Study Amenity Landscape Management
Who oversees sites for amenity horticulture? Today, a wide range of professions, including architects, town planners, engineers, landscape architects, environmental scientists, sport and recreation experts, botanists, biologists, horticulturists, and agronomists, are involved in the management of natural and created landscapes. People from these (and perhaps other) professions may be employed as specialist consultants, as site managers, or as team leaders, depending on the size, nature, and inputs necessary to run that site.
A horticulture site’s administration often entails the following duties:
- establishing a mission, vision, goals, and plan of action
- ensuring that the aforementioned are accomplished or prepared for within a time limit
- Handling finances
- In charge of human resources
- the control of material resources
- Taking care of the environment
This means that the management must choose the direction in which the organisation is headed or, if it has already been decided, how to get there given the resources and timeline available. This typically entails finding additional resources and working with the team he or she is directing to resolve issues relating to the management of the amenity site.
Lesson Structure
There are 7 lessons in this course:
- Adapting Amenity Horticulture to Changing Needs
- What is an amenity horticulture site
- Challenges of amenity horticulture: political, social, economic, environmental
- Management of Amenity horticulture sites
- Defining a mission, vision, goals and activities planning
- Ensuring that the above are reached or planned within a specified timeframe
- Managing budgets
- Managing human resources
- Managing material resources
- Managing natural resources
- Management options
- Amenity sites; horticultural displays
- Management framework
- Types of organisational structures
- Chains of command
- Macro Panning for Amenity Land Provision
- Macro planning introduction
- What to plan for
- Principles of neighbourhood planning
- What is a community
- Principles of leisure facility planning, including sports grounds
- Resources and Information
- Information sources
- PBL project to create and present a report that identifies, describes and uses up-to-date information sources relating to changing influences on the amenity industry
- Social, Cultural and Environmental Impacts
- Introduction
- Comparing positive and negative aspects of different factors
- Examples of environmentally driven management decisions
- Cultural, social and environmental issues
- Economic Impacts
- Financing amenity horticulture sites
- What are we funding
- Funding sources
- Funding amounts
- Human resource management
- Volunteer management
- Material resources management
- Community Involvement
- Amenity horticulture and the community
- Where might you find community participation
- Community needs or wants: not always the same
- What motivates community involvement
- Community participation to develop parks and playgrounds
- Developing a Management Plan
- PBL project to create and present a management plan for an amenity horticulture site.
- Components of a management plan
- What to do to make those plans come true
- Staff morale and enthusiasm
- Involving the community so that they take responsibility
- Solving the budget problem without cutting on services
Each lesson culminates in an assignment which is submitted to the school, marked by the school’s tutors and returned to you with any relevant suggestions, comments, and if necessary, extra reading.
What You Will Do
- Determine optional management strategies for horticultural amenity facilities.
- Find out the different characteristics of possible management strategies for amenity horticulture sites.
- Describe the planning principles and procedures used to provide amenity land.
- Find and explain current information sources that deal with shifting factors affecting the amenity industry.
- Describe the present social and environmental challenges, such as public/private partnerships, sustainability, and community involvement, as they develop in a changing political environment.
- Discuss current economic challenges including community involvement, sustainability, and public-private partnerships as they develop in a changing political environment.
- Explain various community involvement strategies, such as user surveys, exercises in consultation, and physical involvement through volunteer organisations.
- Describe the connections between communities, government policy, and the amenity business.
- Analyze the ways in which the community can interact with the amenity sector critically.
- Assess how local strategies are affected by community policies.
- Identify pertinent (social, political, economic, and environmental) problems that have a do with amenity site management.
- Create a management strategy that is suitable for an amenity site.
Obstacles in the Amenity Horticulture Sector
Since people have used landscapes, the amenity horticulture sector has developed. Since decisions were made regarding the site of homes, foraging and hunting grounds, and other areas of community life when people first began living in organised communities, the amenity business is, in this sense, as old as humans. Landscape planning became increasingly challenging as communities became larger.
Today’s issues for the amenity sector span the political, social, economic, and environmental spectrum.
- Political: Whether urban or rural, the landscape is determined by the policies chosen by various groups. These may be imposed or done with consent. They may have a local or an international focus. But, as globalisation becomes more powerful and democratic ideas are advocated as a desirable political system in many nations throughout the world, there is a movement towards agreement today. Thankfully, they also include sustainability ideas that encourage community involvement.
- Social: Demographics are a major driver of the landscape’s change. While population increase in certain regions has resulted in inadequately managed areas receiving enough cash to be effectively managed, population pressure in many other areas is badly affecting amenity sites. The increased community involvement in the management of public lands is one of the most recent societal changes that is having an impact on the amenity business.
- Economic: Whether an amenity site is urban, rural, private, or public, funding is essential to its survival. A region can receive funding by turning a profit from tourists that visit the area, or, in the case of governmental support, by receiving yearly tax allocations. There are hybrid options where public sites are funded by private donations and where private amenity areas are economically supported to a certain extent.
- Environmental: A few concerns influencing amenity horticulture locations worldwide include pollution, population pressure, erosion, climate change, loss of biodiversity, and invasion by foreign plants.
Among Amenity Landscapes are:
- sports fields
- Streetscapes
- Town parks
- commercial parking lots
- the beautifully maintained campuses of businesses, industrial parks, and schools
- any other manicured space with a feature or a particular use.
How Can This Course Benefit You?
This course is an excellent complement to Amenity Horticulture I. When you’ve established your awareness and understanding of many areas of amenity horticulture, this course will teach you how to manage a variety of horticulture projects ranging from public gardens to temporary exhibits. You’ll learn how to plan and acquire project funding, as well as how to manage staff and volunteers to make the best use of available resources. The course is excellent for those seeking jobs of more responsibility and those intending to work in:
- Public horticulture initiatives
- Private horticulture techniques
- Gardens and parks
- Garden conservation and restoration
- General horticulture
- Ecotourism