility to conserve its integrity and value for the future.

Jordanian Dirt

Jordanian Dirt
  • November 28, 2025
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Jordanian Dirt I am working on an essay about I book I read a few months ago, entitled The Map of Salt and Stars, by Zeyn Joukhadar (2018). The...

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Ephedra torreyana + hogans!

Ephedra torreyana + hogans!
  • October 22, 2025
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In early October my mother and I went for petite road trip to northern Arizona to stay in a hogan within the Monument Valley Navajo Tribal Park. On the...

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Quailbush

Quailbush
  • September 19, 2025
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I love tough plants. A tough, beautiful, useful plant is a superstar. Big saltbush – also called quailbush in the desert Southwest – is just such a wonderment. There...

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Shade [1]

Shade [1]
  • August 20, 2025
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This is hardly the last thing I will have to say about shade. Here in Tucson we are having our second consecutive ‘nonsoon’ – the monsoon that doesn’t show...

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Creosote and Field Station fan rant

Creosote and Field Station fan rant
  • August 9, 2025
  • 2 Comments

I missed last week because I drove to California to help my mother host a family reunion, of sorts, in memory of my aunt, who would have been 99...

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The palo brea logo

The palo brea logo
  • July 26, 2025
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First, thank you to everyone who has been kind enough to write me about the website and blog. I’ve had a few questions about my logo/ page-loader (shout-out to...

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Superstition mallow – July 18, 2025

Superstition mallow – July 18, 2025
  • July 18, 2025
  • 3 Comments

I plan to post occasionally about arid-adapted species I particularly love, and I have to start with superstition mallow (Abutilon palmeri – https://www.smgrowers.com/products/plants/plantdisplay.asp?plant_id=3968 ). Native to the Sonoran desert...

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Landscape as Narrative – July 8, 2025

Landscape as Narrative – July 8, 2025
  • July 12, 2025
  • 6 Comments

I’ll be the first to agree that this website is a peculiar assemblage – a fragment of a novel; a collection of articles about deforestation, Muslim shrines, a park...

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