Volunteer Landscape Architect to Get ‘Unsung Hero’ Award

Dick Glanville, who’s provided unpaid services to San Anselmo as a landscape architect on and off since 1999, will get a Green Award.

The prize will be presented at 7 p.m. Aug. 5 at a special Town Council meeting.

It was voted for unanimously at a recent session of the Quality of Life Commission, which has been giving awards to “unsung heroes” monthly for five years.

As a volunteer, Glanville helped formulate the plan to replant and water the town’s diseased elm trees, and has helped out with the rain garden at the library, tennis courts at Memorial Park, and landscaping at the firehouse after the flood.

He’s supplemented his paid work for the town with many volunteer hours on many tasks because “it’s what feels right to do — the old giving back,” he says.

What does that giving back look like?

At the rain garden, he worked “with some other folks and prepared plans to rebuild the curbs, develop a gravel and drainage system, and then prepared the plants themselves.”

And as an essential part of the volunteer elm tree task force, which was linked to U.C. Extension, he helped come up with a long-term plan for strategic replacement. Five trees “that are still doing fine were planted the first year,” 1999, but, because of budgetary constraints, additional ones were not planted again until last year.

Glanville did come up with a new plan but stepped aside because he was retiring. “I had to pass the baton,” he says.

Way back, when his kids attended, he, his wife and four other parents built the first Wade Thomas garden, with raised flower beds, and also built a stone wall in front of the gym.

He also remembers installing — completely with volunteer labor — a softball field at the school.

His kids now live in Santa Cruz, where both show they’ve inherited his DNA regarding green projects. His daughter, Emily, 30, is employed by an environmental nonprofit, and his son, Tim, 27, works for a solar panel company.

Glanville, who’s lived in San Anselmo 29 years, says he became sensitized to the need for green responsibility while in college, “when the environmental movement was just starting and the first Earth Day was happening.”

In grad school at the University of Oregon, he taught a class on plants after having “learned everything possible about 1,000” of them.

He also cites his lifelong love for the outdoors as having spurred some of his environmental work. He still enjoys kayaking with his wife, Diana, and mountain biking with his buddies.

When his firm, Glanville and Associates, was bidding for a job in South Lake Tahoe, the landscape architect backed the notion of public rather than private access to the beach. The Tahoe Daily Tribune quoted him as saying, “To me, it seems to be a God-given right to walk out there and enjoy the lake.”

He didn’t get that particular job, but he did get to work on five lakefront parks in California. “All involved preserving the water quality in the lake,” he recalls.

The “largest and most interesting,” he says, was a two-year project under the auspices of the state-run California Tahoe Conservancy. He had to work with a 29-person steering committee. “It was kind of like herding cats,” he says.

Glanville jokes about his 25-year stint working on affordable housing projects for the San Rafael-based Ecumenical Association for Housing (EAH): “I always considered that volunteer work even though we were paid — our fees were so low we just broke even.”

All things considered, the landscape architect says, “I feel blessed to live in such a beautiful, environmentally friendly place — and am grateful to all those people who came here in the ‘60s who prevented highways and major development.”

Glanville will become the 29th winner of the Green Award.

It was previously given Lisa Hamilton, Jo Ann Richards, Rene Voss, Linda Hoch, Rich Torresan, Jo Julin, Jake Luria, Anna Frost, Brian Crawford, the team of David Fox and Sheila Mutter, Jeff Hvid, Dick Miner, Conn Rusche, Charles Kennard, the team of Steve Reinertsen and Scott Weeks, Sita Khufu, Rohana McLaughlin, Joyce Brown, Larry Nilsen, Matt Eakle, Ted Bakkila, Christine Dietrich Cragg, Bob Mellin, H.G. Von Dallwitz, Denali Gillaspie, Jonathan Braun, Dan Goltz and the husband-wife team of Janet Byrum and Bob Fleming.

Nominations for the environmentally oriented Green Awards, or the broader Silver Awards, can be hand-delivered or mailed to: Quality of Life Commission, c/o Town of San Anselmo, 525 San Anselmo Ave., or e-mailed to voodee@sbcglobal.net or townclerk@ci.san-anselmo.ca.us.