Do robots dream of electric garden designers?
In a previous career, I worked as a researcher on nuclear weapons for an Oxford based think-tank. Like nuclear technology, AI has the potential to bring extraordinary benefits to many domains, and like nuclear weapons may prove catastrophic.
We need to be realistic. AI is part of the garden design profession. There are already AI platforms available to design your garden. AI capabilities will be showcased at Chelsea Garden Show this year. Software used by garden designers comes with AI visualization plugins as standard. AI will become a structural engineer, horticultural expert, technical drafter, and general gardening angel. It’s pure denial to ignore it or to hope it goes away. To minimise the risks AI poses is wishful thinking.
Inspired by AI
Reluctantly, I admit that AI can be a source of inspiration - even if it has a tendency to designs more like a movie animation studio than a garden designer. This image is from a prompt to create a garden based on a collaboration between Zaha Hadid and Flora Yukhnovich. Make of it as you will (it looks a little like a mausoleum from Star Trek to me) - inspiration is, after all, in the eye of the beholder. And this is the point. I look to other garden designers, nature, art and design more generally for sources of inspiration, why not look to AI too? Design involves innovation, imitation, homage, mistakes, doodling and lots of experimentation. AI does this.
Midjourney prompt: “Create a garden designed by a collaboration between Zaha Hadid and Flora Yukhnovich.”
Trust the process
Our tutors at KLC School of Design kept repeating this mantra: “trust the process”. AI makes them even righter - so to speak. As garden designers, as designers, we must champion the difficult, wonderful, collaborative, messy, uncertain, delighting, and personal creative process. It would be a terrible mistake to devalue that process in favour of efficiency, or to be blinded by the wizardry of this emerging technology. AI will bring many wonders to the world but comes with unique threats to the stuff that matters most – trust in our relationships with one another.
Careless whispers
Truly good design is careful – literally – and AI does not care. Although its trick is to appear as it if can, it cannot care about a unique person. This matters.
All the apparent ‘insight’ and photorealistic imagery in the world won’t change the fact that it cannot imagine what your garden feels like to you. Birdsong will never bring a genuine smile to AI. It cannot share your hopes. It does not care and will not care about you anymore than the security lights care about your safety.
What does a garden feel like to a plant?
But, it could help us to understand better what it’s like to be part of the plant community in your garden.
It’s not farfetched to ask whether, with the right sensors, an AI will one day be able to ‘listen’ to a plant community in all its wondrous complexity. Then drawing on the vast body of scientific literature to comprehend that community, communicate something about the ecosystem’s state or emotion to us a way our intelligence can apprehend? This would be absolutely transformative.
It could show you that the bed over there with the beautiful floral combination is in fact miserable; that there’s no sense of community, nourishment, no sharing, trust, or mutual respect. It may look good, but its not a flourishing plant community.
Soon, AI will make the vast bank of interconnected horticultural, botanical and related knowledge available to garden and landscape designers in accessible forms, and in the service of better design - if by better we mean ecologically positive. Most gardeners and designers will benefit from this, as will the places we ‘design’.
Do robots dream of electric garden designers?
Like many professions, garden and landscape design will be altered by AI. It might even decimate the profession. But it is not special pleading to point out that it will never care about the client, the place, or the wildlife who live or who will live in and around your garden or landscape.
“Trust in the process! Long live the process!”
Some interesting reading:
A recent RHS article about AI in the garden
‘Machines Like Me’, Ian McEwan
‘Ways of Being’, James Bridle
1 March 2025
