About Jennifer

Jennifer Verprauskus is a licensed landscape architect in North Carolina and South Carolina with a passion for creating landscapes that are beautiful, resilient, and deeply connected to the people and places they serve. She earned her degree in Landscape Architecture from the University of Massachusetts Amherst, and her background as a Master Gardener, Master Composter, and Permaculture Design Certificate holder has shaped an approach to landscape design that looks beyond aesthetics to consider ecology, community, and the long-term health of a place.

Jennifer is equally passionate about sharing what she has learned along the way. She teaches classes at the North Carolina Arboretum, serves as an instructor for the Green Built Alliance, and regularly speaks at conferences and events across the country. Whether she’s teaching a room full of students or talking about the power of a well-designed landscape, her goal is to make landscape architecture accessible, relevant, and inspiring.

Her work has been featured on the Emmy-nominated series This Old House and published in Landscape Architect Magazine, giving her the opportunity to bring the conversation about thoughtful, resilient landscape design to an even broader audience.

Education & Life

Ever since she can remember, Jennifer Verprauskus has been drawn to landscapes, plants, and the environment. That passion led her to study Landscape Architecture at the University of Massachusetts Amherst before completing her degree at California Polytechnic State University. But for Jennifer, learning about landscapes was never confined to a classroom. She wanted to understand how people around the world interact with the land—and how landscapes can shape the way we live.

After college, Jennifer traveled throughout South America with a friend, where she had the opportunity to work on an organic farm north of Buenos Aires, Argentina. There, she discovered permaculture and became fascinated by the ways people could build their lives around growing their own food and working in harmony with the land.

She returned to Connecticut and began working at a landscape architecture firm, where she continued to develop her understanding of design, space, and the relationship between people and their environment. But the pull to explore remained strong. Eventually, Jennifer set off on a solo journey around the world, finding herself planting banana trees in the hills of Thailand and, later, helping to plant more than 1,000 native African trees in Tanzania.

When she returned to the United States, Jennifer moved to Washington, D.C., for another landscape architecture position. Several months in, she realized that traditional practice wasn’t quite where she belonged. Instead, she followed her curiosity to the Dominican Republic, where she spent six months working with impoverished Haitian migrant communities. There, she helped create community gardens to address one of the community’s most fundamental challenges: hunger.

A few months after the gardens were planted, a friend from the community approached Jennifer, excited to tell her about the abundance of vegetables he and his family had to eat. That moment became a turning point. Jennifer saw firsthand that a garden could be much more than a beautiful space—it could provide nourishment, dignity, connection, and opportunity. She began to understand the profound role landscapes can play in people’s lives.

Jennifer eventually moved to Denver, where she founded UpBeet Landscapes, a design practice focused on helping people reconnect with their food through thoughtful landscape design. Her mission became clear: to bridge the gap between ornamental and sustainable landscape design and demonstrate that landscapes can be both beautiful and productive.

During this time, Jennifer also partnered with four other landscape designers and architects to create Cooperative Design Resource (CDR), a design resource serving landscape contractors. After six years of building and growing both UpBeet and CDR, Jennifer and her family relocated to Asheville, North Carolina, where they found a place to put down roots.

Today, Jennifer works with homeowners and contractors to create beautiful, intentional landscapes that are designed to do more than simply look good. She believes every element of a landscape should have a purpose—whether that purpose is to nourish, restore, connect, play, protect, or simply bring joy.

Through creative design solutions and an understanding of how people and nature can work together, Jennifer continues to explore the question that has guided her throughout her career: How can we create landscapes that make our lives—and the world around us—better?