Topos Magazine

If you don't want to pay the subscription for this leading edge design mag, then you can get a bit of it online. A shame they don't offer many images with the interesting if somewhat highbrow articles.

Chaumont Festival of Gardens, Chaumont sur Loire, France

A great excuse for a holiday trip to the Loire valley, this festival is set in the grounds of a stunning chateau within the historic park designed by du Chene. This is the model for garden shows, virtually no commercial elements visible at all, innovative and thought provoking themes each year with design confined to a sensible budget. Fantastic plantings around the gardens too. Allow two days to really study the range of designs. This year the theme is weeds.

Westonbirt Festival of Gardens

This is the site of the innovative new garden design festival at Westonbirt Arboretum, Gloucestershire. Following in the footsteps of the Chaumont Conservatoire festival in France, this show is in its second year and promises some innovative angles on the designed space in a beautiful setting.

The Eden Project

An excellent site and a must to visit, an ever changing masterful project. Don't forget to sample the locally sourced food which is surprisingly good. Look out for secretive little green birds in the humid tropic biomes that eat the bugs. This is must be the country's top project for sustainability in an exciting ever-changing designed space.

The plant postcode database

'Flora for Fauna' project at the Botany department of the Natural History Museum. This is database, into which you put a postcode for a example for a site or your garden, and receive a list of the relevant plant species that occur in that area. A really useful way of making sure appropriate native species are used in designs.

Sustainable Urban Drainage

I spent a day learning about this last year and have finally found the website. If you have been to Oxford Services and not realised the reason for all that water, then look again. Although the coffee is no good, and the washroom taps, ironically run for a set, excessively long time, prescribed by council regulations, it is well worth a visit. The site is pretty much self sustaining, including sewage treatment and water for flushing loos and all that bothersome car park run off. The wildflowers in the swales and ponds put on a great show in summer. Climb the mound behind the Travelodge and you will see a series of ponds and aeration fountains.

This is a subject that must be addressed if we are to avoid flooding and poor environments in the future. Its both technical know how and a state of mind.

Green roofs for wildlife.

I read about this in the RSPB magazine recently. A success story for black Redstarts in London, and an encouragement to all designers to specify wherever possible green or brown field roofs.

The Sapling Landscape Gateway

This site provides all sorts of useful links to other landscape and related topics, with tempting book offers and reviews of other websites.

ELA News

This is a useful, though not good-looking site for European and UK landscape news, calls for tender and competitions. It also has a forum.

The Bauhaus Museum Berlin

A well designed website, for a beautiful, compact museum in Berlin. Despite a bit of a walk from the U-bahn, it is the home to a very interesting collection of Bauhaus art, a library, café and gives you the enjoyment of experiencing, first hand, the architectural design of Walter Gropeus.

Garden Guides

A large garden directory offering guides, catalogues and discussion boards