Selecting plants for design

Our design students are busy identifying the plants

And it continues on the studio floor...

In a fresh and exciting start to the new module 'Selecting Plants for Designed Landscapes', Jill Raggett gets MA students busy thinking about the life cycles of a range of collected plant specimens. Once the specimens on our tables have been arranged from the longest living perennials, like the veteran English Oak, Quercus robur, to the short lived but tenacious Annual Meadow Grass, Poa annua, Jill shows us how the variable structures and forms of plants give away their evolutionary strategies, how the climate and planting conditions can affect the longevity of species, such as the tender Banana, and how this dynamic coming and going can be choreographed into a fabulous design dance. Afterwards, it's onto the revision sheets for next week's plant knowledge test.

Kelly Law
WUC MA Landscape Architecture student