I thought I would share my experience of travelling to Santa Fe, NM for the Association of Professional Landscape Designers’ annual conference. I’ve been going to the APLD conference for four years now with each experience being better than the last, making great connections with landscape designers from all over the United States.
If you haven’t had the opportunity to attend, boy you’re missing out. Landscape designers from everywhere come to get inspired and network with their peers. The personal fulfillment you receive from attending this conference will refuel your batteries and will have you anticipating the next one.
The basic framework of the annual APLD conference is an optional pre-conference tour, a full day of educational sessions with world class speakers, an awards of excellence gala, two full days of garden tours (handpicked by a local site committee), and a post-conference tour of more gardens.
This year, we were in for a treat, getting to tour through public and private gardens in the Santa Fe, NM area. Some of the gardens were in quiet residential areas, some were in the mountains with elevations of near 10,000 ft! I took quite a few photos of the different gardens we toured and the conference festivities. One thing I did expect more of, and I don’t really know why perhaps it was because I was heading to the desert, but I was expecting to see more cactus in natural areas. There were lots of planted cactus but not very many in natural areas.
A good many of the gardens we saw had quite a bit of very expensive art pieces integrated into the landscape. It was beautiful to see how some of the landscape designers integrated some of the homeowners’ art pieces into their projects.
Check out the photo gallery!
The Association of Professional Landscape Designers is still dedicated to advancing the profession of landscape design and to promoting the recognition of landscape designers as qualified and dedicated professionals.