The long, hot summer of 2008

Global warming is a fickle thing. There we were in late July with two projects nearing the end of their hard landscaping, the thermometers hovering in the high 20’s and no sign of a drop of rainwater. Of course the next step of the garden build is the planting – but with the threat of another hot and dry summer we suggested to our clients that they should defer the planting for a month or so rather than try to keep a combined total of around £16,000 worth of plants alive under the baking sun.

Our clients were happy with this idea, but of course we all know what happened next. A wet, cool August would have been ideal for planting – hindsight is always 20/20! The plants are now scheduled for delivery in early September and should get plenty of time to establish in the Autumn, ready to grow away like mad in the Spring of 2009.

Of course an irrigation system may have been one way to alleviate some of the concerns of planting in the summer. The counter to this is that at Pure Garden Design we’re focused on using the right plant in the right place, so the plants are selected for the natural conditions on site rather than attempting to force a moisture loving plant to grow in a well drained site (or vice-versa). Furthermore, in the summer of 2006 the hosepipe bans meant that irrigation systems couldn’t be used anyway, defeating their purpose. Well timed planting and a little care during establishment will do just as much without the financial outlay, or the use of tens or hundreds of metres of plastic piping in the garden.

CAD in garden design

It started off in engineering, then moved to architecture and is now taking hold in the garden design profession. What is it? Computer aided drawing (or drafting or design), otherwise known as CAD. At Pure Garden Design we’re committed to the use of CAD but there are some garden designers who seem to feel that using a computer to draw somehow results in an inferior end product.

I’m never sure why that is – after all, you never drew an entire plan using only freehand techniques but drew on a number of artificial tools and techniques which had to be learned before you could generate professional looking results. Scale rules, protractors, compasses and the dreaded smudgy Rotring pens all take a bit of getting used to and can be very frustrating at first.

Even with CAD the drawing board still has a place in the design studio – even when using pressure and tilt sensitive pens on graphics tablets is still hard to ‘doodle’ with the same freedom that you have with a soft pencil on a piece of tracing paper. But, and it’s a big but, as soon as that basic design starts to take shape the computer now offers the best solution for developing it from rough shapes into a client presentation drawing and then on to contractors drawings, planting plans and so on. There’s a massive productivity benefit to gained from the ability to make comprehensive revisions to a project for a 5 acre site and re-issue an entire suite of contractor’s drawings in only an hour or so, and this also translates into being able to be more flexible with our clients while remaining cost effective and keeping a lid on the design fee.

Some of the reluctance to adopting CAD probably comes from the fear of going from the known, familiar environment of the drawing board to the unfamiliar and potentially frustrating environment of the CAD system. This is where effective training and support is so important, which brings me to the point of writing this entry.

We’ve spent a fair proportion of July engaged in CAD tuition, both Vectorworks and Sketchup. It’s not a service that we publicise too heavily as the practice’s main focus is on garden design, but we do get asked to help people now and again. These are usually ‘word of mouth’ type referrals, and are often people who’ve done an expensive CAD course elsewhere then not sat in front of their PC for months, so when they do come back they’re completely flummoxed by the program. Our tuition always takes place on the client’s site and on their machine, preferably using a live project of theirs as an example so that the work we do is of immediate benefit to them.

We also offer a post tuition support service – if anyone gets stuck or (more usually) frustrated about doing something a long-winded way we can use a remote desktop service to work with them to solve the problem. Again this is more effective than just emailing files back and forth as we can work on the problem together and we can each follow every movement of the mouse and every click, rather than trying to decipher a page of ‘help’ text.

There’s no doubt that in the coming years the use of CAD in garden design will follow the same trend as in architecture practices – Sir Norman Foster and Frank Gehry still do pencil sketches of their buildings concepts, but I bet there aren’t many drawing boards to be seen in their offices!