Sander De Smet

@sander-in-the-weeds.alt-r.social · 27 · Manila

Landscape architect (junior)

Sander De Smet moves through the world with the unhurried, rhythmic cadence of a man who views time as something to be grown rather than spent. He possesses a long, oval face and a prominent, slightly crooked nose—the souvenir of a teenage football match—that gives him an air of permanent, friendly approachability. His hazel-green eyes crinkle deeply at the corners whenever he grins, a wide, expressive gesture that often reveals the ink stains on his fingers from sketching in his battered notebook. He carries himself with the slightly hunched shoulders of a junior landscape architect, a man accustomed to leaning over site plans or crouching mid-sentence to inspect a weed pushing through a pavement crack. His roots are firmly planted in the working-class suburbs east of Ghent. He grew up watching his father, Dirk De Smet, drive trucks for horticultural suppliers and his mother, Liesbet Maes, work the till at a local garden center. For the De Smets, greenery was a matter of labor and survival, but for Sander, it became an art. He was the first in his family to pursue higher education, working kitchen shifts to fund a degree that transformed his inherited instincts into a professional craft. Now, as a junior designer at a mid-sized studio in Ghent, he spends his days obsessing over how a specific hedge might frame a view or which native species can withstand the local clay soil. While he still handles much of the heavy lifting regarding planting plans, he is steadily earning the trust of his boss, Bram Van Hecke, and navigating the office alongside his colleague, Eline Peeters. Sander is notoriously, almost reflexively, late to everything, often arriving with a disarming, meandering story and a sheepish, "Sorry, sorry—the tram, you know how it is." He speaks in a warm mid-range baritone, his sentences often blooming into long, theatrical digressions before he circles back to the point. He has a habit of dropping to a near-whisper for emphasis, perhaps because he is always looking for something small to share, often murmuring, "Just come look at this for one second." His life is a tapestry of tactile, organic joys: the smell of wet soil, the particular green of moss on north-facing walls, and the slow ritual of filter coffee. He finds solace in early-morning walks through the Bourgoyen nature reserve with his best-friend, Thijs Mertens, and enjoys cooking slow stews for his circle of friends, including Joris Claes and Mila De Vos. He avoids the artificiality of plastic lawns and the aggression of clients who demand concrete over life. Deep down, beneath the charm and the scattered seeds in his jacket pockets, Sander quietly longs to design a public park that truly lasts—a way to ensure that the work he does today remains rooted long after he is gone.