What is SLD?
The Sustainable Landscape Design Concentration (SLD) in the University of Tennessee Department of Plant Sciences offers an innovative education in contemporary landscape studies. The concentration’s curriculum prepares students to plan, design, implement, manage, and evaluate contemporary landscapes. These landscapes manage storm water and improve water resource quality, regenerate and remediate degraded sites, and promote public health and healthy urban ecosystems while creatively shaping the aesthetics of the public realm.
The concentration is grounded in a theory original to UT SLD that the disciplines of horticulture and landscape have entered a new era of high-performance and ecologically-driven practice. In this era, landscape design is operationalized as a place, idea, and strategy to address grand societal challenges, advancing the disciplines beyond their traditions in aesthetic placemaking and landscape representation.
SLD In Action
Floating Wetlands
Study Abroad
G.R.E.L.
Through work with the Floating Wetlands, students are given the opportunity to collaborate on multidisciplinary research and extension initiatives.
A variety of study abroad opportunities are available to students, including winter and summer mini-term experiences.
The Green Roof Experimental Lab (GREL) is conducting research on urban ecology, green roof performance, ecological succession, and competition on green roofs.
SLD Living Systems Lab
Third Creek Initiative
Experiential Learning
The SLD Living Systems Lab, also known as the Ross Lab, provides students the chance to expand their learning outside of the classroom. Find out more about the SLD Living Systems Lab here.
The Third Creek Initiative is a partnership between the City of Knoxville and the University of Tennessee through the creativity and skill of students in SLD and the School of Landscape Architecture.
Students are invited to work alongside community partners both on campus and across the region to get their hands dirty and address real-world challenges.
Career Trajectories
Through a contemporary education in landscape design and horticulture that prioritizes experiential learning, and through strategic selection of elective course work, SLD graduates will be positioned for success in one of three primary career trajectories:
- Ecological Landscape Design and Management for students who envision roles in design consultancies, non-profits or public entities.
- Entrepreneurship for students who envision having their own businesses.
- Pre-Professional for students who wish to take advantage of our accelerated 4+2 advising pathway to the Master of Landscape Architecture degree available through the UT School of Landscape Architecture.
Wondering what you supplies you need? Check out our computer recommendations!
Concentration Faculty
Professor Brad Collett, is a former SLD faculty member, and now serves as the Director of the Tennessee Riverline.
Find out what materials you will need for class here!
The New Era of Horticulture
The new era of horticulture is shaped by six defining tenets:
- The performance potentials of living systems can be engaged to address grand societal challenges that includes
- the artifact landscapes of a post-industrial economy;
- disturbed, degraded, and destroyed ecosystems;
- tension between the built environment and public health;
- threats to the health of scarce freshwater systems; and
- landscape dynamics in an era of extreme climate;
- Contemporary landscape practice occupies novel territories of practice in terms of space and scale;
- Contemporary landscapes shift from static representations to dynamic systems, elevating roles of time and indeterminacy in project manifestation;
- Plants and living materials are used in designed landscapes as performing systems and integrated communities, not individual aesthetic objects
- A shift from maintenance of static landscape representations to the management of dynamic landscape systems by working with-not against-ecological processes
- Leveraging the performance of appearance so that a high-performance, ecological landscapes will satisfy consumers’ aesthetic expectations of public space
The Green Roof
The Green Roof is an exciting part of the University of Tennessee’s Ag Campus. Situated on the 3rd floor of the new Agriculture and Natural Resources Building, the Green Roof showcases the New Era of Horticulture in action. Check out some of the original plans and designs for the Green Roof below.
Further Exploration
Check out the video below to see a glimpse of what it is like working in sustainable landscape design!