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So, Rachel you're a very successful garden designer and you've been designing gardens
all over the world for the last twenty years or so, what made you give away all your trade
secrets and start to teach Garden Design online. One of the main reasons I decided to
give away all my secrets and teach Garden Design was because the number of gardens that
I see on a daily basis as professional garden designer where people have spent small fortunes,
spent a lot of time, energy and effort landscaping their garden and they just haven't got good
results and if people focus more on design first rather than dashing off down the garden
center to get the latest feature or plants that's available, they would get so much
better results and the thing is in order to have a great looking garden, you don't need
to spend a fortune. You know, just getting the design shapes right first makes a tremendous
difference and that can come down to something that as simple as just reshaping your lawn
so you know, you can save yourself a small fortune and create a much better garden, if
you concentrate your efforts on design first and then once you got the design right, then
go off and buy the right plants and features so that's really what inspired me to you
know, help people stop wasting their money on things that don't make a difference and
show them just how easy design can be. Speaker So, are these the people who probably
wouldn't think to employ a garden designer, but would just need a little bit of help with
their gardening. In other words, does it interfere with your other work, your bespoke garden.
Well, there's always people that would prefer to have a professional garden
designer come in and design their garden and then, there is always people that would rather
have garden do it themselves and there's no reason why people can't design their own
garden as long as they understand how design works and they know a little bit about design
principles and once they got that under their belt, then there is absolutely no reason at
all why you know, a non-professional can't create a great looking garden.
But, you know, there's lots of garden design books on the market. Can't the people
get all the information from those? Well, yes, you're absolutely right.
There are a great deal of garden design books out there, but what I've found is most of
them are the core academic or very conceptual and theoretical. None of them really explain
the how to step by steps of turning all that theory into a finish garden design at the
end of it, one that is going to work with your taste and style and your type of garden
so you know, that's what I said about doing a successful garden design making design really
simple, really easy by showing people a formula that I use as professional garden designer
and it was one I had to use, but I had to develop because when I first left college,
although technically speaking, I was a qualified garden designer. You know, I got all these
theories and concepts rolling around in my brain, but when it actually came to doing
it for a living, you know, I found I really struggle when I came out of college because
no one had said, here's how you do it. I just been given all of this theory without
the actual how to steps and really it took probably five or ten years of me studying
design like crazy to try and work out the formula to use that makes designing simple
and, you know, it did take me about ten years to fully develop it, but now that I have put
that work in, it's really easy and you know, anybody can learn how to do it. I think a
lot of garden design books are either written by people that are either not garden designers
or they naturally gifted designers which makes it very difficult for them to explain how
they do what they do and I have to break the process down for myself so that I could do
this for a living and you know they stock formula that I came up with that did take
me a long time that I now teach here at Successful Garden Design.
So, what's the difference between online courses you teach and The Garden Design
Workshops? Right, well the main difference is
the workshops are a demonstration of me designing a garden from start to finish so I film myself
designing live and then I edit it down to the most vital things that people need to
know, whereas, the courses go in depth, so the workshops of just the videos of me working
and explaining how to design a garden so there much shorter, much more concise, whereas the
courses go in depth with written step by step instructions of exactly what you do and the
workshops are good for people that maybe just want an overview of garden design and they
maybe not sure if they could do it themselves or maybe not sure of the methods I teach are
simple as I say that they are and the workshops demonstrates that so there's a good starting
point for anyone that's interested in garden design and you know, even if they do decide
to hire somebody that workshop will give them an overview of what makes a design good so
it'll help them either do it themselves or know what to look for in a garden designer.
So, you offer up of a variety of things with Successful Garden Design. What are the
courses? Well, there's the main course called
The Great Garden Formula that is the kind of the mother of all garden design courses.
It really covers everything from small gardens to large gardens, awkward shape gardens, front
gardens. You name it. It's in there and what I find is a lot of people start out just
wanting to do their own garden and then they often once they get a taste of designing,
then they want to go on and do their friends and family's garden so The Great Garden
Formula is really in depth. It covers everything you need to know design wise and then the
other courses are more specifics so there's a Small Garden Formula that focuses in on
what to do with a small garden and you know, if you get the right materials used in the
right way, you can absolutely double, visually double the space in a small space garden so
that's why design is so important and you know, there's lots of tips and tricks that
are really easy that people can do in their own gardens and this is laid out along with
lots of example plans of exactly, you know, if that's just because you got a small garden
that could be out of shape or it could be very long and narrow so I cover all the different
types of garden style and shapes and sizes in that course and then there's the longer
of wonderful people got gardens that are longer than wide and you have to make them look wider
and all that type of thing and there's also a specific courses on planting, now The Great
Garden Formula includes The Five Minute Plant Expert which shows people rather than learning
individual plant names because there's hundreds and thousands of plants available so when
you first walk into a garden center, it can be really difficult to know which plants are
going to grow in your garden because they have such an enormous selection. Gardening
are more like plant zoos, these days. There's lots of plants that you know, one grow in
your garden, but look pretty so unless you know which plants you can spend an absolute
fortune, yes, so The Five Minute Plant Expert shows you the key characteristics to look
for in a plant. You know, certain plants that grow in certain conditions often have very
similar types of leaves, like, you know, they might be silver, they might be fairy so if
you know what characteristics to look for, you know, you don't have to learn the plant
name. You can just look at a plant, look at its leaves and you will instantly know what
conditions that plant likes, now, not every plant will tell you, but about sixty to seventy
percent of them, you can tell just by looking at them where they like to grow so that's
what in The Five Minute Plant Expert and then there's The Plant Design Formula that covers
the esthetics of plant design, how to put plants together well. Most people make the
mistake of either choosing plants because they like the flower or because they like
the leaves which you know there is most obvious thing in the world to do, but if a plant is
only flowering for twenty percent of the time, if you just chosen it for that flower eighty
percent of that time, it's not looking good for the reason you've chosen it for so I
teach people how to put plants together in a way that looks good all year round and get
that continuity of color, of shape and form and texture that makes the planting scheme
looks really good rather than just having your garden look good for say two weeks of
the year when everything is in flower. Well, it sounds as though there's
something for everybody, garden wise. Yes, yes, I tried to cover to cover
all levels so as the people that are really keen wanting to know everything and The Great
Garden Formula is the course for them because it's the most in depth, but if it just got
a small garden for example or they just want to redo their patio or their deck, there's
books on, there's books and courses that show them exactly what to do just for they
want the quickest and shortest route to get the garden they want than the mini courses
are better for that, but if you want to know everything, then The Great Garden Formula
is the best course. Okay, great, thank you Rachel
Thank you.