“Dear Landscape Architect”

Dear Landscape Architect is a monthly feature from ASLA Utah exploring the art, ethics, and evolving practice of landscape architecture — written to spark conversation, reflection, and renewed care for our living medium. Submit your question to dearlautah@gmail.com.

October 2025: Dear Landscape Architect, “Should there be more emphasis, continuing education classes, and overall education on good planting design basics for landscape architects and students?”

Thank you for asking such an important question — one that touches the very heart of our profession. The short answer is yes — absolutely. But the longer answer reveals why this emphasis is essential, what’s currently missing, and how we can bring planting design back to the center of our professional identity. Please read on…

We’ve Drifted Too Far from Our Roots

Despite being known publicly as “the plant people,” many landscape architects today are far more comfortable developing site layouts, hardscapes, or master plans than working directly with plant materials. Planting design is often handed off to junior staff — treated as a task to complete, rather than a design discipline to master.

This practice has consequences. When planting design is undervalued, we see landscapes that are difficult to maintain, ecologically fragile, or visually disconnected from their surroundings. Good planting design isn’t filler — it’s the living foundation that connects our built work to its context, community, and climate.

Knowing Our Medium

Plants are not just elements on a plan; they are our primary medium — expressive, complex, and alive. To design with them successfully, we must know them deeply: how they grow, how they respond to light and soil, how they interact with one another, and how they change over time.

Each plant offers its own form, texture, color, and rhythm. But together, they tell stories that unfold across seasons and years.

As landscape architects, we design in four dimensions — three of space and one of time. With plants, the dimension of time generally equates with growth and change, and is what makes our work uniquely alive. When we design without understanding that evolution, we risk creating spaces that quickly lose their intent. True mastery of planting design requires patience, observation, and respect for time.

Planting Design Is Not Decoration

To elevate the quality of our landscapes, we must bring planting design into the process early, not as a decorative layer at the end.

When plants are considered from the beginning, they guide how a site functions — shaping microclimates, defining space, managing water, and grounding the project in its place. When they’re added later, they often become filler for leftover spaces.

This shift from filler to framework reaffirms the value of our profession. Plants aren’t accessories — they’re infrastructure. They are tools for problem-solving, beauty-making, and ecological stewardship all at once.

The Standard of Care

Planting design is not only creative — it’s a professional responsibility. Every design decision we make must meet a Standard of Care: a balance of art, science, and ethics that ensures the health, safety, and welfare of the public.

That means understanding soils, hydrology, maintenance, and context. It means specifying plant materials and details that support long-term success, not short-term appearance. It also means designing for the owner’s capacity — ensuring the landscape can be maintained sustainably.

A landscape that fails within two years because of poor plant selection or incomplete specifications is not a reflection of low maintenance effort — it’s a gap in design education and oversight. By strengthening our understanding of planting systems and technical processes, we can reduce these gaps and raise the bar for our profession.

Education and Mentorship: The Path Forward

To truly improve, our approach to planting design education must extend from the classroom to the workplace and beyond.

For students, that means pairing design theory with technical understanding — learning to read soils reports, interpret environmental data, and observe plants in the field. For professionals, it means continuing education that goes beyond checklists and CEUs, offering real opportunities for immersion, observation, and mentorship.

Senior designers have a responsibility not only to review planting plans, but to teach the thinking behind them — explaining how plant form, ecology, and maintenance considerations shape design choices. Meanwhile, professional organizations and plant growers can partner to host workshops, field tours, and case studies that reconnect us with living material.

There’s no substitute for time spent in the field — studying how landscapes grow, succeed, or fail over years of use. That kind of firsthand learning builds wisdom that cannot be taught through software or specifications alone.

A Call to Care More

Ultimately, this question — about education and emphasis — is a question about care.

Good planting design is both art and science, both emotion and ecology. It shapes not only how spaces look, but how they feel, how they function, and how they endure.

If we want our work to last — and our profession to thrive — we must reclaim planting design as a skill worth mastering, not delegating. We must value it as the heartbeat of our craft, not a checklist item to be completed.

Yes, we need more continuing education, more learning, and more emphasis on the fundamentals of good planting design. But more than anything, we need a culture that values plants as the living, evolving medium that defines who we are as landscape architects.

Because when we take the time to truly understand plants — to observe, design, and care for them — we don’t just create better landscapes. We create lasting legacies.