About
A desire to learn has always been at the centre of my work.
Growing up in Sweden, nature was part of everyday life. I came to understand landscape through season, weather, material and the particular character of a place and perhaps, long before I thought about it professionally, how our surroundings affect how we feel.
In my early twenties, I discovered for myself how calming it could be to spend time outdoors, working with plants and soil. That set me on the path I am still following. Plants were the starting point. I learnt by growing them, experimenting, observing, and noticing why something thrived in one place and struggled in another, and how plants grew together to form communities.
But my interest soon became broader than plants. I became interested in the full experience of a place: how space is organised, how we move through it, what we encounter, what draws us in or gives us somewhere to retreat, and how planting, material, season, sound, light and atmosphere come together to affect how a place feels.
That interest began to shape my studies. My dissertation, Green Urban Spaces and Wellbeing, explored ideas around restoration and wellbeing through the design of landscape. It deepened my understanding that it is not simply the presence of nature that matters, but how the whole environment is conceived and experienced.
That understanding has continued to shape my work.
I have designed private gardens, school grounds and play landscapes, therapeutic environments, public spaces and landscapes for development. The contexts are very different, but I find myself returning to many of the same questions: how does a place make us feel? How do people move through it? What gives someone a reason to stay, explore, retreat, play or participate? How do planting, material, ecology and the organisation of space work together? And how can the living world become an integral part of that experience rather than something added afterwards?
What has continued to interest me is what landscapes do, as well as how they look.
That has taken my work into areas where landscape, health, learning, play and ecology overlap. It has also meant working with people from many different disciplines — architects, clinicians, teachers, ecologists, contractors, artists, developers and communities — each bringing a different understanding of the same place.
I am a Registered Member of the Society of Garden + Landscape Designers (MSGLD), having completed the Society’s professional accreditation process.
Teaching has always sat alongside practice.
I trained as a teacher and taught landscape and garden design at university, including leading a Foundation Degree in Landscape & Garden Design. What interested me most was not simply teaching people how to draw or design, but helping them develop confidence in their own thinking; to question, test, observe and find their own direction.
That interest in how we learn, and the role landscape can play in learning, continues to shape where my work is going now.
The Nature Laboratory grew from my work with schools and a question that has become increasingly important to me: what happens if children grow up with regular, meaningful contact with the living world as part of everyday life? It explores how school grounds can become living landscapes for learning, play and habitat, giving teachers the confidence and resources to use nature as part of everyday teaching rather than something separate from it.
For me, these are not separate strands.
Plants, landscape, people and learning have gradually become part of the same enquiry.
I design landscapes. I grow things, observe, teach and learn.
Mia Niklasson MSGLD