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Landscaping - Site Planning and Design Review - Architect Registration Exam A.R.E. Webinar

1,525 views · Published 6 March 2016 · 5:57 · Indexed 21 September 2026

Channel: Black Spectacles · 2016 · Education

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We're going to start getting into some of the specifics of the vignette issues. When we start talking about landscaping, essentially for the most part, it kind of breaks out into two simple ways of thinking about it.

One is trees, and the other is really everything else, shrubs, and plantings, and decorative and all of that stuff. And the trees are held out as in a sort of different way, I think partly because they're so long term, and partly because they're so architectural that they have big impact, they're for a long time, they have big impact, in the same way that architectural decisions do.

Whereas the other elements can also have big impact in terms of the aesthetics and all of that. But this is not an exam for landscape architects. So they just don't want to get so into the detail on the stuff that is going to be very into the minutia. So the issues about landscaping when we're not talking about trees is going to be pretty big scale issues. It's going to be pretty, you know, from high above. They're not going to ask you about any plant names or anything like that. They're not going to expect any sort of detailed knowledge about it. But there are some basic ideas that you should have a very clear understanding. The first one that's worth mentioning is the idea of native versus decorative. Native plantings versus decorative plantings. There's couple of other terms that can get thrown in there as well, but native and decorative are the ones that will show up the most.

And the trick here is just sort of, when you think of native plants, probably what most people think about is like prairie grasses and big tall grasses and things like that. And that certainly is true in much of the country, there are very specific grasses that look like. You think about a landscape design that is specifically designed to be using native landscaping. Then most people start to kind of picture that very scrubby grassy look. That's actually not really what the term means.

What the term means is that native landscaping is landscaping, it's plants that would conceivably already be living in that region, and so anything, whether it's a beautiful flower, or whether it's a certain kind of shrub, or whether it's a prickly rose or whatever can all be native, if they are literally native to that region. And the entire point is that the reason that you would want to use native plantings is because it is already viable in that particular climate. It is already demonstrated to be viable.

And therefore, you shouldn't have to add water when you plant them. You shouldn't have to do anything special that's going to allow…the plants won't need any special taking care of because they should be able to live in that region just by themselves. So we're not wasting water, we're not taking potable water and then throwing it out onto the plants and into the dirt. That's one of those things that is a sort of basic cornerstone of thinking about sustainability issues in the current day is that there's no reason to waste water so let's not do that. You would be surprised how that was not part of the thinking until just a few years ago. If you said native plantings 15 years ago, the vast majority of architects in the country wouldn't have any idea what you were talking about. It really is a change that has happened.

So I know, for most of you, it probably sounds like, "Well, duh," but actually, you have to be a little careful about this because it doesn't show up on a lot of the guide books and things because they just…that's not how they were thinking about these things just a little while ago. So then, okay, what's decorative? Decorative isn't evil. It just means that there are certain places where you have other concerns. Where it's not about native, it's not about the amount of watering, but it takes on a very particular and very important design aspect.

So decorative is effectively saying, you're consciously using something that isn't native onto the site. It is not saying that you're using something that's beautiful. It's kind of a funny thing, right? They're using the word decorative, but it doesn't necessarily mean that it's a beautiful thing, it just means that it's not native, and that you're doing it for a particular reason. And so you should have a handle on the kind of aspects of how that would play into a multiple choice type question.

Those issues are not going to show up on any of the vignettes. Nobody is going to ask you anything specific about any of the plants or any of that. That's just, it's way too detailed for the vignettes. It's just not going to show up.

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