Park Architect Model Of Creativity

Elizabeth Payne played the cello as a child.

The school bus used to drop her off at the bottom of a hill covered by a terraced rose garden. She would climb from terrace to terrace among the roses, lugging her cello.

“This was in southern Idaho. It was hot, it was desert, and this was one of the few oases that was green,” Payne says. “At the top of the hill, I’d take my cello and my apple, left over from lunch and I’d sit under a juniper tree and look down on the pattern of roses. I thought it was so wonderful. … I wanted to make things bloom in the desert.”

That was one of Payne’s first inklings that she would work as a landscape architect. She went on to gather degrees in three related fields: landscape architecture, architecture and landuse planning.

Payne, 40, has lived in Spokane Valley for about eight years. She does commercial and high-end residential landscape architecture.

Her major projects include a handicappedaccessible park in Portland, a major park in Russia, done for a Calgary engineering firm, and other Russia projects through Rotary Club.

When she starts working on a design, “I get all the `don’ts’ first,” she says. “Then you start with the `dos’. What can we do?

“And you come up against a wall of people who can only talk about what they’ve seen. Unfortunately it’s all plastic and bright colors. What kind of imagination is that?”

The Spokane Valley Rotary Club, to which Payne belongs, asked her two years ago to design a handicapped-accessible, or universal, park for Mirabeau Point.

She has talked with children, teachers, mothers and businessmen since then. The best ideas, she says, tend to focus on simple pleasures - things liking picking a piece of fruit when no one’s looking, or exploring a scented garden.

These are the pleasures that children and the elderly will gravitate to, she says.

Payne counts on Rotary’s engineers, contractors, fabricators and business people to help translate her ideas into reality.

“They’re the ones who will figure out how to do this … how to build these slabs of concrete, how to get this up here so it won’t tip over,” Payne says, her hands darting around the model she’s built, to show ideas for the universal park.

Asked how she accounts for her generous creativity, Payne’s at a loss.

“I guess it’s like good cooking. You take wonderful materials and you try to not only solve problems … but to create new experiences and to project what those experiences might feel like in the future.

“I don’t know how I do it, because that’s what I do.”