When designing a new garden, it’s tempting to dive right in and start selecting plants – it’s what we plant nerds love best! But we’re doing more than creating a space to show off favorite flowers—we’re creating one that also incorporates and considers circulation, function, character, and scale. Join us as we train our brains and sketching hands, learning how to use graphic and conceptual tools to think bigger about the possibilities of place-making.

Once we’ve got the bigger picture of our garden spaces in mind, we can start shaping them with program and structure. In garden design, structure is more than a row of shrubs, a fence, or a wall at your property line – it’s how you shape a space, create a sense of enclosure, and lead the eye to landscape destinations.

In this session, we’ll look at palette and plant choices, focusing on personal and environmental considerations, and take our design dreams and translate them onto paper. Utilizing the base plans created in an earlier session, we’ll look at the current garden space, visualize what we want it to become, and articulate that onto paper in several conceptual drafts.

Whether you're working on a new garden design or revising an existing space, this final installment of our garden design series will address both the large-scale process and the detailed specifics of your personal design. We’ll work together in a collaborative workshop, presenting and providing constructive feedback on students' unique design efforts.