This is a part of the landscape design process that scares people the most.
The thought of sharing something you’ve spent time on and put yourself into – something that feels like a reflection of you – can be nerve-wracking. Any criticism can feel like a personal attack. Don’t worry, I’ve been there – twice every semester, for 5 years. Not to mention the occasional poor client presentation.
In this post, I want to give you a little run down on how to set up your work, how to talk to your garden design drawings and how to frame the discussion to make it useful.
Asking Family & Friends
vs Asking Experts
You want to share your work with two main groups – those you consider experts, and anyone else. These people will most likely be family, friends, maybe neighbours… someone who can’t claim a level of expertise. You may be fortunate to know someone who ticks both boxes, in which case, you can kill two birds with one stone!
Your focus when presenting changes depending on you present to.
For family and friends, you want to:
- Outline what your goals are (your criteria), and ask them to determine if you met those goals
- Check if you made design ‘leaps’ that made sense to you at the time, but now are kind of weird – don’t make sense
- Check if you have made any errors, or assumptions – ignored ground conditions, or designed something ‘impossible’
Once you’ve discussed how successful your design is do you then really engage with their subjective opinion on the design. Do they like it? What would they change?
When talking to experts, you want to be more specific. Focus on:
- Confirming your ideas are feasible – they can be built, or will work, or you haven’t done something illegal
- Ask about alternative options at different price points, to provide flexibility
- Do you need things like permits, engineering or other important documentation?
- If you don’t have specific options in place already, can they recommend solutions that fit your criteria and site conditions?
Maybe they can offer thoughts on other areas in your garden design drawings. Or advice based on past experience. You want to leverage their expertise in an efficient manner – specific questions to get specific answers.
Setting Up Your Garden Design Drawings
This is a basic set up that works well most of the time. Your aim is to talk left to right. If you are talking to experts somewhere else (outside, or at a nursery or home improvement store) you may only need a few select options from above.
I like having things that helped ‘inform’ your design to the left, or above. Things like inspiring images and site analysis. You an also have the ‘criteria‘ for your different activities, features and garden ideas nearby. These are what you use to explain your goals. Then your audience can judge how successful you were.
You main garden design drawings should be as large as you can make them, and in the centre. You can put things like sections, zoomed in plans, or maybe physical models nearby as well.
All of this information is useful to help you explain ideas, concepts and more importantly how you got to where you are now.
Presenting Your Work
The best way to approach presenting is to walk people through your design first, then go into depth for each space.
Up front, make sure you state that you will share the goals you had for each area – your criteria – and you’d, at first, like feedback on if you succeeded in ticking those boxes. Then you would love to hear their broader thoughts and suggestions, or concerns.
Start at a spot in your design that is similar to how people would first see the project. That could be from the back door, the front gate, or maybe down the side. Pick a spot that makes sense and imagine you are walking someone through the space ‘physically’.
Take them on a journey through the whole design. Point out each space, maybe a few words on what you want, or why you want that activity. Keep it simple first.
Once you’ve explained the over design layout, you can start to look at each individual activity, feature or garden idea.
This is where you can start to refer to your criteria for the space, and the inspiration behind it. If you have dramatically altered the space, so that the link between it and the original concept is not obvious, point out why you changed things. Was it due to some of your site analysis? To take advantage of, or protect against, weather or site conditions? Point out how this research helped you.
You can choose to stick to the main key spaces in your garden design drawings, or go in depth into each space. It’s up to you.
And once you are done explaining what you were aiming for, it’s time to chat. Again, you can do this feedback space by space, or maybe once you’ve presented the whole thing.
Taking Feedback / Notes
Whenever you present to people – family, friends or experts – it’s helpful to have blank tracing paper and pens nearby. This allows you to:
- Draw something to explain an idea, concept or space in more detail. If you do this, keep it with you for next time you present – the fact you needed to explain further is probably a sign this concept wasn’t clear at first
- Allow your audience to draw their own ideas
- Take notes, or add annotations to things – especially useful if you’re talking to experts and want to note multiple options for things (including potential prices)
I mentioned above that you may not be able to share all of this work with some experts. That’s OK. You should focus on the spaces they can help you with. So the garden beds for a horticulturist. Or any hardscaping – built structures – with a landscaper or builder.
Sometimes it’s worth retracing your garden design drawings to highlight only the area they can help with. Point out the specific site and weather conditions. And maybe add some notes about things like extreme events, soil types, shadow plans – any site analysis that could have an impact on that activity, feature or garden idea.
Similarly, you can write down questions you have about these spaces. Anything you uncovered during your design process that you want answers to.
Along with these annotated design drawings, you can bring a few inspiring examples. If you remember your main criteria for these spaces, you can share that, but often they tie into the questions you want to ask anyway.
What You Want To Learn
Like I said in the beginning, it’s tough sharing something you’ve put your time and energy into. Opening it up to criticism. But hopefully it helps strengthen your design. If you set it up like my example above, and frame it first as a commentary on if you ticked your boxes, that should prevent endless discussions about more ‘subjective’ opinions.
Opinions about things are helpful, and shouldn’t be ignored. But it’s too easy to go back and forth on something that is subjective. At least, in starting with your criteria ‘tick-the-box’ approach, you can have a more objective lense to view the spaces.
The aim of this whole process is – much like sharing your thoughts with someone out loud – you want to uncover where to strengthen your design. Just like teaching someone else something can help you improve your own skills, forcing yourself to talk about your design may highlight – for you – things your missing, or need to work more on.
Finally, sharing with family and friends can act as a warm up for sharing with experts. Most will be grateful you’ve come with a set of plans and ideas. Remember, specific questions should get specific answers. And even a vague, or unsure answer, is still a clue. It may indicate your garden design drawings are a little too challenging – or unusual – to comfortably build. That may indicate a bespoke approach to things – which is often where things get expensive…
So don’t be afraid of sharing with others. Most people will be amazed at the work you’ve put in. And happy to see how creative you can be – despite your own opinion to the contrary.
