Choosing Garden Elements

Improve your ability to design gardens by learning how to choose the most appropriate garden design elements in this fully self-paced and automated 20-hour short course!

Learn about surfacing materials, garden arches, pergolas and pavilions, and how to deal with confined spaces, create water gardens and choose the right plants and the different effects they can be used to create.

Lesson Structure

There are 5 lessons in this course:

1. Surfacing Areas
   • Soft materials
   • Hard surfaces
   • Segmented or modular paving
   • Unsegmented or continuos paving
   • Coloured pebbles & gravel
   • Why pave an area?
   • Where to pave & how much
   • Choosing the right paving
   • Some golden rules
   • Creating special effects with paving
   • Bringing new life to old paving
   • Paving maintenance
   • Review what you have been learning
2. Garden Arches, Pergolas and Pavilions
   • Choosing the right arch
   • Maintenance of metal arches
   • Maintenance of timber arches
   • Pergolas
   • Building a pergola
   • Living in a garden pavilion
   • Review what you have been learning
3. Dealing With Confined Spaces
   • Courtyards
   • Narrow gardens
   • Plants for narrow gardens
   • Verandas
   • Review what you have been learning
4. Water Gardens
   • Water in the landscape
   • Water effects
   • Construction
   • Water pumps
   • Edges of water features
   • Keeping the water clean
   • Oxygenating plants
   • Creating a waterfall
   • Types of waterfall
   • Fencing/safety of water features
   • Review what you have been learning
5. Using Plants in the Garden
   • The garden bed
   • Plants for your garden
   • Plants for different uses
   • Plants to avoid
   • Review what you have been learning
   • Final assessment

How Your Course Works

1. Enrol any time. Your enrolment will be processed usually within a day or two; and during business hours, often within an hour.
2. You will then receive an email explaining the course and how to access to a study guide, and our help desk. The guide contains both an audio and written explanation of how the course can be undertaken in a way where you can choose to emphasise or de-emphasise aspects of your learning, according to where your greatest interest or needs may lay.
3. You then follow the study guide, reading and undertaking varied learning tasks, designed by professional educators to broaden and deepen your understanding of the subject. These tasks can vary from practicals to research and more.
4. If and when you need to, you can contact our academic staff via a help desk. Emails are answered every working day.
5. On concluding each lesson, you are presented with a series of automated self assessment questions, to review and reinforce your learning experience.
6. On conclusion of all lessons, you are presented with a major online exam comprising numerous questions reflecting the scope of all lessons.
7. The exam is assessed in our online training system immediately as it is submitted; and if you achieve a result of 60% or more, you are given access to download a “Certificate of Completion”. This certificate carries your name (extracted from the original enrolment order) together with a current date, and carrying endorsements from this school and the ACS Global Partners Network.

Everything is automatic, but if you do need help at any point along your journey of discovery there is a help desk, with real people who have real expertise – only an email away!