Ferdinand Leffler | |
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| Born | December 12, 1978 Kadaň |
| Alma mater | Česká zemědělská univerzita |
| Occupation | garden designer |
| Television | Ferdinand's Gardens (Czech TV) |
Ferdinand Leffler (December 12, 1978, Kadaň) is a Czech garden and landscape designer and the founder of Flera landscape architecture studio. His projects have won many awards and can be found all over the world. In addition to garden design, he promotes garden architecture. He was a host and a co-author of the TV show Ferdinand's Gardens on Czech Television channel, he has published books Green Rooms and Live in Your Garden, he regularly creates video content on Flera TV YouTube channel, organizes seminars as a part of Flera Academy project and in spring 2021 he launched online course “Live in Your Garden” in which he teaches how to plan a garden.
He graduated in Landscape Planning and Garden Engineering from the Czech University of Life Sciences. In 2009, he founded Flera landscape studio, in which he collaborates with more than 30 landscape architects. Together they form projects in the private and public space in the largest landscape architecture studio in Central Europe. You can also find his work overseas – in Canada, Costa Rica and Zanzibar in Africa.[1] Many of his projects have won numerous awards, such as Garden of the Year and TOP Destination in the Czech Republic 2017.
In 2017, he acted as co-author and host on the Czech Television TV show “Ferdinand's Gardens”.[2] The TV show ran for two series with a total of 16 episodes. The individual episodes deal with different types of gardens, from a small urban garden to a large rural one. The TV show received positive audience feedback and was the impetus for the creation of the Flera TV YouTube channel. More than 40 educational and inspirational videos have been made there since the launch of the channel.
Together with Tereza Frcalová, he wrote the book Live in Your Garden (2017),[12] which describes a modern approach to garden planning. Two years later, the book Green Rooms (2019) followed, in which they compared individual parts of the garden in terms of their functions to the rooms in the house.
While studying at university, he spent a year in the US, traveling and pursuing various professions. He attended several lectures on architecture in Boston and worked in garden-architectural studios in California. Thanks to this experience, he began to perceive gardens more freely than according to the traditional European approach. American garden architecture does not have such a connection to history and can afford more experiments with space and material. Freedom in the creation of American gardens allows him to create natural projects without reference to the convulsive shapes of historic gardens.[21]
He is interested in the needs of the people who will live in the garden before the actual designing itself. He does not create gardens that are just meant to be admired by people passing by, but gardens that pull their owners out of their house and make them enjoy the environment of the garden just as that of the living room. Gardens must entertain their owner. He considers understanding space very important. This allows him to work with the garden in such a way as to fulfill its potential.[22]
