LAND_542B 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 concept is the strategy of layering plant species according to their evolved survival strategies. Landscape architect Thomas Rainer and landscape designer Claudia West are at the forefront of this topic. Their 2015 book, Planting in a Post-Wild World, describes a designed plant community as “a translation of a wild plant community into a cultural language.” Over the semester, students studied the primary layers of three widespread plant communities: grassland, shrubland, and forest. Following these studies, students reinterpreted these key layers for plant communities of their own design for various urban sites around Washington University’s campus.