National Trust

Travel and garden tours are a great way to improve design knowledge and skills: All the ideas and inspiration drawn from the work of other times and cultures can be brought home, suggests Gail Fanning, and used to differentiate your work from that of stay-at-home competitors.

English Lessons

As a garden designer, I've often heard about wonderful English gardens, historic British designers and specific design styles that have radiated from England through the years. I've studied books, seen wonderful profiles in magazines and searched the web for photographs and descriptions, but in recent years, the modern miracles of frequent-flier miles and house swapping have enabled me to experience these truly marvelous gardens for myself. My family and I, in fact, have visited England ten times since our first trip there in 1999. Each trip has given me the opportunity to visit amazing and inspiring gardens in different areas of the country - an education in design that I have fully integrated into my garden-design practice with Blue Hill Design in northern California. For their part, the English people are very welcoming - and especially, it seems, to gardeners: Gardening hosts on television are major celebrities, garden shows draw enormous crowds in a country where everyone