Happy Christmas

Happy christmas to all from Aralia, here's a piccy of our Garden Design Studio in the snow today, chocolate box or what! have a peaceful xmas.

BALI Worldskills UK Landscape Gardening Competition 2010

What a fantastic year we've had, a Silver at Chelsea, an award for the BALI Landscape Design Excellence Award (runners up to Andy Sturgeon no less) and we've just found out this morning that we've been chosen as the designer for the 2010/2011 WorldSkills UK Landscape Gardening competition organised by BALI , in Association with UK Skills. Andy Sturgeon was the designer for this years WorldSkills UK competition, so we are thrilled to yet again be following in his footsteps. What an exciting end to the year, we are really looking forward to working on this with BALI.

The competetion is run for student landscape gardeners, it is designed to test their abilities as a landscape gardener. They will be competing live at Malvern Spring Gardening Show, Gardening Scotland and Malvern Autumn Show.

Competition Information:
Worldskills UK are a set of dynamic skills competitions for both young people and adults designed by industry experts. They run every year in over 70 skills across the UK. Last year, over 4,000 people registered to compete in a WorldSkills UK Competition.

The Landscape Gardening Competition attracts, on average, 50 competitors from Colleges and industry. Competing in regional heats; those scoring highest are invited to complete in a National Final.

The 2010 regional heat venues are; Malvern Spring Gardening Show and Gardening Scotland. Malvern Autumn Show will host the National Final. These venues attract over 180,000 visitors, providing an excellent publicity platform to showcase industry skills optimising PR.

All National finalists across the UK may then be considered for inclusion in WorldSkills Team UK. Team UK compete in the biennial International Worldskills competition against 50 other countries/regions. This year at WorldSkills Calgary 2009, the Landscape Gardening team won a medallion for excellence and secured 7th position.

The next International Worldskills competition will be held in London 2011. 2010 is the last year people can enter to be in with a chance of competing with WorldSkills Team UK in front of a home crowd.


(Above images are of the garden in Allen's Green Sawbridgeworth that we were awarded the BALI Landscape Design Excellence Award)To find out more please visit http://www.bali.org.uk/uk_skills/introduction

Edible Park / Landscapes Campaign

I've been trying to rack my brains to work out how best to involve local councils into incorporating Edible Plants into local parks etc, and just came across this fantastic web site http://www.capitalgrowth.org/ . They already have £150k to give away in grants to londoners for unused land etc (mostly gone already I think?) but they are campaigning for further funds. Think this is excellent news and will check it out further.

Link: http://www.aralia.org.uk

Gorgeous Metal Work

Came across the most fantastic web site today that does absolutely gorgeous furniture and sculpture made out of wire, a real mix of contemporary and traditional stuff. Check them out at http://www.raymentwire.co.uk/

Is Tim Richardson correct? Would all Garden Designers be better off if we re-marketed ourselves as Exterior Designers?

Tim Richardson, has (as ever) written another highly controversial article for the GDJ November 2009 (Garden Design Journal) asking whether Garden Designers would be better off, re marketing themselves as Exterior Designers. It does appear that the word 'garden' does appear to reduce the money that clients 'expect' to pay for our services. Often accidentally referred to as 'Landscape Gardeners' (which we're not!) the Garden Design profession does still appear to be stuggling to establish itself as a 'profession' , rather than a hobby. Exterior Designer, might be better understood by clients, who are used to the correlating title 'Interior Designer', but will it be worth all the re coding of web sites etc to optimise a different search term - I think possibly not. Surely the most important issue is to educate our client base to more fully understand what we as garden designers, can do and are capable of, to help them understand that we can truly add value into the supply change. So rather than see us as an 'expense', start to understand that we can not only create truly gorgeous gardens, but also can add real value to their homes and properties.