Starting is hard. So let’s start by doing introductions.
My name is Ella. I’m a Finnish landscape designer currently living in Sweden. This autumn I will have been a part of the “green industries” for 10 years, which includes studies and work in three different countries: Finland, Germany and Sweden, in chronological order.
As with many other green professionals, my history with the “green” is longer than my experiences as a “professional”. My grandparents from both sides of the family had a great interest in nature and plants, both from professional and hobbyist points of view. Gardening, forestry, agriculture, foraging, fishing and general appreciation of plants and animals have colored most of my interactions with my grandparents and have had a huge influence on my worldview. My maternal grandmother taught me about the plants in the garden and in the meadows, whereas my paternal grandfather was especially keen on his vegetable garden and the plants in the forest. Their teachings and encouragement led to me learning about plants as a hobby, which then led me to pursue vegetation as a career. I didn’t understand too much about gardening as such, but my grandmother bought me a subscription of one of the big Finnish garden magazines, where I learned that the people who know most about plants professionally are called florists or hortonomists. With simple addition I came to the conclusion that the best thing would be to gain both titles. I dreamt of my own flower shop for almost a decade.
The shift from hobbyist to a professional started at around the time when it was time to decide on higher education. My father’s emphasis was on higher education, which in the Finnish education system meant that I was to prioritize the hortonomist education (university of applied sciences) as opposed to floristry (vocational upper secondary school). So I applied for the landscape design program which would provide me with the coveted professional title of hortonomist.
A reader who is familiar with the Finnish green industry education system might ask: But aren’t there two different varieties of hortonomist? An uninitiated person might ask: What the heck is a hortonomist anyways? So, briefly. The title of “hortonomi (AMK)” is given to people who complete 240 ECTS worth of studies either in the field of horticulture or in the field of landscape design (/built environment, as it now is called). While academically speaking it is treated as a bachelor’s degree (which usually as a university degree is not worth much in the job market), professionally speaking it is a degree that gives you full possibilities for finding work in the field. Internationally speaking, I’m sure that there are any number of related degrees.
When it comes to landscape design, most people tend to think that it’s a more artistic profession than landscape architecture since the name has the word “design” in it. But because of the hortonomist-background of the degree it really is a very technical and practical study program.
What do I then mean when I say technical and practical? I would like to say that the plant is at the center of the profession. Besides differences in the most common project scales, the attention to plants is really one of the main differences between landscape designers and landscape architects in Finland. Unfortunately, at the time when I started my studies, the motto of the green industries was “hard materials first, plants last”. This reflected much on the way we were taught at school, and while we were definitely taught much about vegetation, there was very little credit or appreciation given to plant knowledge. To specialize in vegetation was almost the same as announcing that you aren’t taking the profession seriously, but only want to dabble in the “easy” and “pretty” stuff.
I am not blaming the teachers. The job market was and had been slow and concentrated on hands- on experience in construction and management rather than the holistic understanding of interactions between the natural environment, the built environment, and people. This forced value system led to plants (among many other aspects of the field) being seen as a “soft” and thus a “vague” subject, enforcing the idea that plants are decoration and frivolity. But, of course, vegetation was with us everywhere, all the time. Biology and ecology? How plants work and live. Soil sciences? How to provide plants with adequate substrates. Garden design? How to place plants so that they give shelter, food, and recreation possibilities. Technical drawings? How to include plants into or how to separate plants from hard structures. A hortonomist is supposed to be well versed in all of these questions, and any failures in plantings are seen as shameful. But god forbid that plants would be prioritized! No, street credibility lies in the technical and the practical, around the plant.
While the professional field as a whole might not quite have shared such a stern approach to vegetation, it was still considered rather like a “necessary evil” than something to consider carefully. The exception of course being large and old existing trees and, funnily enough, trimmed hedges. Since discussing plants on a professional level seemed to be hard and unrewarding, the best choice was to concentrate on everything else that the profession has to offer. Personally, I found it incredibly fun to learn about how landscape design was linked to large, complex issues such as land use politics, environmental challenges, public budgets and so on. I even discovered that I had a knack for using the digital tools of the trade (basically a combination of good English skills, good skills for information searching and, above all, regular and variable failures at whatever I wanted to accomplish with the tool). Everything that I have learned has helped me to learn something new, and even at times when my best efforts have not been good enough, I have been able to be happy about what I’ve learned and have been more or less confident that I will do better next time. Enjoying most of the stuff that I do; appreciating even the stuff that I hate or am bad at; improving at a variety of things as time goes by; simply, becoming an all-round landscape professional. This has been what I’ve thought would be enough. Plants were what got me into the field, and finding other things to like and to be able to work with plants every once in a while should be enough, right?
Nah. I mean, for real, no.
I should have realized this long before. I never turned from hobbyist to a professional. For the last ten years I have been a plant enthusiast who works in the field of landscape design. When a school day was over, I would think “not enough plants” and borrow some books from the library to leaf through. I would make my own plant lists “for future use”. During weekends and vacations I would take my camera and go for long walks to photograph plants. For my exchange studies and my Master’s studies I made a point of picking all of the planting-related courses. All of the above I’ve continued with now after entering the workforce. My colleagues have been asking me why I’m studying this stuff on my free time, that isn’t it like working for free. My family has been worried about me overworking myself because of this preoccupation on plants. But now I can answer them: plants are not my work, they are my hobby. My calling, maybe even. Of course it would be nice to be paid to live out your calling, and sometimes I am. Of course you can wear yourself out even when doing something that you love, and sometimes I have. But if my life up to this point is of any indication, I can’t not work with plants. There’s nothing else I’ve put as much time into (except for Japanese pop culture, but that was never a viable career option for me), and there’s nothing else I’ve found as satisfying as learning about plants and applying that knowledge in creative and practical ways.
The view of the professional community has changed since I started my studies, at least in the Finnish green industries. Now vegetation is seen as something that is integral to the benefits that the landscape industries is aiming to provide. But since there still are many things that we do not understand about vegetation, and even what we do know is not obvious to many practitioners, a lot of information and knowledge will need to be reorganized, tested and created before we can say that we know how to work with vegetation that suits the current paradigm(s).
This spring, after 2 years of consideration and effort, I got backing from the company I work at and was enrolled at the Swedish University of Agriculture (SLU) as an industrial PhD-student. My project “Designed plant communities in the nature-based city” (tentative name) aims to synthesize and create knowledge on vegetation in the built environment, mainly within the “naturalistic planting design”-paradigm, but with a critical and practical approach. From a personal standpoint, I see this as a step on a path that will allow me to work with vegetation in a way that both satisfies my own ambitions and that is of use to a wider audience. And that will allow me to remain healthy and sane, of course.
And so. With the introductions and my personal life history out of the way, let’s talk briefly about what this blog is for. Obviously, it’s about vegetation, or at least landscape design through a heavy emphasis on vegetation. Since I very recently was admitted as a PhD-student, I don't need this blog as a motivator for reading and writing anymore as I thought when I first wrote this text; that's par for the course for the next years. Rather, I'll be using this blog as an outlet to branch out and air out thoughts that aren't fit for the scientific papers that I'll be producing. Since I'll be doing the PhD-research parallel to my landscape design assignments for clients I'd also like to talk about real life projects, hopefully with the client's permission. We'll see.
I have read and will re-read key texts on the subject of vegetation design and related subjects. I will expand and reflect on the thoughts and theories presented, and provide my real-life observations related to the texts or the questions raised by the texts. And above all, the writing is expressed in blog form so that hopefully anybody who is interested in the subjects can interact and discuss them with me and each other, as discussion and joint effort in developing the practice is something that is deeply needed to push it forward.
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