Knowledge gardens: designing public gardens for transformative experience of dynamic vegetation

Abstract

This project explores the potential of gardens as specific physical places where humans cultivate vegetation. Humans are increasingly separated from natural systems, particularly vegetation, in their daily lives. Such a disconnect results in a failure to build emotional ties to and deep care for the natural world. To address this disconnect, landscape architects and planting designers need to understand how to design public gardens as ambiguous landscapes, landscapes that refer to natural ecosystems while also clearly revealing the human role in their design and care. Design choices involve environmental components and their articulation. Designers currently lack a vocabulary to identify the components of transformative experiences between people and plants. They also lack a visual understanding of how relationships between components can be articulated to establish ambiguity in specific sites. Synthesis of literature in experiential learning, dynamic vegetation, and planting design establishes a vocabulary of component cues to set up conditions for transformative experience in public gardens. Critical drawing of ambiguous landscapes by contemporary planting designers augments the researcher’s understanding of experiential cues. In order to explore the potential formal impact of designing for ambiguity throughout the design process, this project’s design application spans two sites: Chapman Botanical Garden in Apalachicola, Florida, and the Meadow on the Kansas State University campus, Manhattan, Kansas. Designing Chapman Botanical Garden offers the potential to be involved with the conceptual phases of site design: site planning, programming, and planting design. Designing at the Meadow offers the opportunity to be involved in the implementation phase of design: stakeholder involvement, selection and growing of plants, and design interpretation. Together, the two planting design explorations represent a complete design process for transformative experience.