By: Beth Burnham, Designer at Carroll Landscaping, Inc.

EVERYTHING! My design inspiration comes from many different sources. Let me give you some background about myself to better help you understand where my inspiration comes from. I started my career in the nursery industry working my way through high school summers and then through 4 years of college. I never specifically studied landscape design, but earned my degree in Visual Communication Design. Basically, a fancy name for graphic design. I then combined my nursery experience and knowledge of plant material with my design background. Thus, I began my career as a landscape designer. So, this being said…Where does my inspiration for my landscape designs come from? I am inspired by everything and everywhere. Good design is something that carries over from one medium to the next. I pull ideas from current industry and design magazines, visit local garden centers, the web, Pinterest and by viewing a general selection of landscapes everyday. I am very image driven. A flower picture here, a rustic structure there…I somehow pull all the images together in my mind and make it work together. I can attend a car show and leave there with ideas of color combinations to incorporate into plant material selections. I am always dabbling with other design related hobbies such as freelance graphic design, jewelry design, and creative greeting card design. Usually, I will be working in another medium creating something unrelated to landscaping, and I will get a landscape design idea. Just the opposite will happen while designing landscapes. A trained designer somehow has a different way of looking at things with a different view point. I certainly don’t limit myself to a specific format for being creative otherwise all my designs would be boring and ugly. Of course I am still limited by my clients needs and wants, but by right of being a designer it is my job to be as creative as possible with the design to still meet my clients needs and wants.