What is the practice of Landscape Architecture?

Landscape architecture is the profession that applies artistic and scientific principle to the research, planning, design, and management of both natural and built environments. Practitioners of this profession apply creative and technical skills and scientific, cultural and political knowledge in the planned arrangement of natural and constructed elements on the land with a concern for the stewardship and conservation of natural, constructed and human resources. The resulting environments shall serve useful, aesthetic, safe and enjoyable purposes.

THE ORIGIN OF THE PROFESSION in the US dates back to 1858, when Frederick Law Olmsted and Calvert Vaux designed New York's Central Park. Today, landscape architecture deals with increasingly complex relationships between the built and natural environment. Landscape architects work at projects ranging in scale from the site design for a single building to large environmental planning and development projects.