Scott Allen Bunn lives with his family in Seneca, SC and runs Treehouse Internatural — an umbrella of organizations including the Seneca Treehouse Project, Treehouse Trade School, and Amity Builders. He's also the author of 71 Solutions for Peace, Prosperity & Harmony with Our Planet, a practical guide to turning environmental overwhelm into action.

When Scott came to Hunnicutt in September 2024, he didn't bring a slideshow. He brought a broad fork and showed us how to use it — deep soil aeration without compaction, reading the land with your hands instead of a machine. He also walked us through keyline design thinking: following the natural contour of the land, positioning water where it will spread outward rather than pool, designing with the landscape instead of over it. That single afternoon shaped how we approach layout decisions at the site.

The Treehouse Trade School curriculum is built around the skills required to develop a thriving homestead and resilient community: trades, construction, ecological design, and land stewardship. It's the kind of applied, hands-on education that S4S is trying to replicate in a university setting. Scott is proof that teaching people to build things is the fastest way to change what gets built.

Concetta Cone runs Farm Girl Deliveries out of Six Mile, SC — an all-natural, no-till farm that delivers CSA boxes of fresh vegetables, pasture-raised eggs, seasonal produce, and hand-crafted dried flower bouquets to Clemson, Central, Pendleton, Liberty, and Pickens. She is Certified SC Grown and has been farming the land around us the right way — quietly, seasonally, without synthetic inputs — for years.

Concetta walked the team through keyline design at Hunnicutt in our first fall — identifying the keyline on the site, reading the slope, and showing us where future swales and contour plantings should go based on how water actually moves. That session shaped every layout decision that followed. She doesn't just understand the theory. She practices it daily on her own land.

When Farm Girl Deliveries sent a volunteer crew to Hunnicutt on October 20, 2024, it was one of the first outside organizations to show up and work. That's who Concetta is — a practitioner who pours into the next generation of growers and doesn't make a big deal about it. She is a beacon of what regenerative agriculture looks like when it's actually rooted in a place and community, not a brand.

Jon Fritz is the owner and designer behind Bluestem Landscape Design, based in Seneca — a landscape design practice focused on native plants, ecological function, and the kind of design that looks intentional and cared for, not abandoned. He has a Clemson education background and has been doing this work in the Upstate since 2015.

Jon helped design the Hunnicutt Food Forest and introduced S4S to the 12 Cues to Care — a design framework from landscape ecology (originally articulated by Joan Nassauer) about how landscapes communicate human intention. The principle: if a space looks untended, people treat it like it doesn't matter. If it shows clear signs of care — a mowed edge, a labeled plant, a defined path — people respect it and engage with it differently. At Hunnicutt, every design decision we make runs through this filter. The site should be legible. Visitors should be able to read it.

Jon's influence is in the bones of the site — in how we think about the difference between "wild" and "neglected," and how intentional plant placement and visible maintenance signals change what a food forest communicates to the public.

Rick Huffman is one of the most important voices in native plant landscape architecture in South Carolina — and arguably the region. In 1996 he founded Earth Design Inc., a landscape architecture and environmental design firm dedicated to sustainable landscapes built from indigenous flora. That same year, he co-founded the SC Native Plant Society, which now has eight chapters and more than 1,600 members. He served as SCNPS President for 13 years.

Rick's credentials are extensive: Governor's Award for Environmental Awareness, Environmental Educator of the Year, Upstate Forever's Volunteer of the Year, and elevation to the American Society of Landscape Architects' Council of Fellows — one of the highest honors in the profession. He also co-founded the National Native Plant Coalition and the Southeast Exotic Pest Plant Coalition. He teaches sustainable landscaping at Clemson and has shaped how the SC Botanical Gardens approaches native plant integration.

For S4S, Rick is a reference point. His 30+ years of work in bio-engineering, horticulture, and ecological landscape design at the regional scale is what the Hunnicutt site is trying to plug into at the student level. Our plant choices, our restoration philosophy, and our connection to the SCNPS spring sale all flow from the world he helped build.

Ryan Jones is the field methods lead for the Spring 2026 Stream Restoration Creative Inquiry at Clemson. He's the person who makes the fieldwork rigorous — cross-section surveys, RiverMorph analysis, BEHI scoring, desktop recon, and the kind of careful measurement that turns a "the creek looks messed up" observation into something diagnosable.

The CI's work at Hunnicutt Creek Reach 1 — figuring out why the stream is leaving its designed channel and what a student-led group can responsibly do about it — is only possible because Ryan brought field discipline into a team of students who are still learning. The poster we're building for the FoCI forum in April 2026, the cross-sections, the RiverMorph outputs — those are his work as much as anyone's.

Stream restoration is a field where bad interventions are worse than no intervention. Ryan is teaching the CI not just how to measure a creek but how to stay honest about what you know and what you don't — which is harder and more valuable than any specific technique.