Indoor Landscape & Plant Design
The Brief
In the early stages, a design brief should have been established through discussion with the client to provide a basic starting point. Let us assume this was done and having gone through the design process and decided what goes where the information and justification for decisions made need to be communicated accurately and clearly to the client.
An outline of the design philosophy, related to and created from the brief, helps set the scene, and from there justifications can be directly related back to the client’s initial guidelines and ideas.
Site Layout
In an ideal situation, plans of the site would have been made available, including furniture layouts, intended, functions, access points, window positions, etc. If not the essentials, at least the bare essentials should be drafted up.
Planting Plan
Plan drawings are most helpful to communicate planter display positions clearly.
These drawings can vary in complexity according to the complexity of the project, but essentially each and every plant position should be clearly indicated and labeled on the plan drawing.
For ease of recognition, we start with a black and white plan and use coloured indicators for ‘planter positions’ so that they stand out. We have developed simple ID codes, shapes and colour codes as appropriate to represent the arrangements. It is important to code each item for future cross-reference to the ‘specifications sheets’. Click for sample
Specification Sheets
The specification sheets work with and complement the plan drawing. Each plant arrangement gets a dedicated specification sheet which provides the information shown on the linked sample.
These two documents together leave no grey areas as to what is going where, what it looks like, how big it is, and in the case of the planter, what material it is etc. and, related to the design philosophy creates a full picture relating back to the brief. Click for sample
Bills of Quantity
Detailed quantities and descriptions of all elements being utilized should be listed along with guidance as to general location.
3-D Design Drawings and Sections
3-dimensional design drawings can be used to great effect to sell an idea, and some people prefer their inclusion. Our preference, however, is to avoid ‘artistic’ impressions, which can be misleading. In our experience, invariably the ‘actual’ rarely looks like the rendered image due to ‘artistic license’, which often exaggerates the scene’s “beauty”.
Design processes
There are two aspects to the design process:
Designing with pots
Designing with plants
