The third year of the BLA programme at Lincoln includes a practicum course, where students examine a range of issues around landscape practice from the perspective of a landscape contractor. The course, LASC 393, complements a professional practice course taken in the final year of the programme, where similar issues are considered from the perspective of a landscape architect.

The aim of the course is to review the stages of implementation of a landscape project through hands-on activities, including community consultation, design development, translation into working drawings, and building one or more landscape elements. Usually this is done for a community-based group such as a kindergarten, neighbourhood resource centre or community gardens. This is the third year that we have delivered LASC 393 and there was some great learning in the course, but things did not quite go according to plan this time!

We had arranged for a community gardens project to be the focus this year, but we discovered just before the course started that another volunteer group had completed the work and so we were on to plan B. It seemed as though this would work well, but the new client group's ideas kept evolving to the stage where we were running out of time to engage with the build and so we moved to plan C (about half way through the course at this stage…). Well, what with a long period of wet weather, and an unexpected difficulty in resourcing materials, we had to move to plan D!

Part of the assessment for the class is for small groups to develop a company name (this year names included 'This is not a drill', 'The Tools', and the longest name yet, 'The Fire-breathing Rubber Duckies' - yes, really…) and to prepare a 5-8 minute video which documents progress through the course with a focus on the final practical build component. There were some great videos completed, in spite of the final build gradually shrinking, and so we thought that others might like to see an example of what the students produced. This link takes you to one group's video, where they record their experiences through the course when things kept changing…

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