The strengths landscape architecture draws from its garden design heritage include: the Vitruvian design tradition of balancing utility, firmness and beauty; use of the word 'landscape' to mean 'a good place' - as the objective of the design process; a comprehensive approach to open space planning involving city parks, greenways and nature outside towns; a planning theory about the contextualisation of development projects; the principle that development plans should be adapted to their landscape context.

There is much to learn about what could happen in the gardens of the future, should designers wish to learn about the past.

Garden design theory explains, or should explain, the 'What, Where, Why and How' of making gardens.

Planners and designers should encourage as much diversity in human habitats as they find in animal habitats. It is not possible to resolve all conflicts or to gain all ends. Choices have to be made. Different aspects of the public good should be stressed in different places. To achieve variety in land use patterns, there should also be a variety of relationships between the professions, not an institutionalized decision-making tree. Relationships between the constructive professions should, therefore, be deconstructed.

From 50 centuries, we can learn about the close relationship between garden design and urban design, because both arts involve the composition of buildings with paving, landform, water, vegetation and climate.

Modernism', as a label, has currency in the arts, architecture, planning, landscape, politics, theology, cultural history and elsewhere.

Humphry Repton, the leading garden theorist of the nineteenth century, defined a garden as 'a piece of ground fenced off from cattle, and appropriated to the use and pleasure or man: it is, or ought to be, cultivated and enriched by art'.