For Indian landscape architect Varna Shashidhar, nature taught her ‘more than any lecture ever could’

Indian landscape architect Varna Shashidhar, founder and principal of Bengaluru studio VSLA, didn’t always know that her heart – and hands – belonged outdoors. But by the time she earned her master’s in landscape architecture from Harvard’s Graduate School of Design in 2006, she was sure of one thing: a desk job in an air-conditioned office just wasn’t on the cards. ‘Harvard introduced me to fantastic friends and mentors, and led me to the best scientists, ecologists and designers at the cutting edge of the discipline,’ she says. To her mind, the final frontier was working in her own country, but she didn’t mind taking a little detour first.

We meet VSLA, the Indian landscape architecture studio

An internship opportunity with renowned Sri Lankan architect C Anjalendran led her to Colombo, where, for the first time, she experienced architecture not through books or studio models, but by immersing herself in natural and cultural landscapes, and in the quiet rhythm of her mentor’s home studio verandah. ‘It was more than drawing or planning,’ she recalls. ‘Just sitting there, by the Parijata tree, watching how the house breathed with the landscape – it taught me more than any lecture ever could.’ That quiet, open-air classroom would become the seed of her future practice: one guided by observation, intuition, and a profound respect for place.

‘These experiences helped me see my own country from a different perspective – to really examine things I had always taken for granted, and to recognise the beauty of what we have,’ says Shashidhar, who returned to the US after her internship. She spent the next three years honing her skills at Michael Van Valkenburgh Associates in Boston and the Philadelphia-based WRT, both leading landscape architecture firms. But by 2010, the pull to return home and chart her own path became impossible to ignore. Her vision took root when she founded VSLA in her Bengaluru garage.

These days, for Shashidhar, the line between work and life has all but disappeared. ‘Landscape has a way of touching your chitta,’ she says, using the Sanskrit word for consciousness. ‘In India, you encounter a different terrain every day. One day, you’re walking barefoot on a pilgrimage; the next, you’re tending to wildflowers in your garden. Everything here feels deeply personal.’ And equally beautiful – because if there’s one thing Shashidhar has mastered, it’s finding beauty in the everyday.

As she puts it, ‘The most compelling landscapes evolve gradually, shaped by time, terrain, and a deep harmony with native ecosystems.’ Though her studio has grown over the years, she’s intentionally resisted scaling up. ‘I see the benefit of maintaining a small practice. It allows for an intimacy of spirit, with each other and with the landscape,’ she explains. Her team rarely exceeds four members. And just as she doesn’t measure impact by size, she doesn’t measure value by budget either. ‘The more challenging the project,’ she says, ‘the better.’

It’s no surprise, then, that her portfolio reads like a Wunderkammer – a rich collection of institutional landscapes, private gardens, and everything in between. ‘I’ve always seen private homes as a space to experiment and learn,’ she says. ‘But ultimately, the goal is to give back and create impact at a more public scale.’ She is particular about approaching landscapes through a local lens, ‘exploring plant palettes and uncovering those quiet, unique elements that make our landscapes so distinctive’.

Her projects span a wide range of scales and intentions – from the creation of didactic, ecology-driven landscape for a school in 2015 to the design of a verdant garden of native edibles and medicinal plants for Byg Brewski, then India’s largest microbrewery, in 2018. The following year, she transformed a one-acre site at the Bangalore International Centre into an urban remediation landscape, featuring over 75 species of indigenous and adapted vegetation.

Currently, she’s working on a healing garden in Kathiwada, Madhya Pradesh, and the landscape of a museum near Hampi, yet another step in her ongoing pursuit to root design in care, context and culture. In Shashidhar’s world, the grass isn’t just greener – it’s native, intentional, and quietly revolutionary.