Right Plant, Right Place. Right Tool, Right Task. Where does AI belong in professional garden design?

becoming a professional garden designer professional practice & cpd Oct 07, 2026

by Hannah Smith, Principal of Oxford College of Garden Design

AI is already changing the way we work. The more interesting question for garden designers isn’t simply whether we should use it, but where it should - and shouldn’t - sit within professional garden design practice.

Garden design is an intensely human discipline. It relies on judgement, creativity, observation and an understanding of people and place. Those aren’t things I’m interested in handing over to technology.

Most of us come into garden design because we love designing. We want to create spaces, solve problems and work with plants, materials, people and place.

What’s perhaps less obvious when you enter the profession is just how much work sits around the design itself.

Enquiries, client briefs, site visits, meeting notes, specifications, schedules, tender documents, emails, follow-ups - and the constant job of keeping multiple projects moving at once.

All of that is part of being a professional garden designer. But not all of it requires our creativity.

And that, for me, is where the conversation about AI becomes much more interesting.

What do we actually want technology to do?

There’s understandably still a nervousness around AI in the creative industries, and garden design is no exception. If technology can generate images, write text and process information in seconds, where does that leave the designer?

I think we may be asking the wrong question.

Rather than asking whether AI will replace garden designers, perhaps we should be asking:

Which parts of a garden designer’s workload do we actually want technology to take away?

Because I don’t want AI deciding what a garden should feel like. I don’t want it replacing the relationship between designer and client. And I certainly don’t want it making the creative decisions that ultimately make one designer’s work different from another’s.

But do I need to spend an hour turning meeting notes into a client brief? Or searching back through emails to remember what was agreed three weeks ago?

Probably not.

What happens when the client is already using it?

There’s an interesting shift happening on the client side, too.

In a recent OCGD Studio Session, garden designer Jonathan Hull talked about clients increasingly arriving with AI-generated images of gardens and spaces they like.

Rather than seeing those images as a threat to the designer, Jonathan described using them much as he would any other moodboard imagery - as a way of understanding what the client is responding to.

I think that distinction is important.

An AI-generated image isn’t a garden design.

It hasn’t responded to the site, levels, aspect, soil, budget, construction or the realities of how that garden will actually be built and lived in.

But it can be a useful way for a client to communicate an idea.

Interpreting that idea - understanding what they are responding to and translating it into something appropriate, buildable and specific to their site - is where the designer’s skill begins.

Right plant, right place. Right tool, right task.

Garden designers are already familiar with the principle of ‘right plant, right place’.

Perhaps we need to start thinking about technology in much the same way: right tool, right task.

Not every task benefits from technology - and not every task should be handed over to it.

The value of a designer lies in judgement: understanding the client, interpreting the site, recognising what matters and making creative decisions.

Technology can provide information, generate possibilities and help us organise our thinking, but the judgement still needs to be ours.

Where it becomes genuinely useful is in the work surrounding those decisions.

A conversation with a client can become structured meeting notes and a list of actions. A site visit can feed into a developing project record. Information scattered across emails, notes and documents can be brought together rather than repeatedly searched for. Routine correspondence can begin with a draft rather than a blank page.

None of that makes the garden better by itself.

But it might give the designer more time to do the thing that does.

A good design still has to be communicated well

There’s another area that matters enormously in professional garden design: how we present our work.

A good design still has to be communicated well.

For many designers - particularly those building a new business - creating polished, consistent client presentations can be time-consuming and surprisingly difficult.

Yet the way we communicate a design has a direct bearing on whether a client understands it, trusts the thinking behind it and ultimately has confidence in us as professionals.

Technology shouldn’t create the design or make the decisions. But it can help us communicate those decisions with greater clarity and consistency.

And that matters.

Professional presentation builds confidence. It helps clients understand the value of the work they are commissioning and gives them confidence in the person they have trusted to deliver it.

Rethinking the workflow

The opportunity isn’t simply to add more tools to everything we already do.

If anything, that risks creating more noise - another subscription, another platform, another place for project information to live.

The real opportunity is to think more carefully about the workflow of a garden design project.

Imagine information captured at the first client meeting continuing with you throughout the project - helping shape the brief, supporting the client presentation, recording decisions, informing specifications and schedules, and keeping everything organised as the project develops.

The designer remains firmly at the centre.

The difference is that we spend less time recreating, reformatting and searching for information - and more time applying our judgement to it.

What do we want to protect?

Perhaps the question for our profession isn’t how much technology we should embrace, but what we want to protect as we do.

For me, that’s where the value - and judgement - of a designer still lies. We listen to a client, visit the site and start joining together things that often compete with one another: what the client wants, what the site will allow, what can actually be built, what the budget will stretch to and, ultimately, what will make a good garden

Those are the skills that make us designers.

And perhaps, used well, new technology doesn’t threaten those skills at all. Perhaps it gives us more space to use them.

That requires us to be discerning. To understand what we should delegate and what we shouldn’t. To use technology to strengthen our professional practice, rather than allowing it to define our creative work.

Garden designers have always understood the importance of right plant, right place.

Perhaps the principle for the next generation of professional practice is just as simple: