Are you Louisiana now?I know you like gardening for

wildlife and have several feeders, birdhouses, bird

and butterfly plantings, and a small pond. you have

a small patio and do containers as well. you LOVE

garden structures such as birdbaths, gazing balls,

and unique statues.
build a beautiful arbor and pergola. Arbor covered

with climbing pinkie roses - awesome! In Aug 2005,

all lost to Hurricane Katrina. Relocated to north

MS, started from scratch in new home. Still love

cottage gardens, wildlife gardening, and composting.
You could post your back yard pic here,some people

give you suggests.many suggests and ideas are good

design.you will share texture pic and cad pic that I

try to do with people"suggests for you in that

thread.
In your area,contractors bid your project by same

design pic,make you save money very much.
It is a good idea that reduce the amount of lawn you
have,sugest you use shrub more,hrubs in general tend
to be less maintenance than perennials for many of
the reasons,no need for deadheading, dividing,
staking, cutting back or cleaning up seasonally and
typically require less watering once established due
to wider, more extensive root systems. But to
decrease maintenance even further, select those
shrubs which are recognized as being fully hardy and
well suited to climate and growing conditions,
drought tolerant (once established), disease and
pest resistant and not requiring excessive pruning
to maintain health or size.
Check with local extension office for their
recommendations and visit some of better local
retail nurseries in season for ideas. Ideally would
want to include some broadleafed evergreen shrubs
and/or dwarf conifers as well to provide winter
interest and textural variation.
And I wouldn't necessarily want to eliminate ALL
herbaceous perennials - some are quite a bit less
maintenance than others. A mixed border that
includes a variety of shrubs, perennials, grasses,
groundcovers and even a few small trees generally
will provide year long interest and color with
relatively low maintenance.

Here is a link that might be useful: share other some ideas

This is what sucks about shows like Landscapers Challenge- in the real world, if you want multiple designs to choose from you have to pay for multiple designs. As for students to "give" you a plan? I hope they're taught better than that. Whenever a less-experienced designer tells me about someone willing to "help you build your portfolio if you hook me up" I tell them delete the contact information and run the other way.

If you liked the designer you met with and feel that s/he is competent and gets you and your likes, $500 is a SMOKING deal. Jump on that one- five bills is a small investment.

Laurie, am I reading your post correctly to assume that you are looking for someone to "donate" a plan for your garden? That may be an unreasonable expectation even with student designers.......students of landscape design here generally charge for their services regardless of their experience, although the fees may be very modest compared to that of an established, experienced practitioner. If you are willing to spend a few dollars, then by all means contact the university or any local community or technical colleges that offer hort/design programs - most will have job posting boards for just this purpose. The Mississippi Nursery and Landscape Association could also provide you with additional contacts but keep in mind these are professionals who will need to charge for their services. It is unlikely anyone with any viable degree of knowledge or experience will give away their services for free. This is afterall how they make their living.

For your purposes, you might want to ask for just a design consultation.......depending on provider, this could offer suggestions on bed placement and layout and suitable plant selection. It might even generate some rough sketches/plans. And it tends to be far less expensive than a full blown design plan.

Here is a link that might be useful: MSNLA

just giving me some plant suggestions, seasons of color and interest, and bed shapes and paths.

Ok, and its for free.

>plant suggestions _ petunias are nice, they also come in pretty shades of pink. A pine tree has green needles. Hydrangeas are lovely shrubs

> Seasons of interest _ well the petunias are great color in the summer, the pine tree offers winter interest and the hydrangeas can last into the fall.

>I like round bed shapes. It fits in the the zen thing. But I wouldn't discriminate against a square or a rectangle bed shape either.
And those organic shaped beds are cool too.

As far as getting a free design from a college student, I think that might be a little too much to ask for considering that they will be saddled with a debt of about 80 thousand dollars ( +/_ ) after 4 years of school . I think it might be nice to throw them a couple of bucks for their effort.

Wow - again I find such hostility on this forum. One poster assumed I was looking for free services. This is not the case. I wanted a couple or three designs, so I thought possibly a student or two would be available at a lower cost. I see it as a win/win situation. If you read the first post following mine you would see info from my profile. I had lived in a home in Louisiana for 23 yrs, and my husband and I did the design and work ourselves and it was beautiful. Even won a landscape design contest in New Orleans. However we're both older now and therefore I considered a designer. (write again in 26 yrs and see how you feel).
Just a few more comments. I have a master's degree, and I appreciate what I would pay for in a professional. Again read my OP and you can see that I paid the guy $85 just to talk to me. Still I have a budget to live within. I also worked full time and put myself thru school. It is a myth that everyone has to come out of school with $80,000 in debt. I know this is beside the point, but idiots like you make me crazy. My son is in college now, debt free. Try it.
Thanks to the couple of you who gave me some good ideas and links. I really appreciate that.
Laurie

Laurie,post your backyard pic here,i try to do some.

Here is a link that might be useful: share other some ideas

I don't have a digital camera. Thanks anyway.
I'll make a decision soon.

There are some ideas in my mind.have pictures by mobile telephone,dont need very detail pic,hope you share texture pic and cad pic that i do.
Are you sure you are in zone?
approx 3/8 to 1/2 acr?more detail is beter.

Here is a link that might be useful: share other some ideas

Are you sure you are in zone7?

Now that we know you have a Masters Degree, we can discern that you are a very intelligent person able to understand your own writing.

What gave the forum readers the idea you were looking for a free design ?

A hint : The word " GIVE ME "
Websters Dictionary describes this word as : To turn over possession or control of to someone without cost; make a gift

I wish it was a myth that students can come out of school without debt.
Mine was way over 80 K and that was over 30 years ago.

Laurie, one tends to encounter hostility when they provide the impression that they expect something for nothing on a forum where a good portion of the posters rely on that something to provide their living. It's like saying what you do for a living has no value and I don't want to pay for it.....you can't expect the response to be overly cordial and gracious. Now that you have clarified, we know that's not what you meant but that's how it was read and interpreted by pretty much everyone that responded to your request.

I'm not sure why you feel multiple plans/discussions with multiple designers will offer better results than finding and selecting one designer with whom you have rapport and who shares your vision of your garden, but I do think a consultation is the way to go, at least initially. Even with student designers, you should expect to pay something similar to the $85 you invested with your first experience. More qualified, experienced designers may even charge a bit more for this type of service. Regardless, consultation services will be far less than any more formalized design product. And since you do have a DYI background in this area yourself, it may very well be all that you need.

And FWIW, it IS possible to come out of college debt-free. I managed two degrees myself without student loans, although the second, shorter degree was underwritten in large part by an inheritance. But the first was financed by myself (my parents couldn't afford anything more than moral support, laundry services and the occasional meal) through hard work at a fulltime job at night. Not that I'd necessarily recommend this route for everyone, but it is quite doable.

There are free or inexpensive resources available: books magazines and this forum amongst others. One method that has worked for me (or should I say me and my clients) is to make a scrapbook or collage of the idea of the kind of garden you want. This can be photographs of your old garden, pictures cut from magazines even poems or a passage from a book a piece of material or music.If you think this would work for you then find a designer that understands this approach. You could also post your scrapbook here and if you can find a way to post a picture ideashare will throw some ideas at it that may get your juices flowing. If you have the idea or feeling of the garden but not the practical application perhaps you can then find someone within your budget to pull it all together.

Thank you. All these suggestions and insights are helpful and polite. I do appreciate that. I still don't appreciate your hostility, deviant-duhziner. I googled "give definition" and came up with an entire page of various nuances for the definition and use of this word. However, I can see where my post might have been misinterpreted. It's nice to take the high road, as gardengal48 did, and ask if that was my meaning. In any case, I can only surmise that you are still paying off your college debt; perhaps that has you frustrated. If I am reading you wrong, I apologize.

ink said if you can find a way to post a picture ideashare will throw some ideas at it that may get your juices flowing

-----------your juices flowing? what mean?

"...get your juices flowing." = inspire you. Also referred to as "creative juices", as in, "the music got my creative juices flowing (inspired me), and I made some sketches for a new painting."

Yin, you have a lot of creative juice!

Ideasshare, you may be creative but you also seem to be stealing other people's words and pictures - this is not right. You have stolen pictures from the forum to put on your own gallery, and in your first post above you have clearly stolen words and sentences from other people, including Louisianagal.

If you use ideas, sentences, or pictures from someone else you have to ask permission to use them, and then say where they come from. Sentences that are not your own should be in quotation marks "like this".

Also, if someone does not post a picture for you to work on, it may be because they do not want to. You should only ask once.

Laurie, I sense some dissonance in what you say you want (design help) and why you say you want it (aging) because if you're like me, my aging isn't compromising my design ability, only my build-and-plant ability. I think you've posted rather than just hiring the local designer because for some reason you don't want what he's offering. Maybe you need to look inside to see what you really want out of your property. Or maybe you have something I suffer from, which is shop-arounditis. I can almost never make a buying decision until I've checked out all the alternatives. It's a habit I am trying to break myself of because it's time consuming and sometimes counter-productive. Especially when there are no viable alternatives, and I am looking straight at the perfect solution anyway.

KarinL

There are diplomatic responses, and there are "less" diplomatic responses, and as a professional landscape designer myself, who can remember what it was like just starting out, your idea of utilizing the consulting services of students is not a bad one, but will tend to be more limited in vision and knowledge, even if you only want planting suggestions. Few landscape architecture students have the depth of background to really be as knowledgeable as an experienced professional consultant, but may already have a knack for "visualizing a garden layout" using locally available plants to a greater degree than an amateur homeowner/gardener, but then again, the homeowner may have more hard earned experience than the student!

The whole selection process of getting a good fit between designer and client can be an easy one, or difficult for both parties, depending on the circumstances. I'd suggest that it might be more fruitful if you searched out recommendations of friends and/or neighbors whose gardens you admire, and start from there. As a professional designer myself, I know I feel more comfortable working with clients who have been recommended by past clients, or found me because they had seen my published work and liked it.

It is unfortunate that hard feelings can be created on this forum between people who might actually enjoy each other's company if they met personally. Knowing Michelle, the "Deviant-Duhsigner" personally, and much admiring both here talent and humor, I would hazard a guess that you'd have a different impression altogether if you had a chance to see her work personally.

Good luck finding the solution to your design dilemma, and I hope the original poster finds the right fit between skill set and cost of services. I am sure we are all more aware of how the words "give me" can be construed so differently, and hope that everyone reading here can see that diplomacy pays in the end!

I share Bahia's well expressed description of what you might expect from students or other designers and why.

There is a range of ability and skill sets that vary from designer to designer regardless of education or experience. Until you can connect an individual with abilities that match your needs somehow, it is a crap shoot. The easiest way to make that connection is just as Bahia described.

Often identifying a landscape that matches your needs and then finding out who did the work is more efficient than finding individual designers and then hoping that they meet your needs. It is like looking for a chef. You hear about great restaurants from friends or others sometimes. Other times you smell the aromas of foods that make you want to try them out. It is unlikely that you would seek out a chef and then try to find out what kind of food he makes.

Look for a landscape that is what you want. Keep in mind your other values besides pure aesthetics. A landscape in your area is likely done by someone familiar with what does well in your area, what regulations are in place, and does not have to travel far to take on your project. A landscape in a neighborhood of homes of similar value is more likely to be one that is affordable. A landscape on a house of similar style as yours will also tell you that the designer will not clash with yours.

One way is approach the homeowner and ask. That may be easier than you think if you can catch them outside. It starts with a comment that you admire their garden - flattery will get you everywhere. (tip, don't do this if you drive a van, don't shave, and the homeowner's children are outside) You will also be able to gage how well the homeowner felt about doing business with the designer or landscaper. They have done your homework.

Hopefully, you have aquaintances that meet the description.

These last few posts have been very helpful and appreciated. I am glad that several of you have continued this thread. I do have alot of experience but I've always just added projects to my gardens as time went on. I never had a master plan. That is what I was looking for. The city I live very near to is about 45,000 people and I can find only the one landscape designer. I havent' asked neighbors, I really only see one home that seems to have been planned and landscaped professionally, in this subdivision. I will try to speak to the homeowner. I guess I didn't totally click with the guy, and maybe becoz I was just through the hurricane at the time and was just nervous about spending money on something so frivolous as the landscape. Really, we all know this is not a frivolous expense, but still that is in the back of my mind. Not to say the guy isn't worth it, just do I want to spend the money. It seems he does "high end" type projects, from what I have seen, so that threatened me a little too. Therefore, I was looking for some other options. You all have given me alot to think about, and I am glad to know deviant duhziner is really a nice lady. I hope I will have some future cordial contact with her on this forum. It is a valued resource, to me. Happy New Year to all.
Laurie