With the Chelsea Flower Show in the UK just completed, the gardening world as a whole has the concept of Garden Design awards and recognition - along with the garden world’s trends, concerns and priorities - top of mind.

Such display and attention – and recognition well beyond the garden world – has the potential to move hearts and minds and, more importantly, to change minds and behaviors. We hope for the better.

In 2023, Pacific Horticulture, a non-profit leader in horticultural thinking and gardening up and down the Pacific Region of the US since 1976 (and rooted back even earlier), jumped into the arena of how we encourage, celebrate, recognize, and even incentivize garden design when they launched their inaugural Design Futurist awards.

These awards demonstrate the power of garden design to achieve climate resilience, steward biodiversity, and connect people with nature.

In 2023, the first year of the awards, “visionary designers and regional plantspeople submitted designs illustrating that our gardens can conserve plants and wildlife, treat our water and soil as precious, and hold the wellbeing of people at their center.”

The Design Futurist Awards celebrate “garden design that is easily replicable, modest in scale, or designed for intimate neighborhood community use” and I hope serve as a model for how to not just award but reward good garden design anywhere and everywhere.

This week, Sarah Beck Pacific Horticulture’s Executive Director joins Cultivating Place to share more about the process and purpose of these awards – entries for which are being accepted now through July 26th, 2024. Listen in!

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