The $5 landscape class

That’s what landscape designer Phil Thornburg is offering, over four Wednesday nights

By Mikel Kelly

The Times, May 15, 2008, Updated Oct 30, 2009 (1 Reader comment)

Mikel Kelly / Times Newspapers

"Isn’t that a wild orange-red bloom?” asks Phil Thornburg, about a Chilean fire bush (left) growing near the driveway of his Tigard home. He will teach a class in landscape design over four Wednesday nights beginning May 28.

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Perhaps you’ve been thinking you need a landscape makeover at your house.

But it sounds expensive. Or maybe you’d kind of like to do it yourself, but you just don’t know where to start.

Well, cheer up, because Phil Thornburg, owner of Winterbloom Inc. in Tigard, has the perfect solution.

For four Wednesday evenings in a row – from May 28 to June 18 – he’s offering a landscaping class at Tigard Community Friends Church, 15800 S.W. Hall Blvd.

You’ll come out of it with a head full of new ideas, a landscape plan for your home – and it will only cost you $5.

Total.

Thornburg has been doing classes like this for years. He started in the mid-1980s, with adult education classes in horticulture and landscape design at Portland Community College. Later he switched to doing them through the school district in West Linn, first at the high school and later at Rosemont Ridge Middle School.

“It’s mainly for the design, for the do-it-yourselfer types,” says Thornburg, admitting he can’t teach you everything about landscape design in such a short time.

“At least it gets people started,” he says.

“This is something you can get a degree in, but I tell them, ‘We’re doing this in four nights, and nobody’s going to get a degree in your yard.’”

Those coming to the class should bring along design paper, pencils sketches, photos and lots of questions, he says.

Generally, the classes will be organized this way:

n Week 1 – General design principles (function and esthetics, theory, etc.)

n Week 2 – Hardscapes (pathways, creating outdoor rooms, linking it all together)

n Week 3 – Plants (selecting for interest, function and maintenance)

n Week 4 – Catch-up, Q&A and installation and maintenance tips

“We did this in Tigard, at the Tigard Friends Church, about 21 years ago,” says Thornburg, admitting that spring is not the best time to hold such a class, but the leaders of his current church pointed out that “this is when people are thinking about it.”

The one thing he never knows, he says, is how many people will come.

Although participants are advised to call 503-620-7836 to get on the list or to ask questions, a lot of folks “just show up,” he says.

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