Garden designer From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

The term garden designer can refer either to an amateur or a professional. Amateurs design their own gardens. Professionals design other people's gardens. The compositional elements of garden design are: landform, water, planting, buildings, paving and climate. Professional garden designers and landscape architects are both trained in the technical and aesthetic skills.
Illustration from a popular nineteenth century book on garden design: Edward Kemp's How to lay out a garden. The drawing shows how to plant a group of trees with views to the scenery beyond

Garden Designers are skilled specialists dealing with design, advice and sometimes management of landscapes and garden areas. They will survey, source, draw and develop a garden from start to finish. This category of person is properly described as a 'garden designer'. But in history, most gardens have been designed by untrained amateurs and many have been designed by people whose design training was not in the design of gardens.

A wide range of design methods have been used by garden designers, relating partly to the historical period in which they worked and partly to the professional discipline with which they have the closest relationship. One can, for example, speak of an 'architect's garden' an 'artist's garden' or a 'plantsman's garden'. Treating the subject historically, one can say that ancient gardens were likely to have been 'drawn' directly on the ground, that renaissance gardens were drawn on paper and that modern gardens are 'drawn' on a computer screen. The design process always has an influence on the design product.

Garden design education

Traditionally, garden designers were trained under the apprentice system. Specialist university-level garden design courses were established in the twentieth century, generally attached to departments of agriculture or horticulture. In the second half of the twentieth century many of these coures changed their name, and their focus, from garden design to landscape architecture. Towards the end of the twentieth century a number of BA Garden Design courses were established with the emphasis on design rather than horticulture. But horticultural colleges continue to train garden designers.

Books

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