My introduction to the landscape architecture profession started in the late 1960s while I was studying design in Wellington. I boarded with Ian Galloway, the then Director of Parks and Reserves. He was extremely opportunistic and if he sighted a small, open, vacant site in the city he would sketch ideas on how it could be developed. I would then prepare a coloured rendering of his vision. This team effort resulted in several small parcels of land being acquired by the Wellington Council and eventually being created as pocket parks.

While working part time for the Wellington City Council in 1970 I had the opportunity to design a garden for the blind in Thorndon. Bordering the site for the garden was the Thorndon Motorway corridor and I was fortunate enough to strike up a working relationship with Helmut Einhorn, both a trained landscape architect and a town planner working for the Town Planning Division of the former MoW. Helmut was also a graduate of Berlin’s Bauhaus House, and I consider that school’s strong theories in brutalism in design is strongly reflected in the hard landscape detailing of the Thorndon motorway.

While visiting Helmut's design office on several occasions, I was greatly impressed by the range of strategic planning that he was involved in, many of the areas that are today described as tourist hotspots. Projects included the traffic circulation of Mt Cook Village, Queenstown Mall and a development plan for Milford Sound. Helmut encouraged me to consider enrolling for the Diploma of Landscape Architecture (Dip LA) at what was then Lincoln College 1971.

As I remember it, in the early 1970s there was minimal interest in the course. In more specific terms, the intake for the course in 1971 was two, Vic Allen and myself, whilst the previous year there was only one student application, Bill McLeary. In comparison, the one year Certificate of Landscape Design was very popular, with the enrolment probably the maximum number that the course could cater for. A sepia rendered poster prepared by lecturer Frank Boffa must have sparked considerable interest in the Dip LA course, as in the following year, there was a four-fold enrolment.

Having entered the course on the design side of the profession, I was required to sit several papers in soil science, plant ecology and horticulture, the latter partly with Bob Crowder whose concepts in companion planting were well advanced for that time. I recollect, if working in the design studio in the evening, Arthur, a college cleaner with his family of cats, would inevitably visit you. Arthur would give you free and frank critique on your drawing; luckily he seemed to have access to an endless supply of Pentel erasers. His stories about the refectory's kitchen were truly gut wrenching, e.g. the dead rat and the bacon slicer.

Some of the fondest memories of the course were the field trips, not only of everyone squeezing into Charlie Challanger's Morris 1100, but the calibre of lecturers. One to stand out was Professor Kevin O’Connor's “reading the landscape” on Banks Peninsula, Kevin had such an astute appreciation of rural landscape patterns. Another field trip that I can recall that ended in confusion in landscape technique was to the Benmore Hydro Power Station where an accompanying Welsh landscape architect, Bodfan Gruffdd, thought the whole of the earth dam should be covered in ivy. George Malcolm was nearly speechless.