Tom Paine's diverse career spans a quarter century. His early mentors were steeped in the classic design traditions of A. A. Shurcliff, Fletcher Steele, and Beatrix Farrand. He studied vernacular landscapes with J. B. Jackson at Harvard. His first garden design was a corner of the Children's Hospital Medical Center, Boston, shown here, in the office of Sidney Shurcliff, Vin Merrill and Doug Footit in 1976.

As a licensed landscape architect and a keen student of the four-millennium history of landscape design, he has designed gardens and landscapes in North America, Europe and Asia, and worked to preserve and restore Olmsted landscapes (such as this one, Stonehurst, Waltham, MA) and New England greens (such as Litchfield, CT). In his ongoing series of paintings of figures in the landscape, the latest is a reinterpretation of the Metamorphosis of Daphne. He is a long-time stereo photographer with a keen interest in special effects of all kinds, for all places. His historic stereograph library documents landscape special effects from as early as the mid-nineteenth century. His novel, Double Happiness, a tale of two passions, two worlds, one Tao, was published in 1996. He is currently at work on a second novel. His motto, with a nod to E.M. Forster: Only Connect.

Since 1991 his firm Jubilee Partners has provided land planning and real estate consulting services to private and public clients. He holds an MBA from the Darden School at the University of Virginia and a Masters in Landscape Architecture from the Harvard Graduate School of Design and a BA from Harvard College.