• By ELLYN COUVILLION
• Advocate staff writer
• Published: Apr 26, 2009

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In the early days of his landscape architecture business in Alexandria, Patrick Moore would sometimes find himself sipping coffee in the home of a wealthy client, discussing what types of daylilies could be planted that would match the draperies

“I couldn’t do that” type of work for very long, Moore said.

He and his wife and business partner, Randalle Moore, wanted work that would benefit more people, communities.

Both landscape architects — Patrick of LSU and Randalle of California Polytechnic State University — the couple, over time, turned their company in the direction they wanted it to go.

At some point, “We quit doing private estates cold turkey,” Patrick said.

Today, Moore Planning Group, landscape architects and site planners, has 13 Louisiana cities, five towns and three parishes among its clients.

“We grew up as landscape architects,” Moore said.

“We morphed into planners … our clients kept pushing us to be here,” he said.

Two of the company’s current clients are at opposite ends of the spectrum in terms of their histories. Central became a city in 2005 and is taking its early steps in planning, and Plaquemine, incorporated in 1838, wants to preserve and highlight its history.

“I hired them when we first became a city,” Central Mayor Mac Watts said.

“Central is very rural and needs to be developed from the ground up,” said Watts.

“We have one chance to do this right in Central … We want to keep our country atmosphere” and avoid urban sprawl, he said.

“I wanted to keep it in the state, (with) someone who knows the makeup (of the area), the people. He fit in with all that,” Watts said of Patrick Moore, who, he said, was recommended to him by other mayors in Louisiana.

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