subject: The Very Different Challenges In Landscaping Design [print this page] The Very Different Challenges In Landscaping Design
It's quite amazing really when one thinks about it. The biggest thing all around us, apart from the sky, landscaping design is largely unnoticed by most of us. Yet if it were all ripped apart by a hurricane or tornado, then we'd notice. We would immediately be aware that something of great, though somewhat intangible, value was gone.
That's the secret of good landscape design. Subtlety. It's doing your psychological health immense good, but you hardly notice until it's gone. With most good design it "happens" to you without "shouting" at you. It's the same with good authors. They put you into the scene, make you part of the story, without over embellishing the text with flowery adjectives and ostentatious cliches.
The landscape designer achieves this particularly though one quite astounding characteristic. The ability to see what something will look like long before the work of creating it has even started. They can apply this skill in small contexts. They can equally apply it on a grand scale.
Their skills are required everywhere. They design and plan large city parks and the horticultural aspects of streetscapes. They are used in big private residential developments. They are used in small private garden design. They do their job all around and make us feel better. The improve the environment we have to look at and pass through daily.
Some will argue that you can train to be a landscape designer. That's only half the truth. You can train to know about electricity in a garden, legal planning and building regulation, which plants will survive in a particular location, drainage requirements, etc. But just as you can learn how to use a paint brush and canvas, that does not make you Vincent Van Gogh.
Landscaping design is first and foremost "design". That it concerns landscapes is the part that possible can be learned from schools and books. The design part really comes from within. It is something most people are born with. It can be developed, if it's there. It is generally very difficult, if not impossible, to acquire afterwards, if it was never there to start with.
