Designing with Nature brings together thirty projects developed over two decades across Aotearoa New Zealand. Conservation experiences for children across sixteen national park and other conservation sites, that then morphed into DOC's Kiwi Guardians. Wetland and river restoration on working farms. Trail strategies from Taranaki to the Mackenzie Basin. A landscape vision for vineyards and dairy farms. A volunteer programme caring for our backcountry hut network. Storytelling with Te Araroa.
What connects these projects isn't a design style or a method. It's a question: what becomes possible when you stop treating nature as the backdrop for design and start working with and for it?
In the hills
Each chapter opens with a personal story from my time in the backcountry — a 130-day solo traverse criss-crossing the main divide, an avalanche near Mount Brewster, a moment on Aoraki when I understood something I hadn't been able to put into words. The projects grew from those experiences, and from years of teaching design and working with students who hadn't yet learnt what wouldn't work.
What's inside
330 pages, rich with photographs, maps, field sketches, and design drawings. Thirty projects across a range of scales and landscapes — from a single wetland on the banks of Te Waihora to a strategic design for Antarctica's ice-free lands. The writing is direct and personal, not academic. There's a short bibliography at the back for those who want to follow the thinking further.
Projects include Landscape Planting at Ararira Wetland; Wild Heart Project (a volunteer experience for international visitors); Love Our Huts (a volunteer maintenance initiative for Aotearoa's backcountry hut network); and work on the Ōtākaro Avon River, Taranaki, Waikato, Te Manahuna Mackenzie Basin, and more.
The final chapter doesn't close the book. It asks what a better conversation with nature might actually sound like — and how we all need to be part of it.
Check out the book's reference articles here
MA (1989) Over the tops: South Island traverse. New Zealand Geographic, 4.
MA (2006) Why the conservation estate matters. Landfall, 212.
MA (2008) Designing wilderness as a phenomenological landscape: Design-directed research within the context of New Zealand’s conservation estate. PhD, Lincoln University.
MA (2010). A future with our past: Towards a creative practice of heritage in the Coastal Otago landscape. In Beyond the Scene: Perspectives on landscape in Aotearoa New Zealand. Edited by Janet Stephenson, MA & Jacinta Ruru.
MA (2011). Being landscape. In Making our place: exploring land-use tension in Aotearoa New Zealand. Edited by Jacinta Ruru, Janet Stephenson & MA.
MA (2011). From preserve to incubator: Giving a new meaning to wilderness. In Wild heart: The possibility of wilderness in Aotearoa New Zealand. Edited by MA & Richard Reeve.
MA (2011). The shape of the wild. In Wild heart: The possibility of wilderness in Aotearoa New Zealand. Edited by MA & Richard Reeve.
MA (2012). Visualising a Temporal Cartography of Wilderness Travel. In Cartographies for tomorrow: Mapping in a mashed-up world. Edited by Antoni Moore & Igor Drecki.
MA (2015). Practices of the wild: A rewilding of landscape architecture. LA Plus, (1).
MA, Woody Lee & Cameron Boyle (2017). Aotearoa New Zealand, The story of New Zealand’s national parks. Museum of Chinese Gardens and Landscape Architecture, Beijing.
MA & Jacky Bowring (2017). A laboratory for design-directed research. Building design scholarship and academic possibility through designing. The Journal of Public Space, 2(3).
MA (2018). The sustaining beauty of productive landscapes. Journal of Landscape Architecture, 13(2).
MA, Cameron Boyle, Kate Blackburne & Woody Lee (2018). New Zealand’s ‘Arc of influence’: The ‘clean, blue, green’ country. Journal of Cultural Geography, 35(3).
MA, Kate Blackburne, Cameron Boyle, Woody Lee & Tenille Pickett (2018). A new wild: Reimagining the potential of indigenous biodiversity in Aotearoa, New Zealand. Design Ecologies, 7(1).
MA (2018). Placing design, and designing’s place, in landscape architecture research. Landscape Review, 18(1).
MA, Cameron Boyle, Woody Lee & Li Xuejing (2019). Interweaving protected areas and productive landscapes in Aotearoa New Zealand: Using design to explore multifunctionality in the Mackenzie Basin. Journal of Landscape Architecture, 14(3).
MA & Cameron Boyle (2020). Ecological homelands: Towards a counter-ontopology of landscape design. Landscape Research, 45(2).
MA, Cameron Boyle & Woody Lee (2021). Tourism’s beneficial nature: Increasing tourism’s capacity to enhance conservation in Aotearoa New Zealand’s protected areas. In Managing visitor experiences in nature-based tourism. Edited by Julia Albrecht.
MA, Cameron Boyle & Woody Lee. An architecture of wildness for the Anthropocene: Planting new natures in Aotearoa New Zealand. Kerb, 29.
MA (2025). Forever wild. FMC Backcountry, 241.
