Designing The Landscape

Every professional landscape designer develops his or her own design process, emphasizing some steps while minimizing or eliminating others. It’s important to learn every aspect of the process before getting on the job. Bertauski’s comprehensive and readable Designing the Landscape presents every facet of the design experience from client interviews and concepts through presenting and pricing a master plan, so students can learn what works and what doesn’t when they still have the time and opportunity to make valuable mistakes. The author’s focus on topics that foster understanding of the functionality and aesthetics of design equips students with skills they need to be effective designers. While residential design is emphasized, many concepts and steps can be applied to commercial projects.

Today, there is a growing demand for designed landscapes—from public parks to backyards—to be not only beautiful and functional, but also sustainable. Sustainability means more than just saving energy and resources. It requires integrating the landscapes we design with ecological systems. With Principles of Ecological Landscape Design, Travis Beck gives professionals and students the first book to translate the science of ecology into design practice. This groundbreaking work explains key ecological concepts and their application to the design and management of sustainable landscapes. It covers biogeography and plant selection, assembling plant communities, competition and coexistence, designing ecosystems, materials cycling and soil ecology, plant-animal interactions, biodiversity and stability, disturbance and succession, landscape ecology, and global change. Beck draws on real world cases where professionals have put ecological principles to use in the built landscape. The demand for this information is rising as professional associations like the American Society of Landscape Architects adopt new sustainability guidelines (SITES). But the need goes beyond certifications and rules. For constructed landscapes to perform as we need them to, we must get their underlying ecology right. Principles of Ecological Landscape Design provides the tools to do just that.

Many gardeners today want a home landscape that nourishes and fosters wildlife. But they also want beauty, a space for the kids to play, privacy, and maybe even a vegetable patch. Sure, it’s a tall order, but The Living Landscape shows how to do it. By combining the insights of two outstanding authors, it offers a model that anyone can follow. Inspired by its examples, you’ll learn the strategies for making and maintaining a diverse, layered landscape—one that offers beauty on many levels, provides outdoor rooms and turf areas for children and pets, incorporates fragrance and edible plants, and provides cover, shelter, and sustenance for wildlife. Richly illustrated with superb photographs and informed by both a keen eye for design and an understanding of how healthy ecologies work, The Living Landscape will enable you to create a garden that is full of life and that fulfills both human needs and the needs of wildlife communities.

The first practical yet in-depth exploration of how to reclaim the post-industrial landscape, this volume includes excellent case studies by practitioners and policy makers from around the US, giving first rate practical examples. The book addresses new thinking about landscape, which applies new techniques to the task of transforming outdated and disused post-extraction landscapes through design. In the USA alone, there are nearly 500,000 abandoned mines in need of reclamation and this book provides the first in-depth guidance on this real and pressing issue. Drawing on the work of the well-known Project for Reclamation Excellence at Harvard's Graduate School of Design, this volume outlines the latest design thinking, theory and practice for landscape planners, landscape architects and designers and others interested in maximizing the future potential of reclaimed land.

Frederick Law Olmsted and others saw the landscape as it was and enhanced it, instead of imposing rigid design upon it. Groundbreaking landscape architects Beatrix Farrand and Fletcher Steele, among others, were brought to Maine by patrons, and the resulting public parks, campuses, institutional grounds, and private estates remain a priceless legacy. Drawn from a 10-year survey conducted by the Maine Olmsted Alliance, this book showcases those landscapes and celebrates their history and legacy.

Publisher Description

Practical approach to design and transform your yard and garden into a spectacular landscape.

A team of eminent practitioners and writers contribute to an assessment of the philosophy of landscape, and collectively form a new approach to creative design.