LANDSCAPE DESIGN CLASS OFFERED, WATER GARDEN TO BE BUILT

August 18, 2003

     Ferrum College's Division of Life Sciences will offer a Landscape Design and Management (AG/HORT 411) course for students and the community during this fall. The course will meet on Tuesdays and Thursdays from 3:00 - 5:45 p.m. This experiential education course will teach the basic landscape design process through hands-on idea development, presentations, conceptual design boards, and actual construction. The course will continue the development of the campus arboretum into a community garden, similar to Virginia Western's Community Gardens and Arboretum in Roanoke, Virginia.

     Water gardening instruction, a booming segment of the landscape industry, will lead students to design and construct a water garden in the arboretum. Students will design several other small site-specific projects in and around campus.

     Local high school students will participate in the construction project, which will allow them to be mentored by college students.

     In addition to hands-on projects, the students will tour constructed residential projects at Smith Mountain Lake, the D-Day Memorial in Bedford, and completed campus arboretums at Virginia Western and Blue Ridge Community College in Weyers Cave. The tours will be guided by the designers and contractors involved with the projects.

     Trenda Carter Leavitt will teach the course. Leavitt has taught landscape architecture at Oklahoma State University, Virginia Tech, and Ferrum College, and was most recently assistant director of the Community Design Assistance Center at Virginia Tech's College of Architecture and Urban Design.

     Ferrum faculty Dr. Bob Pohlad and Dr. David Johnson will coordinate the course. For more information, contact Pohlad at (540) 365-4367/bpohlad@ferrum.edu or Johnson at (540) 365-4364/djohnson@ferrum.edu.

     Ferrum College is a four-year, private, co-educational, liberal arts college affiliated with the United Methodist Church. Ferrum offers a choice of nationally recognized bachelor’s degree programs at a cost well below the national average for private colleges. For more information on Ferrum, visit www.ferrum.edu. # # #