Architect Wendy Suhr Is New Leader of Palisades Beautiful

Branching out with a new leader and new trees, Palisades Beautiful welcomes Wendy Alkire Suhr as its new chair and celebrates the May planting of 50 parkway trees in Pacific Palisades neighborhoods. Alkire Suhr is a licensed architect and a landscape designer. She brings double credentials to the local beautification group, with a master’s degree in environmental design from Pratt Institute in New York and a master’s degree in architecture from SCI-Arc (Southern California Institute of Architecture) in Los Angeles. She has recently completed the design of the family’s new home and garden on Chautauqua, and served as her own general contractor. Her husband, Jim Suhr, currently serves on the board of directors at Palisades High School and is a leader of Boy Scout Troop 85; sons Julian (16) and Malcolm (14) both attend Palisades Charter High School. The family moved to the Palisades in 1997. In tandem with outgoing chair Ann Fogel, Alkire Suhr supervised the lengthy process of bringing 50 new trees to residential streets in May, including 25 to the Huntington Palisades, whose homeowners’ association supported the group’s efforts. Since February 2005, Palisades Beautiful has planted more than 110 trees throughout the community and 20 native trees at Palisades High School. Alkire Suhr reminisces about the beginnings of her interest in horticulture. ‘My father grew up on a farm in North Dakota, and both of my parents loved to garden. I spent my childhood in Woodland Hills in the 1960s, and it was covered with cornfields, orange and walnut groves, untouched chaparral in the hills, and ladybugs and jackrabbits. It was enchanting!’ After attending Bard College in New York, graduating from UC Santa Cruz and completing graduate school, Wendy married Jim and they moved to a little cottage in Venice. ‘When the boys were babies, I spent hours walking them in their strollers on streets with very few trees,’she says. ‘The lack of greenery was very disturbing to me, and I realized how powerfully trees affect the appearance of a neighborhood. They provide shade, fresh air, beauty, a home for birds, and they are deeply calming.’ In addition to planting trees, Alkire Suhr would like to gear up Palisades Beautiful to spread knowledge of tree care to homeowners, gain new members and start a small maintenance program for trees recently planted by the group. For information on joining Palisades Beautiful, call 454-6560 or e-mail palisadesbeautiful@earthlink.net (Editor’s note: Julian Suhr has been an intern for the Palisadian-Post the past two summers.)