Professionals typically have college degrees in landscape design or landscape architecture so what you may learn online (and for free) will be rudimentary at best!! And the old adage "you get what you pay for" comes into play here as well :-)

The University of Minnesota used to have an excellent website: SULIS (Sustainable Urban Landscape Information Series) but that has been discontinued and that website is no longer in existence. UFL has a very abbreviated approach HERE. I personally know of no other online design websites that present the material in a thorough and systematic manner.

The problem is the topic is complicated enough and so detailed that an online approach is not very practical. If you really want to learn landscape design at home, then a textbook is more likely to supply you with the information you need. And there is no shortage of those available.

College level textbooks - very thorough and detailed:

• Landscaping Principles and Practices - Jack Ingles
• Residential Landscape Architecture - Booth and Hiss (my primary college text)
• Landscape Design: Theory and Application - Vabderzanden and Rodie

DIY homeowner texts - less detailed (semi-superficial in presentation) but still useful:

• Landscaping for Dummies
• BHG New Complete Guide to Landscaping
• Creative Home Landscaping - Ortho Books
• Taylor's Master Guide to Landscaping

All of these should be available to order online or can be found at places like Barnes and Noble. The college texts are not cheap but you can often find used copies or older editions for much less.

There are also various online design courses you could avail yourself of. But they all cost :-) And some are much better than others.

We don't know what your motivation is ... whether you want to learn so as to make over your own yard ... or whether you're interested in becoming a professional designer, applying your skills on behalf of paying clients. If it's your own yard, you could probably learn a lot by doing. You could create a base plan. (Get advice here.) Do some analysis of the yard. (Get advice here.) Develop some concepts. (Get advice here.) Work out the arrangement and organization of the plan. (Get advice here.) Think through details and materials. (Get advice here.) Organize the work. (Get advice here.) I think you get the idea.

If you're more interested in becoming a professional, and are young, I would highly consider becoming employed in the landscape industry, at a lower level on the food chain, and begin to absorb everything you can, and make contacts. You could learn a lot by being a member of a crew that did installations and could work your way up. Eventually, you may know people that will help you with your aspirations. In addition, you get paid while you learn. I've seen many people who learned landscape design through school but ended up being clueless about many things, especially maintenance of landscapes. They create some impossible-to-maintain things. Being on site during the learning process is invaluable.

Thank you Gardengal48! Very helpful list of resources. Most of the books I've picked up have been so superficial that I really haven't found them helpful at all. I'll have to start looking around for some of these textbooks.

Very good points Yardvaark. I'm 35 years old and have a really busy career. About 5 years ago I became really interested in my lawn and garden and have been experimenting ever since. It's looking better and better every year, but want to try and take it up a notch and become even more knowledgable. Zero chance with my job and 4 young kids I could attend a school or even commit to doing anything beyond my yard (or a friends). I dont have any specific questions, but want to find a good resource to learn more (other than these forums, which are great).

Thanks again for both of your responses.

Check out the textbook "Residential Landscape Architecture" by Booth & Hiss. Amazon has older editions for as low as $12 used. It's a good way to start to understand design concepts and approaches, and it's a pretty readable text. And it may sound nuts but an intro to interior design textbook is great, because it will take you through all the principles and elements of design in a way that anyone who has ever lived indoors can understand.

As for online courses? You'll get what you pay for. We've been working on an online landscape design course for the last 18 months (as time allows, so... slowly). To give you an idea of what's involved, each 30 minute module represents around 10 hours writing the lesson and assignments, creating the drawings to go with it, and creating the shot list, and then 2-3 hours to shoot and edit. No one's giving that away for free.

I taught classes on landscape design for homeowners for a number of years. Even those - which were really just a presentation of the very basics of the LD process - were more complicated than one would expect. Five, 2 hour long classes that focused on site measuring, site evaluation, design principles, hardscaping, spatial layout and plant selection.

In many cases, it was just enough of an informational overload that my students hired me or another designer to do the work for them!!