Just don’t mention the plants: A garden design student’s blog

August 12, 2011 Categories: Gardening

Garden design student Caroline Knight is dreaming of getting her boots dirty

I can hardly believe that the first year of my part time garden design course at Hadlow College is almost over. It has become part of my life in the same way that a small child or maybe a puppy moulds your days and nights around their needs.

The last month has seen me delving into old sheds, musty attics and lingering in hot anticipation at municipal dumps, keen to do my share of “recycling”. One of my artistic tasks was to look at patterns, place two together and then make a 3D model inspired by stated patterns. In no way were we to creatively convert our model into any form of garden – indeed this was a “basic design” swearword and never must a mention of tree, shrub, herbaceous perennial, pond or fountain be uttered.

My treasure hunting unearthed me an old and very smelly broom head, complete with microbes, which has become a rather fetching but decidedly rustic grid-pattern base for my model. Those decrepit bristles, having been washed, trimmed and lovingly combed, look remarkably like wintry things in, shall we say, outdoor spaces. I am now in the process of inserting people into my model using hefty slugs of Alice’s shrinking juice, proving to be as elusive as my adeptness at Photoshop. Scissors and glue are the last resort – a tantalizingly easy solution over which I feel comparatively masterful. Meanwhile, there’s been a 2,500 word essay on specific periods of garden history to prepare and I was fortunate enough to scoop Ability Brown and all his 18th century mates. Evidently he was no fool, reputedly earning more than £21,000 on just one garden project at Blenheim Palace. No wonder Hadlow’s garden design courses are pretty full, and I bet old Ability didn’t even have to make a model with his arty chums.

We have a practical week to look forward to next month, for which the top fashion accessory is a pair of steel toecap boots. Now these I will relish. An quality to each girl’s wardrobe and a fine way to stop people travel all over her. I shall use mine to stamp hard on people’s decking in the hope that it will collapse and rot away to dust, thus brightening the landscape and leaving room for some proper garden design. But what would I know? We still haven’t broached the topic of designing gardens. Perhaps next year …

Freelance writer Caroline Knight is a first year garden design student at Hadlow College, studying with the University of Greenwich, School of Architecture. This post is part of a series on her experiences: you can read her previous contributions here