Join Studio Outside for this Industry Insights session!

 People with different backgrounds and different histories relate to plants in different ways. Community engagement methods can be used by public gardens to learn about these different connections to plants. This knowledge can affect the planning, design, and events that create deeper relationships between people and plants. 

 Community engagement is becoming recognized as an important part of the process of designing public landscapes to better serve all users. This engagement can take many forms and vary greatly in depth and intention, from checking a box to building long-term relationships. Within public gardens this process often focuses on an outcome of expanding visitorship to reach more diverse communities. Strategies to engage these audiences often rely on creating special events, culturally relevant programing, or simply ensuring that gardens are accessible (financial, language, transportation, perception). What if community engagement also included a deep exploration of the bedrock of all gardens – plants? 

 Is it possible to create design processes that reveals diverse cultural and personal associations with plants and to use these associations to drive design from master planning to the curation of living collections? From this process we can learn about relationships between people and plants that are often overlooked. What types of spaces could be imagined if cultural associations between communities of plants and communities of people are distilled into the design of a garden? Leaders at all levels, in gardens of any size, can continue to find new ways to engage visitors with plants. We can only truly design inclusive, engaging spaces through asking these questions and using them to drive decision making. What stories do plants and people tell when we listen to them both? 

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 Presenters:

 Issac Cohen, Studio Outside;
 Gwen Cohen, Studio Outside