Garden Design Course

What you'll learn

Learn how to plan and create your own garden design with our gardening short courses in Sydney!

Join this class to design a garden space that works for you, and create a landscape plan for your garden project.

This course is about designing gardens for specific outcomes, like that special project that you have in mind. It may be an inner-city rear courtyard that needs cleaning up and refurbishing, that balcony storage area that got out of control, a tree square out on the footpath, or a total makeover landscape design for your whole house.

It is time to re-imagine that space and explore the potential of what it could look like, and what it could feel like living with that space integrated into the home lifestyle.

Inexpensive, high-impact, colourful, waste-free, healthy and productive — choose your key objectives in reclaiming your space for your special purposes.

This course will walk you through a diversity of garden options and garden types — from inner-city small space gardens that can include fresh herb gardens and high productivity micro-farms for vegetables, to impressive eco-supporting vertical gardens and stunning green walls, to alfresco entertaining spaces, or wild and untamed flower gardens with a riot of colour, or practical, simple and safe play spaces for all the household.

Note: The Garden Design course, and the Garden Landscaping course have been designed to integrate and complement each other. It is highly recommended to do our Garden Landscaping course at the same time as the Garden Design course to get the immediate benefit of integrating the design into the landscaping component, as there is a 3 month wait for the next round of courses.

Learning outcomes

By the end of this Garden Design course, you should be able to:

Evaluate different options for gardens in your spaces
Determine appropriate types of garden to install
Select design and construction components
Draft and finalise a garden action plan
Develop and produce a garden design plan
Prepare for garden and landscape installation

Course content

What will be covered in this Garden Design course?

Session 1

Practical: Sketch a draft garden design plan.

Measuring and scaling: sizing up the garden space
Bring to class: rough measurements of garden spaces (tape measure, metre-long stick lengths, iPhone measurements)
Bring to class: Photos of your garden space
Preparing the baseline: scoping the design work
Identifying utilities; investigating the drainage; considering irrigation; estimating materials, time & costs;
Sketching rough plans of garden and utility areas;
Initiating a draft design with online software
Looking at compatible plants in the neighbourhood.

Theory

Evaluation of different types of gardens for spaces, concepts, heights, areas, & volumes.
Appraisal of different garden types for appropriateness of installation; inner city gardens, small & green space gardens, fresh herb gardens, alfresco gardens, vegetable gardens, vertical gardens, wild and untamed gardens, bonsai gardens, and water gardens.
Evaluate the design of garden edging, planter box styles, raised bed styles, drainage plans, irrigation systems, kid-friendly designs, vertical gardens and green walls.

Session 2

Practical: Develop and produce a final garden design plan.

Bring to class: sketched / online plans of garden spaces with checked measurements
Selection of plants or plant sizes, listing of materials, finalising budgets.
Progressing the garden design plan.
Produce the final plan for the garden design.

Theory

Decision-making on appropriate garden types and content.
Evaluation of inclusion of drainage and irrigation components where required.
Bringing together all the design item threads
Recognising barriers, roadblocks and limitations

Intended audience

Who is this Garden Design course for?

If you are thinking of doing some landscaping or installing a garden bed, then this course shows you how to plan and design that landscaping as a weekend project.

This course is for people with or without plant knowledge, with or without big enough garden spaces, or with or without design skills, or people with problem areas that need fixing up, and they don’t know where to start, or how to do it.

Course venue

Rozelle Campus

2A Gordon Street, Rozelle NSW 2039 (corner of Gordon St & Victoria Rd in the grounds of St. Joseph's Church)

Course materials

What to bring to class

Measurements, sketch/plans & photos of your garden space, as specified in Session 1 & 2 notes above.
Laptop, iPad, or tablet are best (phone can be clunky for designing)
AND / OR
Pencils graphite or coloured + A4 sketch pad or A4 paper

Course tutors

This course has no current classes. Please join our waitlist and we will notify you when we have places available. Join waitlist for Garden Design Course