Landscape Design and Planning
The Design and Planning domain tests whether you can turn a client program and a raw site into a buildable, code-compliant plan. Questions cluster around site inventory and analysis, grading and drainage, functional layout, planting composition, and how drawn decisions become quantities and cost.
Site analysis comes before drawing
Inventory what exists: property lines and setbacks, easements and utility corridors, sight triangles at driveway intersections, existing trees by species and caliper, soil drainage, prevailing winter wind and summer sun angles, and views to keep or screen. A base map at a known scale is the reference for every later layer.
Grading rules
Soil must fall away from structures at roughly 2% (about 1/4 in per foot) for the first 6-10 ft. Swales carry surface water at 1-2%; slopes steeper than about 4:1 become hard to mow and prone to erosion. Spot elevations, not arrows alone, control construction.
Composition
Work form, texture, color and scale in that order; form carries a design at distance, color is the last and most seasonal layer. Group in odd numbers and mass plants in drifts of a single species rather than one-of-each.
Worked example
A patio 20 ft deep must drain away from the house at 2%. Fall = 20 x 0.02 = 0.4 ft = 4.8 in. If the house-side edge sits at elevation 102.0 ft, the outer edge is 101.6 ft. Put that number on the plan as a spot elevation instead of a vague slope arrow.
Traps
Reading a 1/8 in = 1 ft plan as 1/4 in and mis-scaling every dimension; specifying plants at nursery size instead of mature spread; drawing over a utility easement; showing a slope arrow with no spot elevation; ignoring the sight triangle at the driveway; and designing only in plan view without a grading plan.