Courses

After-hour Course - Every Tuesday evening from 6pm to 9pm and also the 2nd Saturday of each month during government school terms.

Cost for 2010 R16500 per annum

PAYMENT OPTIONS : (without early-bird discount)

• Payment of full fees on Registration or by 31 January 2010, entitles you to a DISCOUNT of R1000.
• QUARTERLY IN ADVANCE :  R5000 registration fee on enrolling and 3 payments of R3834 each February, April, July.
• MONTHLY IN ADVANCE :  R5000 registration fee on enrolling and 7 payments of R1643 each, beginning of February until beginning of August.

Full-time Course :

Based in Eco Park, a delightful conference facility between Pretoria and Centurion, The Irene School of Garden Design offers a comprehensive, and enjoyable course in Professional Garden Design in South Africa. The course is presented by Lee Burger, a Landscape Architect with a Masters Degree.

This unique course teaches the design process and principles of garden design, as well as plant identification and design.

Garden Design is a multi-disciplinary profession, a combination of science and art, and also requires understanding of good business practice. The highly practical course combines all of this. All students will have an opportunity to be involved in building a show garden once a year.

After-hours Course :

This course is taught one evening a week and one Saturday per month (2nd Saturday of the month). This option is for more mature people who are currently working in other fields, but who wish to start their own landscape design business.

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Further Full-time and After-hours Course Information

Drawing on the right side of the brain (From Betty Edwards)
This is an exciting series of exercises to develop the creative side of the brain. We have learnt how to draw by means of symbols instead of drawing what the right brain sees. These simple exercises help us understand how our brain functions and improve free hand drawing confidence.

Drawing symbols and graphic standards
Designers communicate their ideas by putting them on paper. This section of the course consists of the layout and details of the design plan, planting plan, and construction drawings. We also provide the student with enough symbols for hard and soft landscaping as well as standards for using these symbols.

More than Plan
Here we teach the students to draw elevations, sections and axonometric drawings of their designs with ease. This is necessary to communicate the concept, heights and mood of the design.

Rendering workshop
In order to communicate ideas designers must be able to use a variety of colour mediums to effectively convey the plan, sections, elevations and axonometric drawings. We teach the student to work with coloured pencils, line thicknesses, drawing pens, copic colour pens and combinations of different mediums (digital medium is taught as part of the full-time course only).

Form Space Order and Circulation
All designers concerned with space must know what it is, how it works and that it is such an integral part of life that it effects our bodies, our minds, our movement, our emotions and  that we can never escape it. Space- making theory is an analysis of everything we thought we knew about space. It helps us to design new and exciting gardens full of meaning and identity rather than just putting together a style and combining what we have seen before (Class outing to Apartheids museum).

Design Principles and Colour
Here we discuss all the design principles in depth and help students to make it their own to achieve better results out of the design process.

Concept Formulation
It is very important to formulate a concept before you start the design process. To formulate a Concept is, at the same time, one of the easiest and most difficult things to do. We discuss what the concept is and express it by means of music, discussion and mood boards. The mood board also help student to lay out images and ideas on paper.

Client Interview
In the client interview we discuss the different types of clients. We teach the students to pinpoint personality types and provide them with all the necessary questions to ask the client. We also discuss the design process in detail as well as pricing later during the course. Project one commences where all the students interviews each other. These interviews will be used for Design Project 1, a house and garden project to get to grips with the symbolism and theory learnt up to this point.

Triangulation
We teach the students to plot a real life project in its exact position on plan by means of triangulation.

Outdoor Lighting
Outdoor lighting isn't all that difficult to achieve. This is an exciting outlook on the different kinds of light, the multitude of bulbs and luminaries, and we look at the great effects that can be achieved with our easy to use lighting layers.

Planting Design
This part of the course focus on the plant selection process,  plant combinations, The different roles of planting, introduction to plant identification, some special effects to use foliage to create an illusion of a bigger or smaller space.

Irrigation 
This part of the course is presented by an external lecturer who introduces the students to the industry and products.

Contours and Landforms
Students learn how to set up a dumpy level and take height measurements with the instrument. Then we teach the students to translate the site information to paper for analysis. We teach a step by step program of working with contours as well as exercises in contour manipulation. We discuss where landforms come from and why they are so important. We also discuss how one small garden is interconnected to a web of ecology and how your design can influence the environment.

Hard Landscaping
We discuss different landscaping materials and their history as well as their applications in the garden. Through design we plan the different processes involved in the construction of everyday garden products and an external lecturer tells us every thing we need to know to design water features, swimming pools and hardware as well as introduce our students to the industry. We constantly discuss the construction details and problems throughout the year during their individual designs.

Basic Botany, Propagation, and General Garden Management
This exciting side of gardening is presented by an eternal lecturer.

Ecology and Climate
We explain exactly what ecology is and the relationships it holds. We also explain the different terminologies involved in order to fully understand current situations. The group discuss certain strategies to prevent damage to an ecologically sensitive area and produce a management plan. Ecology is not an aesthetic. Ecology is interaction of species.

Water and Soils
We discuss the different methods of treating water run-off as well as water and soil as a resource. An external lecturer introduces the notion of organic products and methods and introduces the students to the industry.

Sustainable Landscape Construction
A design product is only truly sustainable if the construction is also sustainable. We look at what the designer can do to mitigate the destructive building process.

History, Present and Future
We take a brief look at the history of architecture and gardening through the ages and have a discourse on the work of some of the most influential contemporary and modern designers, gardeners, landscape architects and landscape artists. Does South Africa have its own aesthetic? We discuss this and the different vernaculars of our country.

Specifications and costing
This part of the course ensures that everyone get what they pay for when designing a garden. This is where we discuss the roles and responsibilities of the designer, contractors and client. We provide the basis for the specification document where personal preferences on planting methods and products can be changed.

Design Experience
The students do a number of projects throughout the year into which we try and build as much topic information as possible for the different stages of learning. It is also the basis for philosophies, discussions, revisiting some of the course material, public speaking, and added tips of the trade so to speak. Students also help one another during the design mornings and evenings and this helps to build a network of people who can assist each other in the many different alternatives the residential garden industry offers.

Full-time Course Extras
The full-time course offers more design, one-on-one time with the lecturer, more industry opportunities, excursions to visually experience the course material, and computer aided design methods to produce design plans and presentations, better and faster, in this digital age.