Are You An Environmentally-Friendly Garden Designer?
If you’ve been following the shenanigans in Copenhagen over the past couple of weeks then it’s inevitable you will have been thinking about your own carbon footprint and as a garden designer, that means thinking about the carbon footprint on clients too.
They may have set their hearts on that Indian sandstone that seems to just shimmer in the sunlight but can you (or they) really justify transporting exotic landscaping materials half-way around the world just to satisfy an aesthetic whim? Similarly, can we really justify the use of hardwoods, which take centuries to mature, when a softwood would do the same job and can be replaced in half that time?
As garden designers, we have a responsibility to make the right choices for both our clients and our own consciences. And it’s no good arguing genus loci – a design concept that refers to the very essence or spirit of a place – because actually, if you really think about it, what is Indian stone doing in a Cotswold garden or a London terraced street?
If that’s not enough to persuade you to persuade your clients to source their hard-lanscaping materials locally, then get them to think about the other, often hidden, political, social and environmental implications of imported products. How has that Indian stone been quarried or that hardwood been logged? Can you be absolutely sure child labour has played no part? What has been the impact of that process – including pollution - on an already environmentally-sensitive landscape?
More and more of us - designers and contractors both – are now making more environmentally-friendly choices when choosing our landscaping materials and that’s a trend that is only set to increase over the next decade.
For more information about environmentally friendly garden design and other garden design courses, visit the OCGD website.
Questions and Answers
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The prices of collect textbooks continue to rise. That's the bad news. And the good news is that there are ways to get cheap textbooks – you either rent or buy them from college bookstores online.
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I would like to form an argument that demonstrates how more can be made of the preliminary research documents, when it comes to winning design contracts and selling schemes to clients.
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