Leslie A. Wren

A licensed landscape architect and horticulturist, Leslie Wren practiced for more than ten years in North Carolina and Texas, including managing her own solo-practitioner firm, before joining the faculty at Kansas State. Her professional experience includes public, institutional, commercial, greenway, and residential projects. She has also been a farm laborer, a landscape foreman, and a leader of the volunteer installation of a school garden.

During her years as a designer/project manager in high-end residential design/build/maintain firms, Wren gained an intimate understanding and appreciation of the field operations side of the profession. She also saw how much landscape architects have to gain in their work from productive collaboration with their counterparts in the field. Accordingly, her academic focus is on developing best practices for involving installation and maintenance managers in the landscape architecture design process in order to resolve microsite challenges, minimize water needs and issues, optimize plant selection, clarify instructions and specifications, facilitate installation and maintenance, reduce laborer safety risks, and maximize capability for green infrastructure maintenance and longevity.

Wren has a bachelor's degree in biology, with a concentration in ecology and evolutionary biology, from Rice University, and master's degrees in both horticultural science and landscape architecture from North Carolina State University. She is also a certified designer of early childhood environments through the Natural Learning Initiative.