Alumni Spotlight

Catharine McCord is the program coordinator for the therapeutic horticulture programs at the Denver Botanic Gardens. She is the producer and host of the Gardens’ new web series, Therapeutic Thursdays, developed to maintain a connection with people to plants in response to the quarantine surrounding COVID-19. Catharine also serves as a sensory garden design consultant in the Metro Denver area, supporting cultural institutions and other non-profits as they plan and build sensory gardens.

In 2017, as part of her master’s thesis project, McCord designed a sensory garden for Denver’s Sewall Child Development Center. This garden was constructed with the aid of a $75,000 grant McCord helped secure from the Colorado Garden Foundation. These accomplishments led to her selection as a National Olmsted Scholar Finalist. She presented her work at the Council of Educators in Landscape Architecture conference held in Beijing, China, and she was awarded the 2020 American Horticultural Society’s Great American Gardeners award in Horticultural Therapy.
 
McCord earned a Master of Landscape Architecture degree from the College of Architecture and Planning at the University of Colorado Denver. She also holds a master’s degree in Biochemistry from SUNY Buffalo, and a Bachelor of Science in Microbiology and Molecular Biology from the University of Central Florida.