The Ann Douglass Wilhite Nature and Design Fund was established to honor the longest-serving member of the LALH board, Ann Wilhite, made possible by a generous gift from Ann’s husband, Clayton E. Wilhite. Ann’s remarkable spirit and discerning intellect contributed enormously to the success of LALH through the years.
Ann grew up in Dayton, Ohio, and received her bachelor’s degree from the University of Michigan, where she trained as a concert pianist. She earned a master’s degree in ethnomusicology at the University of Sydney, Australia, and, later in life, did graduate work at the School of Forestry and Environmental Studies at Yale. At various times, Ann and Clayton lived in Chicago, Sydney, London, St. Louis, and New York City before moving to Ann Arbor, Michigan, where Ann was a member of the Director’s Council of the Matthaei Botanical Garden and Nichols Arboretum. She joined the LALH board in 1995 and was an active and generous member until her death in 2020.
The Ann Douglass Wilhite Nature and Design Fund assists in publishing books about the role of nature in landscape design and has supported the publication of:
Beauty of the Wild: A Life Designing Landscapes Inspired by Nature by Darrel Morrison
Essays on Landscape by Laurie Olin
Warren H. Manning’s Urban Vision by Kevan Klosterwill