We’re looking forward to introducing you to Kristine Parr. Check out our conversation below.
Kristine, really appreciate you sharing your stories and insights with us. The world would have so much more understanding and empathy if we all were a bit more open about our stories and how they have helped shaped our journey and worldview. Let’s jump in with a fun one: What makes you lose track of time—and find yourself again?
I’m perpetually inspired by the way jazz musicians can improvise, settling into a creative “flow state” where they’re playing in every sense of the word. While I am definitely not a jazz musician, I find a similar sort of creative play time in writing and illustrating short stories, drawing or painting. These imaginary worlds are emotional landscapes for me, letting me explore and wander deep feelings or dreams or whimsies when it feels like reality is confining or condemning. Sometimes it’s re-imagining a fleeting happiness, like a soap bubble when I’m washing dishes, and translating it into an illustration. There’s a safety in there to show up authentically and help remind me that there’s still good in the world to see, and it won’t leave me behind. So, whenever I feel lost or out of myself, I pick up my sketchbook.
Can you briefly introduce yourself and share what makes you or your brand unique?
Angie’s Garden is a woman owed ecological landscape design business in the greater Austin area. Our namesake is my mom, Angie, who was and still is an unending source of inspiration. She was a deeply compassionate and intelligent woman with a heart that cared for everyone and everything; as a pediatrician and science teacher, she was a Ms Frizzle type advocate for the environment and so much more. She passed away the first year of my master’s program for Landscape Architecture. I inherited her passion for the living world, inspired to pursue environmental healing through ecology rather than her route of medicine.
At Angie’s Garden, we believe in strengthening the inherent connection between folks and the beautiful ecologies that they live in. Our focus is creating holistically healthy habitat for not only people, but the Central Texas native species and pollinators that sustain a mosaic of ecosystems. We believe in education via the power of “soft fascination” of natural beauty to calm the mind and inspire creativity. Our hope in designing and installing a landscape is to create a beauty that inspires those who interact with it to really look, appreciate, and advocate for the plants and critters around us.
Summer is an off season for us, so we have been working to develop some fun printed merchandise, as well as a children’s book!
Amazing, so let’s take a moment to go back in time. What was your earliest memory of feeling powerful?
We were a road-tripping family; it seemed every summer we were cramming the car full of camping gear and headed towards the Rockies. I was around 6th or 7th grade the trip we drove to the Grand Tetons. We grew up camping, so I always felt more at home outside in nature than with people. This particular trip, it was our last day and we were hanging out by Cottonwood creek (I believe). I was a little separated from my family, still within sight but just far enough to feel solitary. While I was clambering up and down boulders in the creek, there was a profound sense of belonging that I didn’t know how to explain. But my typically painfully shy demeanor was dropped, and I could just be a little feral child. It was so liberating! I cried desperately when it was time to leave. I’ve found that feeling many times as I’ve gotten 0lder; on back country trails by wild rivers, alpine meadows, wading in the ocean, or even hammocking under old oak trees. A phrase, “deeply alive and fully happy” is how I coined the feeling. There’s a respect grown when you’re immersed in untamed habitats. But there’s something more humbling, more empowering, more inspiring, about finding a friend in these ever-changing but ancient ecologies.
What did suffering teach you that success never could?
I think about pain quite a lot actually. It may be my naturally tenderhearted nature, but I tend to feel very deeply very often. The thing I’ve found about suffering, is that it stares into your deepest, most secret places and demands honesty. It’s like water and gravity, it will always find ways to travel deeper, finding the lowest place; where the most sensitive belief would stay buried if not for such an intervention. Until mom died, I never realized my fear of being abandoned. It was just existing under there, formed by other pressures and subconsciously influencing many facets of life. Along the way, suffering erodes and redefines landscapes in ways that are devastating but with the promise of rejuvenation. Learning from that fear with curious and gentle eyes led me to other beliefs and thought processes that are so fundamental to how I show up in the world. Water, like suffering, has many forms that play many parts. Yet at the end of the day, it’s an essential part of life; there is no life without it.
Walking with grief, in its many forms, has redefined my capacity to engage with others around me. It’s eroded judgments towards other’s actions I may or may not agree with because, like landscapes, everyone’s emotional terrains are being reshaped constantly. There’s a grace that comes from realizing just as grief carved out cavernous feelings in my reality that I am still spelunking through, so everyone is navigating unfolding realities. And that’s messy, confusing, frustrating, complex, and astoundingly beautiful.
After we’ve sat with pain, beauty feels more electric, more moving. After a devastating flood, a loss of some sort, life that is a part of us is always resilient to return in new ways. The mundane becomes enchanted, brimming with beauty and whimsy. And the places in your heart that have weathered many storms (for the metaphor I think of wetlands or mangrove forests) starts to become a shelter, a safe place; for you, as new griefs emerge in life, but also a protective oasis of deep sympathy for those around you. Creating new ecologies of connection and life.
Sitting with my suffering taught me a gentleness towards myself and others. It re-trained my eye to see that life and joy and whimsy and enchantment about the world will always come back for myself and for you.
So a lot of these questions go deep, but if you are open to it, we’ve got a few more questions that we’d love to get your take on. What’s a cultural value you protect at all costs?
Curiosity. Curiosity is the gateway to empathy, to critical thinking, to imagination, and to resilience. To lose the mindset of curiosity is to deprive yourself of a lifeline and a capacity to live life to its fullest extent. A mind without curiosity believes it alone is only right. An inflexibility that robs it of diversity (the spice of life) and hope when this mind is inevitably crushed by situations one mind can never prepare you for.
There is no authentic creativity, connection or community without curiosity. Please think critically for yourself, be curious about what you think you know (hint, it’s not as much as you think). Please be curious when interacting with others who don’t think like you do. There is magic there, if you’re curious enough (and patient and humble and kind and honest enough) to find it.
Okay, so let’s keep going with one more question that means a lot to us: How do you know when you’re out of your depth?
In the earlier days of the business, it was literally all the time but especially communicating with clients (yay growth!). But practice makes confidence and all that. These days, I feel most out of my depth honoring the creative impulses by actually trying to do them! By “out of my depth”, I’m thinking of that stomach clenching feeling of a cartoon character that ran off a cliff and has that split second to look down before taking the mighty fall. Any creativity involves some sort of risk: that it won’t meet expectations of myself or viewers, etc. But at the end of the day, it’s just playing! It’s fun! I feel out of my depth in having confidence in my work. That the “fun” of it won’t mean anything or produce anything worthwhile. So, short story long, I suppose I feel out of my depth trusting my inside world has a place on the outside…Can you tell I’m still navigating finding words for this?
Contact Info:
- Website: https://www.angiesgardendesign.com/
- Instagram: @Angiesgardendesign
