The Dry Garden: UCLA in theory and in practice

Posted on | June 4, 2010 | No Comments

Stephanie Landregan, program director of the UCLA Extension Landscape Architecture & Horticulture program. Click on the image to find out about certificate courses. Photo: Emily Green

Nobody ever said that doing the right thing was easy. Students in UCLA Extension’s landscape architecture and horticulture program now learn this before leaving with a certificate. “All of our advanced design classes used to be make-believe,” said Stephanie Landregan, appointed program director two years ago. “Now every one of our advanced classes is involved with the community. Every one of our students has real projects and reality checks. The big ideas get tested.”

Just such a test happened in November, when an undergraduate from UCLA’s environmental science department contacted Landregan wanting to know how his class might introduce a water-efficient landscape somewhere on the 400-plus-acre campus. Landregan partnered his class with a group of her graduate extension students, and the team soon learned that although UCLA might teach environmental ideals, facilities managers practice something else entirely. Every inch of waterlogged sod, every rose bed, was sacrosanct, she said.

Click here to keep reading this week’s Dry Garden column in the Los Angeles Times.

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