My Drystone Work Featured in The Smithsonian Magazine

I am beyond pleased to share that I am featured in the latest issue of world renowned publication, The Smithsonian Magazine (July/August 2025).

For those who don’t know, the Smithsonian Institution is a vast American network of museums and research centres. It includes 21 museums, the National Zoo, and has over 150 million artefacts in its collections. It’s often described as “the nation’s attic.” The Smithsonian Magazine is their flagship publication, with a monthly readership in the tens of millions across print and web, and a reputation for beautiful, intelligent features on history, science, art, and craft.

Drystone walling is still a male-dominated craft, there are very few women working in Drystone globally. However, this feature includes three of them: myself, Tara Whitcher based in England, and Christa Mone who is a landscape garden designer in California. To have our work and perspective recognised by a publication of this calibre feels both incredible and important.

Also featured are president of the Canadian Drystone Walling Association John Shaw Rimmington, Dan Peterson from Minnesota, and artist, designer and drystone waller, David F. Wilson, based in Scotland.

I was a joy to work on the piece with brilliant editorial photographer Christie Hemm-Klok, her assistant (and photographer in her own right) Jess Lynn Goss, and senior editor at The Smithsonian Magazine, Jennie Rothenberg Gritz. What can I say? I love working with women.

Tara and I were photographed together which was such a treat, because even though we’d been friends for years online, we had never met in person. It was a pretty big day in every sense!

A few months after the photos were taken, Jennie and I had an easy, interesting conversation over zoom, and I love the quotes she pulled for the article from our chat.

“I always tell my clients, ‘It doesn’t have to be these big, rustic walls,’” said Kristie de Garis, a dry stone waller in Scotland. “You can create really modern lines, a really neat structure. You can do pretty much anything with dry stone, actually.”

“De Garis also tells her clients that a dry stone wall is an investment in the future. “It’s a proper legacy thing. Mortared walls need to be redone roughly every 15 to 30 years. But there are dry stone walls still standing after thousands of years. What price do you put on forever?”

“Women build better-looking walls. They just do."

“I realised really quickly for every stone I can't lift, there's a stone that a man can't lift,”

To see my work, and my voice, recognised in Smithsonian Magazine, and to take up space in a field where women are still few and far between, means more than I can say. I was a very proud mum showing my daughters this article.

You can read the full piece in the July/August print issue of Smithsonian Magazine or online here.