. . gardens to live in were more important." Works The majority of Church's work was residential, and he reportedly designed over 2,000 private gardens in California and 24 other states. Notable residential works include the now iconic landscape design of El Novillero (Donnell Gardens) for the Donnell Residence (1947–1948), overlooking the winding salt marshes of the North Bay in Sonoma County, California.Pacific Coast Architecture Database (PCAD): Donnell, Dewey and Jean, House and Garden, Sonoma, CA Others include the Mrs. Clinton Walker House in Carmel-by-the-Sea, California, and the Bloedel Reserve and Lakewold Gardens in Washington state. He also worked on a number of larger non-residential landscape commissions. He worked on campus master plans for UC Berkeley, Stanford University, UC Santa Cruz, Harvey Mudd College, Woodside Priory School, and the Wascana Centre in Saskatchewan. He designed the grounds of the Embassy of the United States, Havana, the General Motors Research Laboratory in Detroit (1949–1953), the Des Moines Art Center, the Hotel El Panama in Panama City, the Mayo Clinic in Minnesota, and Parkmerced (1941–1951) in southwestern San Francisco. He was the landscape design consultant to Stanford University for 30 years, beginning in the late 1940s. He served on the Stanford Architectural Advisory Council from 1960 to 1978, that President J.E. Wallace Sterling created. "Church was trying to put a layer of continuity around the original buildings and the new (ones), he was working on a (campus) landscape that was meant to tie all this together." Death Thomas Church died on August 30, 1978, at the age of 76, in Russian Hill, San Francisco. Legacy Thomas Church had a long, distinguished, and productive career with over 4,000 projects, as a Landscape Architect. He also wrote several influential and popular landscape design books, including Gardens Are for People (1955) and Your Private World: A Study of Intimate Gardens (1969). The Post-war Modernist garden design style, first in California and soon influential across the United States, was created and developed by a small group of landscape designers, of which Thomas Church was the "first founder." The subsequent founders and practitioners of the Modern California Landscape include Garrett Eckbo, Robert Royston, James C. Rose, and Dan Kiley. See also Landscape design history of the United States American landscape and garden designers American landscape architects Notes References Thomas Dolliver Church; Gardens Are For People — San Francisco: McGraw-Hill Book Co., 1955, reissued 1983. Thomas Dolliver Church;