I talked to a number of people during any given year, those that are interviewing for a design position with our company in some cases and in my discussions through the landscape design trade organizations, with folks that are rethinking their careers and orienting themselves now to a career in landscape design. So I was daydreaming about what real guidance I needed back in the early days. There are of course quite a variety of orientations to the work that can be considered, whether it is commercial versus residential landscape design or urban planning or municipal and park and recreation work, or interior escapes or resort design.
For my part, I've mentioned this before, but I came from the nursery industry -and as such this gave me a unique perspective toward the work overall. Like a lot of folks, I oriented myself first to the plant material. That was the spark that gathered my initial interest and that focused my passion at the outset. I did spend a few years working for commercial firms and doing planned unit development, hotel and resort and retail design planning. I found the work to be somewhat cold and sterile. I felt like I had come quite far from working in a greenhouse too, where I had originally become first interested in the potential of the career -and I longed to make the change back into the greener aspects of the work. I took a bit of a detour in the late 80s, to learn some specialty computer rendering work that was fairly edgy at the time. By 1990, I was doing digital imaging work and learning new applications for presentation rendering, a field that was relatively unheard of at the time - and led to some interesting work with Sunset magazine, The Los Angeles Times, the ABC Home Show and ultimately toward future employment.
But in the end, I gravitated back into the residential design field , to the work that inspired my original passion. I think that there is some advice that I could have been given, that was not available to me in my early days. With the perspective of decades now in the work - and the ability to see the arc of my own career more clearly, I wanted to take a few minutes to advise my past self - and in so doing perhaps those that are starting out in their careers and landscape design as well.
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