gentle gardener: green

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.

gentlegardener.houzz.com

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

"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].

"Every Child Deserves a Chance": At age 114, North GA Doctor Blazed Trails For Women In Medicine : NPR

Copyright © 2012 National Public Radio®. For personal, noncommercial use only. See Terms of Use. For other uses, prior permission required.

via www.npr.org

If you don't know Dr. Leila Denmark's remarkable story, here 'tis. She doctored my 3 nieces, I toiled with her grandson Steve, (hey Steve!) in the noble caring profession of advertising and marketing for a large fizzy drinks co. in GA, and I used her books and wisdom when our daughter Stella was born. Yes, breastfed. No pacifiers (she spit them out). Yes, introduced one new food a week at 4.5 months after she began to salivate - not teething as we are often told - but signaling the digestive system's readiness for food in addition to breast milk. And yes, sweet potatoes were the first food, that nutritious miracle food known mostly to Southerners it seems, with no processed sugar or ---eeechhh----marshmallows! required.

Be inspired at this story. http://www.npr.org/2012/04/06/150149102/doctor-blazed-trails-for-women-in-medicine

I bow deeply to the wisdom of Dr. Denmark and the mothers, grandmothers, doctors, midwives, nurses, doulas and other healers who carry on the work of caring for our children.

How did the United States get $14.3 trillion in debt? And who are the creditors? - NYTimes.com

via www.nytimes.com

Just the facts, ma'am: 6.1trillion out of 14.3 trillion - almost half - because of Dubya, Cheney and their misadventures abroad and at home. The anemic stimuli the States spent on anyway projects and subsequently cut or abandoned maintaining a pittance in comparison. Who holds the Debt? 3.6trillion is US - NOT THE US, BUT Usn's. China is 1.2 trillion.

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.

What is 'greener' than grass? Here's to Bringing Nature Home: Tallamy's Top Twenty for the MidAtlantic

Each February the Piedmont Landscape Association in central Virginia creates a Valentine to the plant world and its workers:  the growers, designers, plantsmen and plantswomen who paint in plants.   

This year's PLA winter symposium featured Dr. Doug Tallamy of the University of Delaware, author of Bringing Nature Home, a Timber Press release, and now, a re-release.  Dr. Tallamy and other stars of the horticultural world enthralled over 600 gardeners in the packed Paramount Theatre on the downtown mall in Charlottesville; in Tallamy's case, with pictures of - gasp! - caterpillars.

These action shots of caterpillars consuming native plants - most photographed in Tallamy's yard - were an unlikely inspiration for those who are often asked by clients to pick, smash, burn, poison, explode or just deter those caterpillars from eating any single leaf on 'their' plants. And as a result, many years of accumulated experience go into creating plant 'palettes' for 'low-maintenance' landscapes based on plants that have little appeal for these caterpillars; in other words, we prepare a banquet for our own human visual and sometimes olfactory entertainment that is also made to be un-appealing and dis-tasteful to these creatures.

 

Our landscape design clients who dislike the munching caterpillars often ask for 'butterfly' gardens to be composed by  us, their dutiful landscape designers.  (The notion of metamorphosis for lepidoptera has escaped some of us,  if not our children).   And, we and our clients often go to great lengths to feed birds year-round, when what is crucial to biodiversity, particularly diversity of migrating birds, is the availability of food rich in protein during nesting and fledging season. What food do birds prefer and need greatly at this critical time?  Well, the bugs and caterpillars.of course. 

Dr. Tallamy and his students research and publish the links between the food needed, and food provided in the regions where we live, particularly the midAtlantic.  Critical to the entire food chain in any ecosystem are the plant genera that support the greatest numbers of lepitoptera and other 'bugs'  in each region.  Plants, large and small, feed the critters, and they in turn feed the birds, and on and on.  Eventually, we too are fed.

At a time when food, and eating local, is tres chic, au courant, de rigeur, the zeitgeist, we often deny the birds in our flyways the same opportunity.  We lay a banquet of foreign, strange and sometimes unappetizing material for them, and tease them with 'melting icebergs' of  large expanses of foreign, clipped, never-blooming turf grasses, dotted with single 'specimen' trees and shrubs from other places, rather than a knitted-together community of native trees, shrubs, herbaceous perennials, grasses and forbs.  And of course, the berries and other snacks on the foreign shrubs  that birds DO find appetizing, end up being propagated by them.  In the right conditions, these invasives then roll like a mighty tide right over the native plants.  Think berberis (barberry) hosting increased tick populations in the woodlands of New Jersey and southern New England, and privet (ligustrum amurensis) colonizing the piedmont and coastal plains of South Carolina and Georgia. (There is a singular virtue, after all, in clipping privet hedges into rectangles:  denying birds the berry/seed to propagate an invasive pest).

So. What? you say.   So, many thanks to Dr. Tallamy and his researchers for providing a list of the top 20 woody trees and shrubs and top 20 herbaceous perennials, grasses, forbs for supporting biodiversity in the midAtlantic.  This single page handout was worth the price of the day's admission.  We now hand out this list at speaking engagements and to each client in our initial landscape design consultation.  Gardeners and designers love lists:  look at the back of any catalog. 

My teacher at Kew, the British landscape designer and writer John Brookes, opened our History of Garden Design lecture with a deceptively simple statement:  "Gardens are a product of the culture in the time and place they are made."

Your landscape designer, gardener, landscape contractor and maintenance crew may not tell you they have suddenly converted to stewards of the ecosystem in your yard.  In fact they will probably be quite reticent on the topic.  But stealthily and steadily they will begin to suggest different plants, native replacements for the Norway maples and other strangers in your midst.

A generational shift that began in the sixties and seventies will shift almost all gardens in the midAtlantic in the next decade.  Individual single family homes with individual yet identical turfgrass lawns - the archetypal American expanse - limitless, with no walls or hedges to define each suburbanite's plot, will become right-sized and sized for a purpose. 

Grass?  Who needs it?  Well, children do.  Players of sport do.  Those of us with Seasonal Affective Disorder do,  Rather than the development default, turfgrass lawns will become one design element, but by no means the most important element, of the designed landscape.  Our gardens will be designed for people, yes, as Thomas Church so rightly pointed out, but also for a more permanent, sustaining culture, not just human culture.  Permaculture speaks of forest gardening, and Bill Mollison's most exciting lectures in our permaculture design course were of 'weaving',  'stacking' or layering productive systems on land and water as Nature does. 

Could it be that we are on the verge of unifying our notions of beauty with a reawakened sense of stewardship? 

If so, we have a few important teachers to thank, and Dr. Doug Tallamy is among them.  A deep, prayerful bow seems the right expression of gratitude.

The twenty woody plants, and the twenty herbaceous perennials, grasses and forbs, will inspire us this spring in this blog and in our design work for some time to come.

Stay tuned, and walk in beauty.

 

 

 

Media Release:Gentle Gardener to launch campaign-Is Grass always the 'Greenest' Choice?

Virginia R. Rockwell of Gentle Gardener Green Design, will launch an educational campaign entitled 'Is Grass always the “Greenest” Choice? Sustainable Alternatives to Turf Grass for Healthy Gardens, Waterways, Rivers and Bay' via a lecture on Wednesday, March 16 at 7 p.m. at the Central Regional Rappahannock Library, 1201 Caroline Street, Fredericksburg, VA. The free event is hosted by the Master Gardener Association of Central Rappahannock Area and open to the public.

Rockwell will discuss beautiful, sustainable options for turf grass, design elements and new legislation concerning phosphorous levels in commercial fertilizers. Good gardening choices and practices have a positive impact upon waterways. Rockwell will show attendees how to achieve a garden as pleasing to nature as the eye.

Virginia R. Rockwell is a certified landscape designer, horticulturalist, Association of Professional Landscape Designers member, Virginia Society of Landscape Designers member and LEED* Green Associate. For more information about Rockwell and Gentle Gardener Green Design, please visit http://www.gentlegardener.com/green. To learn more about MGACRA, please visit http://www.mgacra.com. Media inquiries can be directed to Ann P. Reid via e-mail at [email protected].

*Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design

 

PRUNING WORKSHOP on the grounds of historic Tudor Place Saturday, March 26th, from 9:30 a.m. to 12:30 p.m.

PRUNING WORKSHOP
Tudor Place, Georgetown, D.C.
Saturday, March 26th, from 9:30 a.m. to 12:30 p.m.


Join members of the APLD DC-MD-VA Chapter, for a hands on pruning workshop with Peter Deahl co-founder of The Pruning School.

Can this plant be saved? How many times as a designer are you asked by a homeowner whether a particular plant can be drastically reduced in size without killing it? Or, can this green blob be transformed into something more interesting? And of course, can the 'growing out' period be minimized as much as possible so they don't have to look at a disfigured plant? Here's your chance to learn the answers to these questions and improve your pruning skills.


Back by popular demand, we are once again offering a hands-on pruning workshop with Peter Deahl. Peter, an Interpretive Naturalist and ISA Certified Arborist, has spent over twenty years practicing his craft and sharing his knowledge and experience with garden clubs, schools, municipalities, Master Gardeners and Tree Steward groups. He is co-founder of The Pruning School, located in Sterling, Virginia (http://www.thepruningschool.com/main.htm).


For this workshop, we will gather at historic Tudor Place in Georgetown where Peter will start us off with a brief introduction to pruning biology before taking us outside to spend the remainder of the time getting hands-on pruning instruction. Tudor Place, a 5 1/2 acre late 19th century garden in the heart of Georgetown (www.tudorplace.org/about.html), has a large variety of mature evergreen and deciduous shrubs and small trees. Peter will instruct us in how to prune ornamentals in a biologically correct and aesthetically pleasing manner. There will be plenty of time for you to practice exactly where to make the cut and to ask all your pruning questions.



Bring your sharpened hand pruners, pruning saws and gloves. Wear your work clothes and dress for the weather. APLD will provide mid-morning refreshments, but please eat breakfast before you arrive. NOTE: It is not possible to prune in the rain. If weather forces us to reschedule, the rain date will be April 9th, 2011 and if needed the reschedule will be posted on the APLD DC.MD.VA Chapter website (dcmdva-apld.org/events.php) by 9:00 pm the night before. So if you have any doubts, check the website on Friday night March 25th.



The cost for this workshop is $55 for APLD DC.MD-VA Chapter members and $65 for non-APLD members. This is a hands-on workshop so space is limited.

If you're interested in joining us please fill out the registration form and return it with your check made out to APLD DC.MD.VA Chapter as soon as possible. If you have any questions please email Derek Thomas at [email protected].



For this and many other educational and networking opportunities check out the chapter website Events page at dcmdva-apld.org/events.php


Pruning Workshop with Peter Deahl
Saturday, March 26, 2011
Registration Form
Sponsored by the APLD DC-MD-VA Chapter

Please enroll me in the March 26th Pruning Workshop:

Contact Information

Name: __________________________________________________________

Company: __________________________________________________________

Address: __________________________________________________________

__________________________________________________________

City/State/Zip: __________________________________________________________

Phone: __________________________________________________________

E-Mail: __________________________________________________________


The above information will be used only if we need to contact you with regards to this event, and will not be given to any other organizations or used for any other purposes.

Payment

Please check the appropriate category below:

___ APLD DC.MD.VA Chapter members - discount rate $55.00
___ APLD members $60.00
___ Non-APLD Members $65.00

No refunds will be given after March 14, 2011

Please make your check payable to APLD DC-MD-VA Chapter and mail it to:

Marty Hays
APLD DC-MD-VA Chapter
8817 Burbank Road
Annandale, Virginia 22003

 

'YOU SAY YOU WANT A REVOLUTION...." ASLA residential landscape design survey: What y'all say you want now - 2011

LAND Article.

Residential Design Survey Respondents Look Ahead

Despite a down economy, landscape architects anticipate strong interest in outdoor living and designed residential landscapes, according to ASLA’s 2011 Residential Trends Survey. The survey asked 245 residential landscape architecture professionals questions on the relative popularity of a variety of design features and elements for the year.  The most popular outdoor living features this year include lighting, with 96.2 percent indicating the feature as somewhat or very popular for 2011. Rounding out the top five are fire pits (94.2 percent), seating/dining areas (94.1 percent), grills (93.8 percent) and installed seating (89.5 percent). At the other end, only one in ten (10.4 percent) rated outdoor bedrooms and sleeping areas as a popular amenity for 2011. Among landscape and garden elements, interest continues to focus on low maintenance landscapes (94.2 percent), native plants (87.2 percent) water features (81.0 percent), and food/vegetable gardens (80.3 percent). Respondents also indicated wide interest in several sustainable design features, such as water-efficient irrigation (83.1 percent) permeable paving (77.0 percent) and reduced lawn (72.6 percent). Outdoor Living Features (Percent rating somewhat or very popular for 2011) Lighting – 96.2% Fire pits/fireplace – 94.2% Seating/dining areas – 94.1% Grills – 93.8% Installed seating (benches, seat walls, ledges, steps, boulders) – 89.5% Weatherized outdoor furniture – 83.6% Counter space – 74.2% Utility storage – 61.3% Stereo systems – 58.3% Sinks – 54.7% Refrigerators – 50.2% Wireless/Internet connectivity – 46.3% Televisions/projection screens – 45.4% Outdoor heaters – 44.4% Showers/bathing – 42.1% Outdoor cooling systems (including fans) – 36.7% Bedrooms/sleeping spaces – 10.4% Outdoor Recreation Amenities Decorative water elements such as ornamental pools, splash pools, waterfalls, grottos, water runnels or bubblers – 84.7% Spa (hot tub, Jacuzzi, whirlpool, indoor/outdoor sauna) – 75.9% Swimming Pools – 69.4% Sports/recreational spaces (tennis courts, bocce ball, etc.) – 47.7% Landscape/Garden Elements Low maintenance landscapes – 94.2% Native plants – 87.2% Fountains/ornamental water features – 81.0% Food/Vegetable gardens (including orchards/vineyards etc.) – 80.3% Organic gardens – 65.5% Ponds/streams – 62.5% Rain gardens – 56.6% Xeriscaping or dry gardens – 56.3% Sustainable Design Elements Native/adapted drought-tolerant plants – 88.8% Drip/water-efficient irrigation – 83.1% Permeable paving – 77.0% Reduced lawn – 72.6% Recycled materials – 64.5% Rainwater/graywater harvesting – 63.6% Compost bins – 49.4% Solar-powered lights – 48.8% Geothermal-heated pools – 23.2% Structures Fencing (includes gates) – 85.1% Arbors – 83.8% Pergolas – 82.6% Steps – 79.3% Ornamental water features such as fountains or splash pools – 77.5% Decks – 74.4% Porches – 72.3% Art (sculpture etc.) – 60.7% Utility shed (tool shed, garden shed etc.) – 59.3% Play structures (tree house, swing set, etc.) – 58.9% Pavilions – 52.9% Awnings, including retractable – 49.6% Gazebos – 49.6% Columns – 40.9% ADA-accessible structures (ramps, bars, accessible shelving etc.) – 23.5% Here are the results in graph form:

4-H in Orange County, VA: 4-H Teen Hosts Sustainable Agriculture Seminar February 26

Sarah McKay, Orange 4-H teen and Blue Ridge Virtual Governor's School Senior, invites the public to attend a Sustainable Agriculture seminar on Saturday, February 26th, at the Orange Train Depot in downtown Orange. The event will be held from 1:00-3:00 p.m. and is free of charge. Participants will hear from featured speakers of Retreat Farm and Virginia Cooperative Extension about local food production methods now and in the future, as well as tips for your home garden and a demonstration of nutritional smoothies you can make at home from your own garden. The seminar is part of McKay's year-long Senior project for BRVGS. For more information, please call 540-212-3663.

via ocva4-h.blogspot.com

Sustainable Agriculture seminar
Saturday, February 26th
Orange Train Depot, Main Street, Orange, VA 22960

1:00-3:00 p.m.
free of charge

Phosphorus For Your Garden Plants – Its Crucial Importance And How To Apply It Correctly | TopPageInformationListing.info

Plants require 12 mineral nutrients that are essential for their growth and development. A shortage of any one element will result at best in stunted and poor growth. The plant however needs the various minerals in differing amounts. Phosphorus, together with Nitrogen and Potassium, being consumed in relatively large amounts, is considered one of the macro elements.

via www.toppageinformationlisting.info

#phosphorus occurs in nature and is crucial for growth. As Walter Reeves,#MG Cooperative Extension master gardener teacher at the Atlanta Botanical Garden, taught us, here's how to read a fertilizer bag:

N P K "UP, Down, AllAround":

N=Nitrogen which greens plants UP, gives them top leaf/stem growth for more photosynthesis so they can feed themselves...

P=phosphorus, which plants need to go DOWN with root development to survive drought, provide a strong foundation for top growth and for bloom development...

and K=potassium, which is crucial to ALLAROUND vascular growth.

I'm no soil scientist. "UP-DOWN-ALLAROUND" is single most important thing I learned in MG training.

The finer points of how addding highly concentrated phosphorus fertilizer to alkaline soil creates a concrete-like farming disaster in developing countries and elsewhere, I learned from Bill Mollison in training to be a certified #permaculture designer.

Most important sentence of the article is last, of course (Peek at the happy ending first!)

 

"It may be well worth your while conducting a soil test before amending your soil. If you are in doubt, it would be best to rely on organic matter only, excluding chemical fertilizer altogether."

And now #VA and other #Chesapeake Bay watershed states: New York, New Jersey Elevate Lawn Phosphorus Debate | Safelawns Daily Post and Q&A Blog

Compile all the managed lawn surface in New York and New Jersey and, conservatively speaking, you’d probably be talking about 15 percent of the total lawn care industry in the United States. That puts billions of dollars and high emotion into play when the two states’ legislatures start passing lawn laws.via www.safelawns.orgmore on bad science > bad policy > bad legislation > unintended consequence: putting organics and small businesses out of business

via gentlegardener.typepad.com

Will VA follow other states in banning phosphorus-containing fertilizers, even #organic fertilizers?

Finding the Money in Water: The Smart Landscaping Boom | Triple Pundit: People, Planet, Profit

By David Jay

via www.triplepundit.com

As usual, California is at the forefront of this #water-saving landscape design trend. Here in the midAtlantic, a second reason to use less water in landscapes: all that water carries runoff of excess nitrogen, phosphorus and sediment into our streams and eventually Chesapeake Bay.

Landscape auditors? Creating those jobs won't satisfy the 'landscape free or die' crowd, but it's a thought. Landscape coaches, educators, first....then, the auditors, maybe.

Regardless, landscapes typically use an awful lot of water on landscapes, and the embedded energy that goes with it. We CAN do better...by catching and using the rain off the roof, by infiltrating SLOWLY into our own land the rain we get, and by planting and fertilizing more sensibly and sustainably.

Landscape for Life -- Based on the principles of the Sustainable Sites Initiative

via www.landscapeforlife.org

Woohoo! a translation of the Sustainable Sites Initiative,  from landscape architectureSpeak to down-to-Earth gardener talk ....I am a fan!

Landscape design came a little late to the LEED party...After all, if you could build a 'green' building, but trash the site while doing it, what was so green about that?

But after a long subterranean growth period, green shoots are appearing!  The ASLA, US Botanic Garden and Lady Bird Johnson Wildflower Center have worked together on this for YEARS...and while 99% of the pilot projects for the Sustainable Sites Initiative aka SITES(TM)are public, so that people can experience these demonstration projects, it's great to see a quick translation.

In the Chesapeake Bay watershed, this is the RxH20 for our soils getting healthy, our waters getting cleaner, and our people being more conscious and healthy.

Congratulations to the writers/translators at Blue Crocus Consulting for doing the necessary work of bringing this good work down to Earth.

Gentle Gardener Green Design creates gardens and landscapes in accordance with the Sustainable Sites Initiative. Virginia is now a LEED Green Associate (one of only 92 LEED credentialed landscape architecture/design people in Virginia), credentialed by the U.S. Green Building Council as a person schooled in sustainability.

Allee at Rothesay: Gillette Garden Goes Green

Sustainable garden revamp of this 75 year old Charles Gillette design showcases green practices:  sustainable container gardens featuring native and drought-tolerant plants, bench fragment re-upholstered with LiveRoof panels, living wall demonstration panels on locally made wrought iron arch, careful organic care to revive boxwoods and crape myrtles.  Garden and house open through 11 October 2010 to benefit Richmond Symphony Orchestra League.  All container gardens and garden ornament for sale through Boutique on site.

via web.me.com

enjoy pictures before, after, during revamp of 75 year old Gillette garden!

Green Matters @ Charlottesville Community Design Center Tuesday 12 October

SUSTAINABILITY NEWS


GREEN MATTERS: PANEL DISCUSSION IN CHARLOTTESVILLE ON
SUSTAINABLE LIVING OUTDOORS
AT CHARLOTTESVILLE COMMUNITY DESIGN CENTER
Tuesday 12 October 5-7PM

Want to know why green matters? Join us October 12th for "Sustainable Living Outdoors" at the CCDC, from 5pm - 7pm for the return of the Green Matters lecture series. A special thanks to our sponsors: Blue Ridge Home Builders Association, Airflow Systems, Inc. Dominion Power, and Latitude 38. Sustainable Living Outdoors Expand your living space into the outdoors, create healthy habitats for butterflies and birds, grow your own food, and protect the environment. Join us for a discussion of how to design your yard and landscaping to require less water, lawn maintenance, while incorporating edible landscaping and native plantings.

Moderator: Charles Hendricks, AIA, CSI, CDT, LEED AP The Gaines Group, Architecture and Design Experts: Karl Shank, The Natural Garden Virginia Rockwell, VSLD, VCH, LEED Green Associate, Gentle Gardener This event is free and open to the public. For more information: www.greenmatters.info facebook link to more information

via www.gentlegardener.com

join us to talk about establishing sustainable gardens/landscapes this autumn, the BEST time of the year to plan and establish your garden.