Annette is now officially eligible to become a Fellow in the American Society of Landscape Architects

Annette recently received notification from the Society that she is eligible for their top level of membership. The ASLA states, "Investiture into the Council of Fellows is among the highest honors the Society may bestow upon a member."

Of course, being eligible for Fellowship is not the same thing as becoming a fellow. The process involves nomination and selection by a jury, so acceptance into the Council of Fellows is by no means assured.

Annette has been active in the local chapter in the past, holding office on the Executive Committee as a Member at Large and briefly holding the post of President.

-end-

Mike joins the APLD

Ironically enough, at about the same time as Annette received her eligibility notification, Mike joined the Association of Professional Landscape Designers. The association is composed of landscape designers who typically are not licensed landscape architects. Their goals are to promote their members, provide current design information and to defend the right of people doing residential design as a profession. They offer a certification process as a means of demonstrating certain members' qualifications, as an alternative to the test that landscape architects must pass.

The reason this is ironic is that they often battle the ASLA's efforts to exclude anyone not holding a landscape architect's license to practice landscape design.

Since Mike is already a registered landscape architect, he's not planning to go through the certification process. Only certified members may place "APLD" after their names, a rather strange decision given that this makes it impossible for the majority of the members to show their affiliation (unlike the ASLA, where all members have the right to put these letters after their name). "Why couldn't they have CAPLD for certified and APLD for non-certified?", he questions.

-end-