LAND_542B Landscape Architecture Seminar: ‘Introduction to Planting Design: Designed Plant Communities’

This course introduced students to the contemporary planting concept known as a “designed plant community.” Central to this idea is the strategy of layering plant species according to their evolved survival strategies. At the forefront of this topic are landscape architect Thomas Rainer and landscape designer Claudia West. In their book, Planting in a Post-Wild World: Designing Plant Communities for Resilient Landscapes, Rainer and West describe “a designed plant community” as “a translation of a wild plant community into a cultural language” (Portland, OR: Timber Press, 2015, p. 38). Over the semester, students studied the primary layers of three widespread plant communities: grassland, shrubland, and forest. Students then reinterpreted these key layers for plant communities of their own design for various urban sites around St. Louis.