Landscape Design Process

Plan for the 2007 Parade of Homes

It’s no secret that I design land­scapes pro­fes­sion­ally. I have spent a great deal of time (USU– Land­scape Archi­tec­ture School) and money learn­ing all I can on the sub­ject. How­ever, a for­mal edu­ca­tion can only teach so much. Mother Nature will teach lessons over time that no school can pre­pare you for! In gar­den­ing, as in many areas of life, there is sim­ply no sub­sti­tute for experience.

I pre­fer to do quick con­sults because I’m in and out in a few hours and get paid good money for the time spent and it is the best value for a com­pe­tent do-it-yourselfer. How­ever, I also do full-scale plans for higher-end clients– and no, I don’t have a full-scale plan for my own home even though you’d THINK I’d make the time for that!

I recently did a full-scale re-design for a mil­lion dol­lar home that had been bank-owned for more than a year. Need­less to say, the land­scap­ing was just about dead. The new own­ers are retir­ing and wanted to make it a haven for their grand kids. They were self-contracting the project (though they brought in a pro­fes­sional swim­ming pool com­pany) and were great to work with. I need to get over there and see how it all worked out, the down­side of not installing my designs is not hav­ing full-control over imple­men­ta­tion and there’s plenty of room for things to go awry.

Any­way, here’s how the plans come together:

Pen­cil sketch approved and ready for ink

Pre­lim­i­nary Pen­cil Sketch

Pre­lim­i­nary pen­cil sketch which I go over with the home­own­ers and get approval for design choices. Once I have that, the pro­duc­tion work begins.

8:00 am: After weeks of mea­sur­ing, meet­ing with the clients, review­ing ideas etc., it’s time to cre­ate a final plan. I started work­ing on the final draw­ing as soon as the kids left for school. The ink­ing process took WAY longer than planned so I didn’t fin­ish it up until 6:00 pm or so.

Can a girl ever have too many color choices?

10:00 pm- After din­ner and some fam­ily time, the kids and Hus­band are finally down for the night and I can start the color phase. I have long since real­ized that this is a HUGE plan (thanks to the odd prop­erty shape) and it’s gonna take a all night to finish!

 1:00 am- miles to go before I sleep.

This is what 3:00 looks like– view from my draft­ing table

3 am and DONE!

3:00 am- the color ren­der­ing is now fin­ished but I still have to make the land­scape man­ual –which took me until 5:00 am

The fin­ished plan is lam­i­nated for dura­bil­ity and ready to go to the client. I also give them black and white copies. I’ll say right up front that this plan is not my best work. How­ever, I had to do the best I could within the perime­ters the client estab­lished. Some­times, it’s more about get­ting paid than doing an award-winning plan. So long as the client is thrilled, I am thrilled!
In total, it took me more 20 hours of sketch­ing, ink­ing, copy­ing, and color ren­der­ing BY HAND to com­plete the color pro­duc­tion of the design (I am old school).

While I love my full-service clients, my spe­cialty are peo­ple like ME– the do-it-yourselfer who wants a high end look on a low end bud­get. Doing a great design for a pro­fes­sional install is far eas­ier than cre­at­ing a great design that’s bud­get and do-it-yourself friendly. I like a challenge!

 
I know a full-scale plan is beyond the bud­get and need for most peo­ple.  I limit the num­ber I do each year because they are intense for me too.  A plan need not look glitzy on paper in order to look great in real­ity.  I was a lit­tle ner­vous to post this here because I don’t want any­one to think I believe a plan at this level is a need– but it is defi­nately a nicety!

If you want to cre­ate your own color design plan, I will be teach­ing sev­eral land­scape design classes this year– FOR FREE– that you’re more than wel­come to take!  I’ll post more about them when the time gets closer.

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