gentle gardener: green

American Farm :: Consistency, certification needed in Bay conservation landscaping

conservation landscape practitioners for a healthy Bay

the photographer's eye: Cville photog Ben Greenberg on landscape design portfolio photos

Thanks to the Virginia Society of Landscape Designers - the certifying body for landscape professionals in Virginia with the longest track record - for hosting Cville photog Ben Greenberg yesterday at Maymont for a truly educational winter meeting.  Ben gave the designers in the room a quick class on basics of landscape photography for those of us who shoot most of our own portfolio pics while dodging heavy equipment and trip hazards like tools, cords and rubble.  http://vsld.org/photogallery.php?reg=ch#

Then the professional photographer, whose book was recently published by UVA Press, http://www.naturalvirginiabook.com, gently and kindly coached us in improving our own photos.  Reminding us early on in the talk, and often, that he had never seen a photograph that could not be improved, he led us through our own designers' photo gallery that we publish to you, our prospective clients, hoping that they will elicit a phone call, text or email for landscape design services.

 A fun discussion of many images ensued, including on one of my photos, which is on houzz.com.  It was even more fun when I compared the pro's recommendations with what I notice using all those houzz and google analytics tools:  what people click on, and spend more time on,  is an image that does NOT tell them exactly everything, does NOT tell them what to think and where to look.  Here's a snippet of what I heard :

"Why are we looking at the back of the chairs?"

"What would you see if you sat in the chairs?  Why is the photo not of THAT?"

"What are the chairs facing out of frame?  I'd like to see that too."

"I can see myself in one of those chairs."

"The tree is in the way."  

"No it makes it more interesting.  I like the mystery."

 "We want our clients to see themselves in our landscapes."  

"I like that there is no house dominating the landscape."

Beach Style Landscape by Montpelier Station Landscape Architects & Landscape Designers Gentle Gardener Green Design

 

Of course the houzz.com caption and keywords 'give the mystery away':  It's a beach home, and that thin line of silver, echoed and amplified by the russian sage, perovskia, billowing misty blue in the background, is the salt pond called 

Quonochontaug 

by the Narragansett and/or Pequot tribes in what is today Rhode Island.

So here are a few more views of the same space, less mystery, more directed, more informational.  But when I am shooting  - well, snapping - photos early in the morning or late in the evening 'golden hour', what I am really sharing is my favorite landscape experience:  

I am alone, early or late in the day, in the quiet, when the birds and the sound of the waves breaking on the barrier beach are the only thing I hear.  What I want to create for you in the photo, and for #landscapedesign clients, is that incredibly joyful and peaceful mix of serenity and excitement, of gratitude and humility, for being alive in this moment in this beautiful place.

On some level, all professional landscape designers are in the business of soul conservation.  

 

 

Beach Style Patio by Montpelier Station Landscape Architects & Landscape Designers Gentle Gardener Green Design

Traditional Landscape by Montpelier Station Landscape Architects & Landscape Designers Gentle Gardener Green Design

Beach Style Patio by Montpelier Station Landscape Architects & Landscape Designers Gentle Gardener Green Design

Beach Style Spaces by Montpelier Station Landscape Architects & Landscape Designers Gentle Gardener Green Design

Beach Style Spaces by Montpelier Station Landscape Architects & Landscape Designers Gentle Gardener Green Design

 

And finally, to 'break all the rules' of real estate, architecture, landscape, houzz.com, and professional photography, here's one with An Actual Person In The Place:

Beach Style Patio by Montpelier Station Landscape Architects & Landscape Designers Gentle Gardener Green Design

 

I can't resist the joy in this photograph, with all its 'shot in the midday sun' flaws.  When you see the place in the photo, you know why that smile is there.  Creating that smile, or gently allowing a space for our children and clients to stop.... and enjoy BEING in a place...is what we do in #landscapedesign.

 

What do you think?  

 

Thank you, Ben Greenberg, and thank you, VSLD.  Namaste, y'all.

green+midCentury=thoroughly modern in Charlottesville

as seen on houzz.com: green+midCentury=modern landscape Charlottesville. pervious sfRima pavers by Eagle Bay, with adequate runoff storage and infiltration capacity underneath, keep parking forecourt/party space dry all winter long, and work well with natural stone and the required blacktop on steep slopes. The pervious pavers slow down, spread out, and sink in rain, snow and ice from paved areas uphill.

.

"http://www.houzz.com/photos/23979547/Rugby-Road-Charlottesville-Green-midCenturyThoroughly-Modern-Entry-modern-landscape-other-metro"

gentlegardener.houzz.com

made-for-mobile quick peek at projects on houzz.com via gentlegardener.houzz.com

conservation landscape design project: Albemarle County, VA

new project on houzz.com

Albemarle County, VA: gentlegardener.houzz.com

gentlegardener.houzz.com One small project, big ideas inspired by our teachers on gentlegardener.houzz.com.Big shout out to Julie Moir Messervy, inspiring designer and featured speaker at Piedmont Landscape Association here in Charlottesville, VA TOMORROW. #PLA at The Paramount Theatre, downtown mall, Charlottesville, VA. Where the professionals will be tomorrow! piedmont landscape.org

"Avoid Abstractification" - Franklin Pierce Commencement 2012, Temple Grandin

via www.youtube.com

On the doing of 'real stuff', Temple Grandin speaks truth to power, and to the powerlessness we mire ourselves in with endless 'abstractification": Policy makers with no experience on the ground with the things they aim to regulate, mathematical abstractification to create the "next credit default swap": these are the ills of our age.

I admire the plain spoken, the direct, the radically honest, and those whose craft leads them to create things of both beauty and usefulness. Temple Grandin is one of our heroes here on the farm, helping us see things as others see them: specifically, how cows see and process visual information and react to it: either calmly, or, not so calmly.

Today I spent 5 hours working with locally grown flowers, including some from my own garden, for a wedding; the ritual bathing of the stems in warm fresh clean water, the careful plucking of errant and unwanted leaves, the blocking of blooms by colour in buckets in shade, then in the cooler: violet campanula, fuschia gomphrena, magenta celosia, magenta phalenopsis orchids, plum and silver heuchera amethyst mist leaves, white orchids, white lysimachia, white achillea, white valerian, white and green false solomon's seal, the white spires of four foot tall pacific giant hybrid delphinium, the rounded cerebral shapes of 'annabelle' hydrangea in white and young fresh green, glossy green camellia leaves, the shock of the chartreuse heuchera 'citronelle'.

These hours grounded me back in the world of tangible, beautiful, and intricate things of Nature, the way with flowers requires a simplicity of Mind: to make a Bride's bouquet as she has dreamed of it, to make each vase hold flowers so that their complex beauty is a calm oasis for the eye in the swirl of a wedding party.

After getting to some sort of milestone with elected officials on a multi year design project, the respite was real. The design project was one so deceptively DIFFICULT, made so by endless abstractification by so many entities.

What could be simpler and cheaper? to clean up the runoff coming from urban and suburban roofs, driveways, yards, gardens in our #Chesapeake Bay watersheds (in our case, the Rappahannock), than to do it at the source, one yard at a time?

As it turns out: nothing. The obvious answer IS the correct one. The old ways, from Agricola to the CCC to permaculture, are still the best. Empirical and close observation of historical examples are more instructive than all the PDF's, tomes, trainings and mathematical models in the world.

But the ABSTRACTIFICATION of this obvious result by regulators, legislators, planners, city managers, stormwater engineers, soil scientists and model-makers is one of the most daunting educations I've ever undertaken: partly because of the acronyms, dependence on mathematical models rather than historical examples and what we already know works. It's positively Corporate in the endless torpor it generates.

The most difficult challenge of the process was not the constraint of using existing design methods, practices, and systems, applied to a tiny suburban lot with an oversized house on it and nothing but turf and a single tree on it.

The most difficult challenge was simply sticking to the simple task of avoiding re-inventing the wheel. If there are existing methods that have been shown to work, use them, and observe the results, rather than abstracting to something else.

We seem so addicted to making the Perfect the Enemy of the Good, and the Abstract the Enemy of the Practical and Useful. The result is a hovering helicopter like buzz: failure to launch - because we cannot ever get beyond the abstractification to create what Temple Grandin calls 'real stuff' coupled with failure to land - generating more and more options of where to fly and where to land, while burning fuel.

Thank you Temple Grandin for pointing out one of the useless vanities of our age. Given the applause from your young student graduating audience, it seems your admonition to 'create real stuff' hit home.

Young people want to do real work, real play, and make real contributions with their hands, hearts and heads. Despite being seemingly addicted to tiny devices that lead them into hours of abstractification, this younger generation seem to want to experience the real, the gritty, the useful, and do seem to want to have clean water and living streams, Bay and ocean. Give them a ploughshare, and they will use it. Give them an app, and they will use it too. Sustainable ag and farming in general is au courant among the young just now, perhaps for its geeky allure.

Give people a reason, and give them a job: cleaning up the streams of the Chesapeake Bay watershed in 6 states and DC by cleaning up their own little acre, one yard at a time.

DIRECTIONS FOR USE: Apply Brains First, Fertilizer only as needed.

Our green design team is acquiring acronym alphabet credentials behind our names at a clip.  Gentle Gardener Green Design team collectively now comprises 4 Virginia Certified Horticulturalists (VCH), 2 Virginia Society of Landscape Designers certified designers (VSLD) 1 LEED* Green Associate, an MBA, a certified permaculture designer, the firm is licensed in Virginia as a Nursery Stock Dealer.

The latest credential is in:  I am now certified by the Virginia Department of Conservation and Recreation as a Nutrient Management Planner for Turf and Landscape, No. 714.  We planners appear to have no clever acronym, but given how challenging the exam was and the prep class, I will probably answer to"Certifiable NutMan". 

Taking our lead from agriculture, where conservation and Nutrient Management Plans have been in use for a good 20-30 years by farmers who are stewards of their land (and also poor
, unwilling to spend a penny more for fertilizer than they have to) , those of us certified by the Commonwealth to write plans for urban (that is, non-ag) turf and landscapes, have a tall order ahead of us.  With sub/urban sales of fertilizer at some eight times the rate per acre of ag N and P and increasing right through the recession at about 6-8% per year, plus  conversion of ag land to developed,  it's no Miracle that our water quality problems Grow and GroW.

Virginia recently submitted its second draft Watershed Implementation Plan to reflect the myriad bottom up, stream by stream, watershed by watershed, plans by localities to clean up the entire #Chesapeake Bay drainage (VA is not alone; water 6 states and the District of Columbia drain to the Bay).

The Commonwealth of Virginia has just committed to managing over a half million acres of private and public sub/urban (that is, non-ag) lands via Nutrient Management Plans written by certified Nutrient Management Planners for Turf and Landscape.  Right now, only about 15,000 acres of such lands have written three-year plans.  In five years, by 2017, VA intends to have over 350,000 acres of private and public  non-ag, sub/urban turf and landscape responsibly stewarded by three-year Nutrient Management Plans........twenty times the acreage we have now.

In January a small publication named The  Wall Street Journal published the findings of the study indicating that the cleanup of the #Chesapeake Bay is, in fact, a jobs creator.  We certainly intend for it to be so; we would like our clients and others to spend more on Gentle Gardener  brainpower to write nutrient management plans for them based on sound science, and less money on over-fertilizing with nitrogen and phosphorus without a plan. 

For a Nutrient Management Plan and sustainable site maintenance plan custom written for your landscape, please call 540 832 7031 or book at www.gentlegardener.com

 

Here's a copy of our media release for Historic Garden Week - let's make an historic leap forward in protecting soils and water in Virginia!

SUSTAINABILITY NEWS APRIL 2012 - for immediate release

via www.gentlegardener.com

April 17, 2012

 

BARBOURSVILLE, VA - Rockwell attains certification credential for stream-friendly landscape planning

Virginia R. Rockwell, owner and principal designer of Gentle Gardener Green Design, has been designated a certified Nutrient Management Planner for turf and landscape by The Virginia Department of Conservation and Recreation’s Division of Stormwater Management. The certification demonstrates a planner’s expertise to competently compose and execute nutrient plans in line with the Commonwealth’s efforts to reduce fertilizer runoff from residential gardens, lawns, athletic fields, golf courses, commercial landscapes and university, town, city, federal and Commonwealth-owned lands.

A written plan for maintaining turf and landscape sustainably over three years is a new service now available to clients of the established Barboursville firm’s certified landscape designers and horticulturists. Gentle Gardener has long advocated responsible land stewardship practices including the use of proper and organic amendments, accurate rate calculations and precise application timing.

“The idea is to apply brains first, then apply fertilizer as needed. These practices improve effects on waterways, soil, plants, animals and people,” said Rockwell. She explains that runoff nitrogen and phosphorous in streams can be curtailed; Virginians can spend less by applying only what is truly needed, and improve the health of ecosystems and economies downstream.  “Nutrient management planning makes good economic sense. We all depend on clean water for life and livelihoods,” she adds.

The goal for Virginia counties and cities whose streams drain into the Chesapeake Bay, as described March 30, 2012 in the latest Chesapeake Bay Watershed Implementation Plan, is to rapidly increase the acreage of turf and landscape managed with Nutrient Management Plans written by Rockwell and her fellow certified nutrient management planners to more than a half million acres.

 

To learn more, please visit www.gentlegardener.com and www.dcr.virginia.gov/vabaytmdl/documents/baytmdlp2wip.pdf.

 

Media inquiries can be directed to Ann P. Reid at (804) 501-9888 or via e-mail at [email protected].

countdown to spring: personal garden coach

Gentle Gardener - Garden coach | sustainable landscape design | VA.

Gentle Gardener @ Stonefire Station: Orange Wedding Tour 2011

Despite the rain, sun and wind, peonies reign.  At home here in Barboursville, our farm-based design studio collaborates with hosts Carl and Tori Tremaglio of Stonefire Station to create an afternoon rich in the sweet sights and tastes
of the best the Piedmont of Virginia has to offer. 

via web.me.com

green design at home here in Barboursville with locally grown peonies and other flowers, composed for Stonefire Station penultimate dessert toward the conclusion of the #OrangeWeddingTour 2011. Thanks to Meghan McSweeney Photography, Ann Reid, and Stonefire Station & Kitchen. Enjoy!

Buy Local Virginia

via www.buylocalvirginia.org

we are proud to be part of the 'Buy Fresh, Buy Local' movement. It's been a part of our philosophy since day one......for a Garden as Pleasing to Nature as to the Eye..........
for Weddings and Events as Pleasing to Nature as to the Eye.

Despite the rain, in May, peonies REIGN!

Thirty Orange County Virginia hospitality and event professionals host 40 wedding and event planners, photographers and media for two days of ‘speed weddings’:  showering food, flowers, wine, music, and gifts upon our guests.  Mother Nature showered 4.5 inches of rain on us in 36 hours, helping answer the perennial question from nervous brides to be:   “What if it RAINS?!” 

via web.me.com

All flowers and plants composed by Gentle Gardener Green Design are locally and sustainably grown. Thanks to my very able and generous growers for helping us showcase their talents and Nature's bounty for our guests at the Inn at Mayhurst, 22960. Next post: flowers and food at Stonefire Station 22923.