Landscape Architect

Beautiful spring days should be spent relaxing outside on the grass in city parks, on college quads, and company lawns. As a Landscape Architect, you work to create these idyllic settings. You do this by designing functional and scenic outside spaces where people can spend their free time. The materials that you work as a Landscape Architect with include different types of plants and flowers, and rocks and pebbles with which to build walkways and create garden accents. The goal is to make areas both pleasant to look at and healthy for the ecosystem.

In this job, you can work with a number of different clients. Governments, private companies, or individual families all hire Landscape Architects to remodel anything from a garden, park, or shopping center to a golf course or backyard.

You start each job by talking to the client and finding out what they ultimately want. Then you survey the area you’ll be working on, looking at the slope of the land, existing vegetation, climate, soil, and future function of the site.

Once you know, literally, the lay of the land, you create a design for the space, keeping in mind the local ecosystem and your client’s budget. You also need to check that your design neither violates any federal or state laws nor interferes with any historical or natural landmarks. If you’re in the clear, and once you win your client’s approval, you can start taking your design from plan into actuality, doing things like detailing types of construction, drawing up plans for workers, and creating lists of needed plants and supplies.