For here I'm guessing a basic mission statement would be that I want a colorful, welcoming 'public' front garden and a calm,serene, quiet private backyard garden. Is that the sort of thing you mean?

A basic mission statement (to distinguish from ink's "position") would serve to separate what is important from what isn't; would clearly state who and what will be served and how; would briefly outline an idea of the intended direction for the entire project.

Your mission will always be different from your vision in that the mission is the cause and the vision is the hoped for effect/result; a mission is something to be accomplished whereas a vision is something to be pursued.

More forgiving to intertwine mission and vision in landscaping/gardening, though, than it would be on your resume or maybe even in the intellectually challenging section of a beauty pageant.

1.understanding the basic mission of the project.

2.determining the goals and objectives of the project.

3.defining the activities, the intended experience during those activities, and the physical requirements to make those happen.

4.Ideal schematic

5. understanding the site – site analysis.
6.merging the best relationship of those activities with the realities of the site – conceptual plan.

7.enhance the stated experiences through use of plants and other things.

8. mitigate what is working against those intended experiences in the same manner.

I’m going to over simplify the heck out of this.

1.)You don't want to suggest what the basic mission is to somebody, but to either have it stated by the client (too difficult because they don’t know what you mean) or (more likely) deduce it through discussion.

Many people have some particular activity that they want to do in their landscape and have a sense of what they hope the experience will be. A lot of people have a tendency to jump right over that and start with what they think is the physical thing that they need to achieve it (ie, "we want a patio over here with a pergola going over it, ....") and kind of forget about anything else.
A mission should be rather generic such as "a landscape that supports our family lifestyle". ... then why have it? … to further develop, of course.

2.) You get into objectives – to entertain your friends, to have the kids to play safely, to enjoy the fun of gardening, to sun bathe (looking at the sky, Ink, is an indication that you are always …. …up?), safely park the car, enjoy the view of the sky line, ….

3.)Then you move toward figuring out how you achieve your objectives. Entertaining friends is an activity as is sunbathing (a passive activity). Any activity usually has some kind of experience that we want to get out of it (different for different people). You may have a group of 8 people whom you like to get together with (while someone else might have one or twenty). You might be people who like to have big feasts or you might all like to lounge around in recliners … or both. Depending what experience you are looking to get out of your get together is going to require specific site related built work – maybe a patio of a certain size, solar orientation, proximity to or away from other activities, tables, chairs, privacy ,…. These are the requirements. Without them, the activity either does not happen or it does not yield the desired experience. You do that for each activity.

4.)Then you take all of these things including the functions on the inside of the house and make a bubble diagram that arranges these activities in such a way as to avoid conflicts between them and to place supportive activities in close proximity to one another (outdoor eating area close to the kitchen, kids playing area away from street and within view).

5.)THEN you go out into the site and analyze the opportunities and limitations. This is a big subject on its own.

6.)You might find that some of those ideal relationships just don’t fit that way on your site, or that some of your activities need to be scaled back a bit. So you re-arrange the bubble diagram to make the bubbles the right size and where they can actually happen on the site – this is a conceptual plan.

7.)Then you actually start a plan to scale that lays out all of these things – site plan. This is working from big to small.

8.)The plants and other details come in to support the activities or to mitigate other things that detract from the desired experience – again working from general to detail.

That is what we did in school – over and over again. Yes, we did have to write out and draw up all of this stuff on each project. No, I no longer write out mission statements, goals and objectives, list activities, experiences, & requirements, sketch out bubble diagrams, (I do draw an existing conditions plan for every project which no one else ever sees as part of my site analysis), I don’t draw conceptual plans, but I follow through with 7 & 8. However, I do that entire design process by rote on every project because it was beaten into me. It has not been beaten into most people, so it is very important to go through it. It gets ignored because people think that they can do it by rote without knowing what they are ignoring, in my opinion.

When working on other people’s landscapes, #1-#3 are the biggest factors in making people have confidence in hiring me or anyone else. I bring people through those by discussion while walking their sites. It is done without a questionnaire or interrogation. They don’t know that I’m doing as much as I am through conversation. But, I am able to give it all back to them in the same way that I got it, before I leave. They know we are on the same page – not because I have all the answers, but because I was trained and am well practiced in getting the answers out of them.

The process above makes that possible.

... many of you do the same thing in one form or another.

… and some others just start decorating.

Thanks, Laag, for the further explanation. Planning processes are what I do for a living, so I sort of figured I had a fair grasp of the elusive basic mission. As I thought about the mission emerging from your guided conversations with clients, I thought how -- in a much more rudimentary way -- a question posted here will sometimes yield enough information so that the point of the project begins to emerge. Often, as you said above, no one stops and says, "OH, that's your landscape's basic mission." Yet somehow our minds pick up pieces and scraps of information that have, at their center, a concept of what it is that the poster most desires from their landscape.

The poster, of course, has the most information about him or herself and about the site. All we have are scattered words and photos on a screen. The exchange is not as easy as an in-person conversation.

Even if a person were to start a post by stating "This is my basic mission", we'd still have to ask questions and clarify terms to confirm that, to the limited extent that it is possible on an internet forum, we are on the same page as the poster. We'd question the mission, in other words, to make sure that it really is what the person says it is.

I know that my own basic mission has to do with safety, simplicity, and loving to garden. So, when I say "safe" and "simple" I don't mean generic. I won't go into detail, but I can go all around my landscape and "see" the problems that need to be resolved in the direction of meeting this basic mission.

Wellspring

My favorite thought process involves determining the genus loci (i.e spirit of the place). The genus may be that which is inherent in the surrounding as in an established environment (i.e neighborhood, woodland, or even like the other OP's lakeview).

The genus may be that which you wish to imposs on the environment or in other words you create that spirit of the place by context or genre or formula.

One of the ways my design instructors would get us to focus on the mission statement was to name or title each of our designs and we were actually graded in part on the appropriateness of the name in response to the client program and mission statement. How helpful this would be to others, I'm not sure.....afterall no one is grading you on the outcome or success of your design other than yourself. And realistic self-assessment is hard to achieve in any endeavor, let alone landscape design. And there is a tendency of homeowners to shortcut or eliminate many of those elemental steps outlined above when in reality they add immeasurable understanding and benefit to the process. Once you've been through the process a few dozen times, they become ingrained or almost second nature and while still very much considered, seldom adhered to with the same dedication -- it's been years since I've bothered to name a design or do bubble diagram myself although I do prepare various conceptual plans to present to the client at follow-up meetings.

All of this stuff trains you to understand what you are doing even if you still do what you were going to do in the first place. You are never stumped when someone says "why did you do that"? The way to cheat (both the questioner and yourself) is to chock it up as a gift or artistic expression - total cop out.

When you can express why you do something (to yourself, let alone anyone else), you can measure your success or lack thereof in order to apply what you learned based on that. When you know why something succeeds or fails, you can apply it later to reproduce success or avoid failure.

I do continue to assume that if one has several concepts, or a list of goals or desired compontents, that that is probably not the same thing as a basic mission but is somehow farther along the thought process.

I have sat thru so many commitees for nonprofits, gov't agencies etc where you spend hours deciding on your vision. More hours getting just the right mission statement that people can remember so they can fire it off without thinking when someone asks what does the (insert name of nonprofit/agency here) do? Then the goals, then the tasks that will accomplish the goals that will complete your mission and fulfil your vision.

I prefer the Nike slogan. Just do it. And my landscape looks like that philsophy, too.

Case in point - I was asked to explain it because no one really understood what it meant, apparently. I thought it was nonsense, too. The farther I got from school, the more it all really came together. Its not the lists and diagrams, it is the exploration which it forces that develops your understanding of things you'd otherwise brush over or ignore altogether. That goes from collecting information into knowledge over a period of time and practice - the time and practice is missing from those quickie charettes.

There is always the risk that homeowner/designer will still be inclined to skip these beginning steps......it is just human nature to want to streamline the process and get to the end result as quickly as possible. And true, many do think them silly or unnecessary as well. When I teach landscape design for homeowners, this is one of the hardest segments for them to absorb and adopt -- they immediately wanted to jump to plant selection :-) But it really is worth the extra effort put into it.

timbu, I think you are well on your way, whether you realize it or not :-) I can see a lot of substance in your contemplated mission statement (either one) and so many possibilities to create a satisfactory output that achieves that mission. My advice would be to pick one and run with it......move on to step 2: list the goals and objectives required/desired and then start listing the activities these two families will share and those that require separation or privacy. I think you'll find that a plan will begin to follow quite naturally from this start.

For landscaping, a basic mission does seem to be intuitive to me, as I see a mission as something that is executed or accomplished, as in a military mission or a business mission statement.

The genus loci idea as a starting point does seem to be more appropriate to me, as it express an idea or vision to be performed or achieved.

When I did the plan for my landscaping my "ditch" that was grubbed and cleared to a blank slate, which I posted about a year or two ago, my basic mission/GenusL was to provide a shared habitat for wildlife and my family. From that starting point there was a flow of ideas to get on with the restoration.

My basic desire is to have a garden that matches or generally conforms to the image in my head of what a garden means to me. I'm not seeking to have outdoor rooms or living space in the sense that commonly seems to be meant, where the garden is secondary - often a distant second - to the house. For me, creating a garden is the point of the outdoor activity. Obviously the garden has to work with the house and my particular accessibilty needs (getting into point 3 and below here...) But my mission is to create something in the way of Keat's 'A thing of beauty is a joy forever' so 'therefore, on every morrow, are we wreathing a flowery band to bind us to the earth'.

I have a specific vision of what the public vs. private parts of the garden should be but the whole thing is one garden intended to be a thing of beauty - for us at least. Since I feel no time pressure, the first years here were spent exploring what would grow here and trying out ideas, listening to the 'genius loci' to see what the garden wanted to become.

I frequently feel very out of sync with posters on this, and other, garden forums because I seem to have a very different time horizon and image of what can or should be created in the outdoor space around a home. It can be very discouraging at times, although it's interesting to try and see the world through others' eyes - and that's what keeps me coming back.

I have been able to extract a three word mission statement from people and it can be very useful unless of course one of the words is 'no maintenance'! I think it is possible to convert functional words into imaginative words and vice versa.

Say we stretch colourful, and add fragrant and old fashioned or nostalgic I think you can see where this might lead. The practical part being to discover combinations of flowering plants some with fragrance and with some kind of resonance with your, or your clients, memories. If you are installing a complete landscape the other items will serve as an appropriate back drop for a flowery garden full of scent and memories.

I like that quote by Ink.

This is partly what makes forum discussions problematic at times--if one thinks it is important to work on a certain phase of the design process, and an OP is all over the map, and you are not in a tre designer-client relationship but were trying to take a design approach, your choices are to hammer at a particular phase, or take the bait of the tangential discussion run the line out for awhile--certainly there can be interesting and fun discussions in many directions, or drop off the post.

Whatever happended with your ditch you were landscaping?

Maybe a December new years review of projects is in order!