Plants that thrive well create essential amenity qualities in open spaces. The changing aspects such as scent, colour changes and blossoms touch the users and create lively, lovable places. Plants are currently being rediscovered as possible solutions to the problems of climate change.

Excitingly, the use of plants is one of the few planning areas that hardly any structural or civil engineer thinks they can cover themselves. The respect of clients and other planners for the use of plants shows that this expertise is a unique selling point of our profession. Sometimes it is even the first reason to involve a landscape architect at all.

Complexity of plant planning

In addition to all the technical rules, an understanding of horticulture is also necessary for plant planning. If the static use of plants is not enough for you, but you are planning the seasonal change you want today, you have to think in the fourth dimension. In addition to the complex design with the range of flower and leaf colours, structure, texture and habitus, other issues are also taken into account such as benefits for animals, allergen avoidance, toxicity, maintenance requirements, risk of becoming invasive and, above all, site characteristics.

Planting is considered in all phases of the project, as it is an essential factor in the overall design. This makes it clear that plant planning cannot be understood as a specialist planning service that can be restricted to certain areas or service phases. For the depth and stringency of a design, it is crucial that the plantings are not planned in isolation, but are integrated.

Problem

Planting design - a complex challenge for us well-trained landscape architects that is adequately remunerated? The fee is usually determined on the basis of the calculated production costs. The idea behind this is that the planning effort and the construction costs are connected. The more it costs to manufacture, the more extensive the planning and the higher the fee required.

If the production costs of, for example, paved areas or equipment elements are compared with those of a perennial bed, in this logic the planning and supervision of plantings should be a quick affair. Since the opposite is true, sophisticated planting design must be "cross-subsidized" within the overall task.

Thus, there is no direct economic driver. Fee-optimized planning would have to greatly simplify planting. In the worst case, this could lead to a situation in which the planning of planting areas by a landscape architect is no longer different in design terms from the repertoire of a structural architect or civil engineer. If then even the emphasis of a planning task lies in the plant planning, the expenditure of an elaborated planning for the rates of the fee tables is economically no longer justifiable.

On the other hand, the service is almost always in deficit in internal project calculations. This means that the responsible colleagues are under constant pressure to justify why they are taking so long. Plant planning is not a luxury, but a necessity.

Outlook

The bdla working group on plant use has therefore set itself the goal of making good plant use not dependent on the idealism of the offices, but to reflect the appreciation financially. Just to make our occupation more attractive for the new generation, we should be able to pay also fairly.

The first step is to determine to what extent this disproportion actually exists and within what range it is. For this purpose, time estimates for the planning of different types of planting and the chargeable costs to be applied to them will be determined. The categorisation of the planting types and the associated planning effort will be discussed intensively.

In the long term, the aim is to find a way of appropriately rewarding planting planning within the overall contract that can be easily integrated into the existing system. A tricky question, to which the working group would be pleased about ideas and approaches from the circle of colleagues. The results are to be presented and published within the bdla.

Author: Laura Heuschneider, landscape architect bdla, Heuschneider Landschaftsarchitekten PartG mbB, Rheda-Wiedenbrück. The text appeared in the bdla association magazine "Landschaftsarchitekten" 1/2021.

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