Landscape Architecture Merit Badge

Three permissions, and all three are asked for by you

None of these is hard and none of them is quick, and the badge introduces each one at the moment you need it rather than at the moment you should ask. Send all three requests in the first week. They run in parallel, they cost you nothing while you wait, and requirements 2 and 5 can be worked on while they do.

Requirement 1: find the project, then find the architect

1 Go to a completed landscape project that a landscape architect has designed. Before you visit the site, obtain a plan of the design from the landscape architect if one is available.

There are two searches hidden in that sentence.

First, a project you can be sure was designed by a landscape architect. Not every pleasant garden was. The reliable places to look are a public park built or renovated in the last thirty years, a botanical garden, a college or corporate campus, a city plaza or waterfront, a hospital courtyard, a zoo, or a cemetery of any age. Large public projects almost always had one, and they almost always credit them: a plaque, a donor board, the park's own web page, or the parks department that commissioned the work.

Second, the plan. "If one is available" is the escape clause, but you cannot use it until you have asked, because unavailable is an answer somebody has to give you. Ask the parks department or the firm named on the plaque. Firms are usually pleased to hear from a Scout and a plan is often already a PDF on a shelf.

Go with the plan in your hand if you can get it. Requirement 2 asks you about separate spaces, points of entry, path systems and sun and shade, and all four of those are things a designer drew on purpose and a visitor sees by accident. With the drawing you can see the intention; without it you are reverse engineering it from the grass.

Requirement 2 says "after completing requirement 1", and means it

2 After completing requirement 1, discuss the following with your counselor ...

This is one of only two places on the badge where a requirement names another by number, and it is doing something simple: 2(a) to 2(d) are four questions about the site you visited, so there is nothing to discuss until you have been.

Take notes and photographs while you are on site, because all four parts ask about things you will not remember precisely a fortnight later: whether the space was divided into separate areas, where the entry was and how it was made obvious, where you could walk and where you could not, where the sun fell, how the seating and parking sat in the design, and which plants did what.

2(c) is the one usually answered thinly. Comfort, shelter and security are three separate ideas, and security here means whether a place feels safe to be in: sight lines, lighting, and whether somebody standing in it can see who else is there.

Requirement 3 is eleven plants and twenty two answers

3 Identify five shrubs, five trees, and one ground cover ...

Read what is being asked of each of the eleven:

• it must be identified, by name;
• the eleven together must show different shapes, sizes and textures, so a set of eleven similar things is not an answer;
• it must grow in your area, which is what your counselor or the nursery is there to confirm;
• you must bring a picture, or a branch, leaf or flower;
• you must be able to say how you would use it in a design;
• and what maintenance would follow. That last pair is two answers per plant, twenty two in all, and they are the two that get left out. Use is where the plant goes and what job it does: screening a fence, shading a bench, marking an entrance, holding a bank together. Maintenance is what it costs every year afterwards: pruning, watering, leaf fall, how big it gets and how soon. A local nursery is a better hour than a search engine, because the eleven plants have to grow where you live, and a nursery only stocks what does. Ask for a mix of shapes and sizes while you are there and requirement 3's hardest condition is met by the person helping you. The group has to be booked. Pictures or cuttings have to be brought to a group such as your troop or a class at school, so the last step of this requirement is somebody else's agenda, exactly as with the permissions above.

Requirement 4: permission, a measuring tape, and rain

4 After obtaining permission from the appropriate authority, look at and study a place of worship, school grounds, or a public building ...

Three sites are offered and the practical difference between them is who you have to ask. Your own school or your own place of worship is the easy version of this requirement, because somebody there already knows you.

4(a): measure it, then copy it twice

4(a) ... Make two copies of this plan and save the original, then do 4(b) and 4(c) using the copies.

Do that before you mark anything. This is the only instruction on the badge that cannot be undone: one drawing marked with drainage arrows is not the original, and it is not two copies either. Draw it, photograph or scan it, print two, put the original away.

The drawing is to scale and the scale must be stated, so a measuring tape is required kit and not a suggestion. What has to be on it: the driveway, the sidewalk or path to the main entry, and then any sidewalks, structures, trees and plants, lights, drains, utilities and other site furnishings in the study area. Drains and utilities are the ones people forget, and they are exactly what 4(b) is about, so walk the site once with only those in mind.

4(b): the answer is not there on a dry day

4(b) ... indicate where the water drains across the site, where ditches occur, and where water stands for a longer period of time.

Slope you can see. Ditches you can see. Standing water you cannot, unless it has rained recently, and a puddle that lasts is the single most useful thing on this drawing.

Three ways to get that answer honestly:

1. Go back after heavy rain. Best answer, and the reason to start requirement 4 early rather than late.
2. Ask somebody who is there every day. A custodian, a groundskeeper or a sexton knows precisely where the water sits, and will usually walk you to it.
3. Read the ground. Moss, silt lines, worn or bare grass, sunken paving, algae on concrete and a difference in what grows are all marks left by water that stood there.

4(c): redesign it, on the second copy

Safer and more comfortable, for the people you identified arriving by bus or car at the start of requirement 4. The badge lists what you might add: new walks, covered waiting areas, benches, space-defining plantings of trees and shrubs, and drainage structures. Two of those five are answers to 4(b), which is why the copies are done in that order.

This is also where requirement 3 pays for itself. You have just identified eleven plants and worked out what each is good for; plant them here, by name, and say why.

Requirement 5 is the careers requirement, and it is longer than it looks

Three career opportunities identified, one chosen, and then eight things researched about it: training, education, certification requirements, experience, expenses, employment prospects, starting salary, and advancement opportunities and career goals. Then a discussion with your counselor about whether it interests you.

Certification is worth a paragraph of its own here. Landscape architecture is a licensed profession in most of the United States, which makes this requirement less abstract than the careers requirement on other badges: there is an actual examination, an actual accredited degree, and an actual period of supervised experience to describe. Your own state's licensing board publishes all three.

If you asked a landscape architect for a plan back in requirement 1, that is the person to ask about this. One email covers both ends of the badge.