Abstract: Plant design is a core course of the landscape architecture discipline, but the construction of plant-related curriculum system in engineering universities remains unsatisfactory. To improve engineering college students’ acceptance and absorption of plant design knowledge, improve teachers’ teaching effectiveness, and improve students’ plant design ability, this paper sets off from the perspectives of the course system, teachers, teaching mode and students of engineering universities to analyze the problems in landscape architecture discipline construction of engineering universities and, in accordance with the shortcomings, puts forward the teaching optimization strateies for the plant design and landscape course. 1) Increase the relevant courses or class hours of basic plant knowledge; 2) Organize extracurricular activities of plant knowledge contests or creative workshops; 3) Strengthen inter-school and school-enterprise teaching cooperation to increase students’ practical learning experience; 4) Utilize emerging technology products, such as Unmanned Aerial Vehicle (UVA), Lumion software and Virtual Reality (VR) technology. These optimization measures will help enrich teachers’ teaching modes, reduce teaching costs and improve students’ cognitive and operational abilities, so as to make up for the weakness of plant-related knowledge in engineering universities and improve the teaching effect of “Plant Design” course.