landesignwebA web of landscape design information

“Design in art, is a recognition of the relation between various things, various elements in the creative flux. You can’t invent a design. You recognize it, in the fourth dimension. That is, with your blood and your bones, as well as with your eyes.“
D. H. Lawrence

An amusing and informative blog by a landscape designer who goes by the moniker Miss Rumphius Rules, in real life Susan Cohan.  Susan is a landscape designer, who cares about what she is doing, a keen observer of the natural world, and a good writer.  Check out her blog.  We need more landscape designers who can write as well as she does, and who care as much as she does about what she does for a living.  And, of course, being myself a designer located in Damariscotta, Maine, I couldn’t resist checking out a blog with the title taken from a well loved childrens’ author, Brabara Clooney, from right here in Damariscotta – (and my wife worked for a time as the childrens’ librarian at the Skidompha Public Library here in Damariscotta, a library well endowed by Barbara Clooney herself!)

Most designers are now well aware of the movement toward sustainability in landscape design.  And many, I’m sure, are familiar with the Sustainable Sites Initiative (SSI), a collaborative effort to bring the landscape design process into the same discussion of sustainability that has produced the LEED certification for buildings.  Here is a blurb from the SSI web site which explains their mission:

The Sustainable Sites Initiative is an effort underway to develop guidelines and performance benchmarks for site development that will reduce the adverse environmental impacts of planned landscapes. It is a partnership of the American Society of Landscape Architects, the Lady Bird Johnson Wildflower Center and the United States Botanic Garden in conjunction with a diverse group of stakeholder organizations. The Guidelines and Performance Benchmarks will include criteria for site design, implementation and maintenance.  The Initiative will analyze, consolidate and advance the research needed to establish sound metrics and create regional guidelines and incentives for sustainable sites.

If you’re anything like me, you go a bit twitchy when it comes to standards, and benchmarks, and committees, … “Oh my”!  But in truth the results of these bureaucratic initiatives can be very helpful, and the Sustainable Sites Initiative’s Guidelines and Performance Benchmarks is all of that and more.  It’s a great learning and teaching tool, with terrific background information on just what is involved in site development and why sustainability should matter to us as designers.

No need for me to go on, an on.  Visit the site and check it out.  Download the Guidelines (a pdf file) and read it.  I think you’ll be convinced, as I was, that the folks at the Sustainable Sites Initiative are doing the design community a great service.  It really isn’t business as usual any more when it comes to our environment.  Those designers that are knowledgeable about sustainability issues will be better situated to help their clients, assist in the good stewardship of the environment, and, in the process, improve their business model going into the future.  A win-win for all.

…you may ask.  Right and right!

Well, I’ve (along with my wife Carol) been relocating.  Not far, but that doesn’t matter all that much.  I discovered several years ago, when we moved from one side of the street to another that distance isn’t the important thing in moving, it’s, well, moving… packing and all that good stuff.  Which brings me to another thing you never want to do when moving, and that is break your wrist, severely to boot.  Thank God that was the move across the street not this most recent move, our third in a year and a half, and plenty enough to do us for a good long time.

We bought a property in Damariscotta, Maine, the next town over from Waldoboro, where we were care-taking a large federal style mansion as an interim move, which turned out badly.  Our owners were stuck with a large mansion they could not keep up and took out their frustrations on Carol and me.  They were disappointed in the lawn area

which was part of our side of the bargain, but which we let partly go to meadow (for obvious reasons – it was beautiful!).  We fully intended to shear the meadow and mow it for their return in September, but a funny thing happened on the way to the forum.  I was badly stung by yellow jackets and a bumblebee while out mowing, with a resulting effect I wish on no one.  Carol had to rush me to the hospital, where I almost immediately went into an anaphylaxis shock, and came too close for comfort to the end of my days.  That’s why I couldn’t keep up with the lawn, which the owners were aware of, but seemed not to want to take into account. We’re glad to be gone in in our own home.

Which brings me to another little sidebar:  we have 2 acres for our gardening and design pleasure!  One problem: its almost all seabed clay!  Awful stuff to garden in.  Our first goal is sustenance, which means a rather nice sized potager styled kitchen garden.  Here’s the design:

So far I’ve taken down about 18 white spruce, cut them to 10 and 5 foot lengths for fence posts and raised bed siding.  It’s a lot to take on, but we’re excited and anxious to get out catalogs for the coming year to relish over and dream upon.

So that’s where the hell I’ve been!  Now there!

There are lots and lots of plant identification sites on the Internet, many of them very good, and I will be visiting them and commenting on them in future posts. But one of my favorites is Plantwire, an easy-to-use, simply designed site that is still in beta development. The home page allows searching by plant name, both common and scientific, plant color, and html tags, which is a very helpful indexing approach to searching.

The folks at Plantwire describe their mission as…

…a fun, easy way to find and learn about plants. We provide information on many of the world’s most beautiful, interesting, and important plants… Our database now includes over 300 plants and is growing quickly. We provide general descriptive information, flower colors, and basic instructions on how to grow and propagate each plant. More than 6000 images are included.

The image database is particularly helpful, and of high quality. Many of the plants have multiple photos gathered from the Flickr database, available under the Creative Commons use license.

This site is a terrific aid to the designer, giving him/her very useful plant information in an easy-to-access and understand format. And the photographs, because they are freely available to use commercially, can be copied and pasted into your own computer database of plant images for use in client presentations. I highly recommend Plantwire to the landscape design community!

As a landscape designer, one of the things that motivates me most is a devotion to service. Serving the client is just as much a craft as the design of the landscape, and deserves equal emphasis. And the ideal of service is intimately connected to success as a business person. My business as a landscape designer offers a service others are looking for, a skill they are willing to pay for. Though it is fashionable in the media to portray business people as money hungry leaches willing to bleed others dry merely for their, the business person’s, own benefit, mostly this is flat out false. My contacts with other business people, including designers operating their own business, leads me to believe they are good, decent folks earning a living by providing services others need and want. I’m proud to count myself in the ranks of a profession that through it’s skills and efforts is beautifying the world around us and making a living doing it.

Homegrown Gardens is a business that illustrates this idea of service and profitability intimately linked. Though not landscape designers, I include them here because they exemplify the idea that service to others is not just a byproduct of doing business, but can and should be the soulful element of doing business, the heart of a business. One of the things that makes us most contented as people is giving something to others, and a business does just that. Though Homegrown Gardens does this in a unique and extended way they are a good example of the concept.

Homegrown Gardens is a business enterprise of the Homeless Garden Project. We provide non-profit job training and transitional employment for people who face challenges obtaining employment and housing.

The Homegrown Gardens nursery, which is part of a larger, organically-certified farm, offers opportunities for program trainees to learn horticultural and retail skills, and connect with other social and educational services. Your support of our nursery in turn supports the broader mission of the Homeless Garden Project.

Also, with the most recent spike in oil and food prices, we are all wondering how our own landscape design business will be affected. Certainly more and more people will be growing their own food. Perhaps there is an opportunity here to integrate edible plants into the designed landscape in a more concentrated way? Homegrown Gardens has some interesting and helpful ideas here as well.

Three cheers for Homegrown Gardens; you’re doing good things and doing it right!

For the landscape designer and architect working in any capacity on public places the organization Project for Public Spaces is the place to begin. PPS is many things, an educational hub, offering courses to individuals and agencies involved in the process of building and improving public places; and advocacy agency, working with governmental departments and local leaders to speak on behalf of the need for beautiful places for the public; and an hands-on design network offering cities and towns all over the world expert design assistance from conception to implementation.

Their web site is a pleasure to visit and explore with lots of helpful information for the designer. It is loaded with terrific photographs to stimulate your creative juices. And their lists of the best and worst public places throughout the globe is a fun and educational exercise to explore.

Become part of their email list and receive monthly updates on the latest happenings in the design of public spaces. Even if you work solely on residential properties this organization is worthwhile knowing about. Their image database is extensive and is a great way to enliven your own design ideas. Check it out.

I, like many of you, have an animus against information sites loaded with ads; they’re distracting in the extreme.  I’m not against ads – I have them right on this page – just sites stuffed to the gills with them.  About.com is just such a site.  I seldom go there because it’s just too irritating to read the information squeezed between all the text and picture ads.

Still, there is good information there, written by knowledgeable people.  If you’re willing to put up with the over abundance of extraneous stuff, here is a link to an article on the language of landscape design by David Beaulieu, which I think does a good job of explaining the various elements that go in to design well conceived and executed.  Also, the indexing column on the left linking to similar articles on the web site is very helpful.

Too bad some web sites have become digital versions of print magazines with more ad copy relative to the actual articles, but that’s the reality of a money driven enterprise.  Reader beware!

This has got to be the best site I’ve come across yet on my Internet tripping in search of useful sites for the landscape designer.  It’s Mark Laurence’s site The Design of Gardens. 

First off, Mark is an terrific writer, which makes the effort to consult his site very much a pleasure and well worth it for that fact alone.  Secondly, the site is a fine example of putting organization and ease of use ahead of flash and sizzle.  Anyone who has followed my reviews knows my insistence for a well organized site above all other considerations.  I’m a librarian as well as a designer, so it’s in my blood.  The ability of a visitor to easily access the information in a web site is just as crucial as the information stored there.  If it’s poorly arranged, then no matter how good the information is, the visitor will be gone faster than a kudzu plant will cover a utility pole, and all that good info is basically of no use.  So, Mark has designed his web site as well as he designs gardens!

The site is organized with the main Index across the top of the page, and includes pages titled: articles, sustainability ,design notes, plant notes, construction notes, subject threads, and blog.  Clicking any of these subjects brings one to the desired page, with another links bar to sub-pages on the left.  For instance, clicking on the sustainability link brings one to the main sustainability page which explains Mark’s philosophy on the subject of sustainable environments.  On the left is the link’s bar which takes one to other pages under the subject of sustainability, pages like the future of gardens, rainwater harvesting, and sustainable materials, where one finds much useful information, and not a little wisdom.

Mark also has a blog which is accessible from his web site.  There are many fine photographs.  This isn’t a perfect site (Is there such a thing?) but it’s a wonderful example of how to organize a site, and one with information worth the effort to visit.

After excoriating Tom Turner’s Gardenvisit.com site for it’s lack of intuitiveness, I came across this little gem there: the full online version of Gertrude Jekyll’s famous book Colour Schemes for the Flower Garden. Hat’s off to Tom, and a wee “mea culpa” form yours truly.