A campus planting plan has to work at two scales. It must feel convincing when someone walks past a single bed, and it must read as one landscape when that person crosses several buildings, entries, and public spaces. While I was at The LA Group, I developed the planting design for an Empire State University landscape project in Saratoga Springs and presented the work alongside my supervisor. That experience reinforced how much of campus design is about making good decisions repeatable.
Start with the places people actually notice
On a multi-area campus, planting has to do several jobs: frame an entrance, clarify circulation, offer seasonal interest, and sometimes recede so a building or gathering space can remain the focus. A uniform treatment across every bed would be easy to draw, but it would ignore those differences. At Empire State University, I treated the more visible places as opportunities for a stronger composition while allowing other areas to be quieter.
That distinction is useful for any institutional property. A planting plan should ask where people approach, where they stop, where they look across a space, and where they need unobstructed sightlines. The answers help determine which areas deserve visual emphasis and which need durable, straightforward planting.
Build a palette that can repeat without feeling repetitive
The design challenge was to establish continuity across distinct campus areas without drawing every bed as a copy. I worked with sweeping plant masses and a limited vocabulary of forms: woody structure to give the landscape presence beyond the growing season, perennial layers for continuity, and more concentrated seasonal color where it could have the greatest effect.
Plant selection was not simply a color exercise. Exposure, soil, mature size, resilience, and upkeep all matter. The right plant in the wrong location creates a maintenance problem; an attractive drawing cannot fix that. My plant-science background at Cornell shaped how I thought through the relationship between a plant’s intended effect and its long-term performance.
Consistency comes from repeating a clear design idea, not repeating an identical bed.
Let the plan explain the experience
A useful planting drawing communicates more than species names and quantities. It should make the rhythm of the landscape legible: where a mass starts and ends, how a walk or plaza is edged, where height provides enclosure, and where a view stays open. I used presentation graphics to make those decisions easier to discuss with the project team and client.
That conversation is part of design, not a formality after it. I presented the planting approach with my supervisor, and the drawings let us talk about the character of each area while keeping the larger campus identity in view. Specific species and construction details belong in the project documents; the public lesson is the process of making many separate spaces feel related.
What property owners can take from this
The same framework works on smaller properties in Saratoga Springs and the Capital Region. You do not need a university campus to benefit from an overall planting strategy. Identify the high-visibility spaces first, establish a manageable palette, and let the quieter areas support the whole. A plan that ties these decisions together is more useful than making one bed beautiful at a time.
This article reflects my contribution to a project completed as part of The LA Group team. The illustrative image shows a different campus. It is not a photograph or drawing of the Empire State University work.
