Garden Bloggers Bloom Day Foliage Follow Up February 2014 Snow…What’s up

I haven’t heard this sound in a long time.  In the stillness of the landscape there is a crackling sound of branches as ice falls from them.  Several storms have passed and at the present time we just endured our sixth snowfall of the season. It is time for another Garden Bloggers Bloom Day and Foliage Follow-Up, and while not much is blooming this time of year, the garden is full of hope…well maybe.  I know all of the cold climate folks are getting a bit stir crazy and have seen way too many snow photos…but prepare yourself...there are more in the near future. I am also celebrating A Guide to Northeastern Gardenings Fourth Anniversary on the 17th. so I included some macros taken with the new lens. Come take a look at the garden in winter.  

   Hydrangea Endless Summer Flower Seed Head

Nellie Stevens Holly Berries

Crape Myrtle Sioux Seed Head

Western Arborvitae and Spreading Yew

Picea orientalis Skylands

Acer Palmatum Sango Kaku 

(Coral Bark Maple)

Ice Bubbles in Birdbath

Gardens & Rock Waterfall in Winter Mode

Picea pungens Montgomery Foliage

Skylands Spruce, Barberry and Weeping Blue Atlas Cedar

Garden Under Blanket of Snow

I know this is not the traditional post and I am counting on our warm climate bloggers to chime in and show off some blooms. After all...isnt that what Garden Bloggers Bloom Day is all about?   Carol at May Dreams Gardens had a good idea with this meme.  We can  experience blooms every month no matter what the time of year.  Also thanks to Pam at Digging for hosting Foliage Follow-Up. While there arent any blooms in the garden right now I can focus on foliage and buds which are a hopeful sign.   Maybe next month will be more promising!  Happy Garden Bloggers Bloom Day & Foliage Follow-Up!

And As Always...Happy Gardening!

Author: Lee@ A Guide to Northeastern Gardening.  All rights reserved 2014.

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Contemporary and Modern Table Lamps

Table Lamps

Contemporary Table 

Lamps
The contemporary table lamps are considered as task lamps because of their specific functions. Today, these lights are considered as home accessories for their decorative designs and styles. These lights are normally leave to contemporary table tops in a position right amount of light on a particular area.With the appropriate lighting around your premises you can move with ease in the sense of security and peace of mind especially at night. The contemporary table lamps are adorned with matching lamp shade will make it decorative. They are used primarily for lighting purposes and additional accents. Each area of your home lighting needs for proper lighting.

Modern and Contemporary 

Table Lamps
There are so many types of modern table lamps but they are all for the task-lighting purposes. With their styles and contemporary designs you gain additional accents. These lights can create the ambiance of drama that you want. You can also use it on your corner tables and the contemporary lamp are conducive to some bad calls. These are the appropriate light providers you can for your bedroom, where you can be their brightness for some romantic mood moderate. As task modern table lamp, which are the best things you do on your desk is a place where most of your writings.

 Modern Table Lamp

 There are websites that you offer through their online catalogs of the myriad of selection for which you can choose. If you are the type of person who should be amended into the atmosphere every now and then love, you can choose these styles with dimmers to adjust the light to the desired setting for your modern table lamps.The modern table lamp is an important task-lighting fixture which is usually placed on tabletops. It comes in varying shapes, sizes, modern table lamp designs, styles with matching lampshades of many different sizes, colors, designs and styles.

Modern Table Lamp
A table lamp can be considered important decor in a home. With the right kind for the room, a lamp can give a general impressive look that can create a lasting impression about you and how you manage your home. A modern table lamp can add color, glow and life in a dull and boring room. Given the right size, style, table, and motif, you can make a great impression with the modern table lamp that you have placed on the matching end or corner table.


Contemporary Table Lamps
Table lamps are made for different purposes. The more common lamps are used either for task lighting or ambient lighting. Task contemporary table lamps are used for the purpose of accomplishing tasks like reading, cooking, sewing or some other activities. Ambient contemporary table lamps, on the other hand, are used to create a mood in the room - an effect that can make you relax and be free from a stressful day. These two purposes require different kinds of contemporary tables lamps. When you buy your lamp, you should clearly define the purpose of why you are buying such.

 

Modern Table Lamps

 

Contemporary Table Lamps

   

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Planning Your Garden 2

There are lots of tools and techniques that can help when designing a garden on plan:

1. 3D software is ideal - because you can take a 2D plan and see what it would be like to stand in your finished garden.


























The drawback is that there is a fairly steep learning curve with most programs, and the programs themselves can be quite expensive.

2. Photographs and tracing paper is a great way of visualising how your garden will look. This is really helpful in seeing how big you need plants to grow to hide ugly views, or to see how much space plants are likely to take up in the garden.
Drawbacks are that you still need a fairly good eye, and a basic ability to draw perspective.

3. Overhead plans are often the easiest to get right. Also, if a design looks right on plan when viewed from above it will usually look correct in reality.

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Dont wait for summer!!!!

Ever wanted that dream backyard? A pool? A deck? A nice stone patio? Or maybe all of it!!! One of the most common things I find in my business is what I term as the last minute client....these are the folks that believe they can have a contractor come to your door, present ideas and a cost estimate....and start the work next week!

Lets have an inside look at a landscape contractors life....

For the most part, in the Northern reaches of North America, it is a seasonal business! Winter and frost in the ground means no construction can happen between the months of late November (or when the frost sets in) to about early May (or when the ground dries up and drains properly enough to drive equipment over it).

Next we look at the contractor, he/she is usually looking to fill the work schedule up in the cold months when no work is happening. After all, knowing what sort of season start you will have in terms of work can help a contractor know how many people they need to hire, how many trucks they need and what equipment they will need to either purchase or resurrect from winter storage!

Now comes the bills....because the season stops, does not mean the banks or creditors suddenly stop looking for money for equipment payments. So that feeds the never ending drive to seek new work contracts for the coming season.

Then comes the idea that you need good qualified labourers to build the projects you are signing up! Once those projects are complete, you want to keep your labourers working....once again feeding the hunger to find more work.

By this point a contractor is edgy....wanting to fill the work seasons schedule up as soon as they can so they can sort of rest well at night knowing their mortgages, equipment payments, insurance payments and material supplier account payments.... plus labourer expenses are all covered!

Now, having explored all that....this all adds up to a busy spring start. Home owners are antsy to get things rolling and like I stated above, contractors are eager to sign up work and hopefully make a profit by the end of the season.

What does that spell for the last minute client syndrome?

Example phone call.....

Client dials contractors number on June 15th, contractor picks up.

Contractor: Hello...so and so Landscaping....Joe speaking! (Hopefully in a pleasant salesman like voice)
Potential Client: Hi, yes I am wondering if you do interlock patios?
Contractor: Yes we do...
Potential Client: Good! Can you come see my place and give me an estimate?
Contractor: Yes I can....give me the address and so on....

Well, the meeting goes well....prices get discussed, eyebrows sometimes get raised (mainly from the client being shocked as to how much landscape work truly costs) and material choices are tossed about....suddenly the client drops the bomb.....

Potential Client: When can you start the work?
Contractor: Well.....I am booked for the next 7 to 8 weeks given that we do not get a lot of rain in the next while or so....
Potential Client: 8 WEEKS?!?!?!?!?! But I need this built before summer starts!!! My kids get out of school soon and I go on Vacation in July....I want to be enjoying my yard by then!!!

I personally have been in this situation as the sales rep and have been blasted for not being able to start sooner! Its not fun!!! It can sometimes make you question your choice of professions too! It is at that point, as a sales rep for landscape work....you ask yourself the question....Why dont people think about contacting contractors months before they actually want the work completed?

So.....a word of advice, if you want to be swimming in your brand new swimming pool by June 21st or sipping cold beer on your new deck while dodging BBQ smoke, yapping with your friends on the July long weekend....consider calling the contractor in February! Or even better....Call them in October with the request of being one of their first clients for Spring.....Youll get first priority and time devotion to you by the contractor. Materials and prices can be well thought out with that much time to spare before the work begins.

Also....if the need for a landscape design arises.....youve got the time to contact a designer and get something drawn up....

That is where I come in!

Paul

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A Difficult Planting Site in Brooklyn

Of all the private sites in Brooklyn there is one in particular that stands out as an extremely harsh environment all year long. With a northern exposure facing McCarren Park the planting bed in front of a modern co-op receives indirect sunlight all day long and is the unfortunate home of an incessant wind tunnel. The life of leaves are often determined by how well they are able to retain moisture and convert sunlight into energy through photosynthesis. Intense wind decreases their moisture.

I decided that mid-winter would be the best time to assess how well the plants were holding out. The plant choices consisted of Ferns, Acubas, Ilex, Liriope, Hydrangeas, Azaleas, Red twig, and Birch trees.

Given the overwhelming size of the co-op, the rather tight planting space and the need to avoid window obstructions, creating a successful planting that wasnt dwarfed and insignificant was a real challenge. While some of the plants have wind-burned leaves, overall the planting looks healthy and successful. I would have chosen White Catawba rhododendron instead of Ilex and underplanted with lots of Japanese forest grass for its lime green, hardiness and yearlong swaying.

                                                                           click image for slideshow                                                 

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Is Ecological Restoration Just Gardening

Lagoon Park in Santa Barbara by Van Atta Associates.  Photo by Saxon Holt

I recently read a wonderful and thought-provoking article by Peter Del Tredici, Senior Research Scientist at the Arnold Arboretum of Harvard University. Del Tredici has been on my radar since he published a subtly subversive book called Wild Urban Plants that I reviewed earlier this spring. This new article posits the question: “Is ‘landscape restoration’ really just gardening dressed up with jargon to simulate ecology?’. Here is a bit more context:

“Implicit in the proposals that call for the control and/or eradication of invasive species is the assumption that the native vegetation will return to dominance once the invasive is removed, thereby restoring the “balance of nature.” That’s the theory. The reality is something else. Land managers and others who have to deal with the invasive problem on a daily basis know that often as not the old invasive comes back following eradication (reproducing from root sprouts or seeds), or else a new invader moves in to replace the old one. The only thing that seems to turn this dynamic around is cutting down the invasives, treating them with herbicides, and planting native species in the gaps where the invasives once were. After this, the sites require weeding of invasives for an indefinite number of years, at least until the natives are big enough to hold their ground without human assistance.

What’s striking about this so-called restoration process is that it looks an awful lot like gardening, with its ongoing need for planting and weeding. Call it what you will, but anyone who has ever worked in the garden knows that planting and weeding are endless. So the question becomes: Is “landscape restoration” really just gardening dressed up with jargon to simulate ecology, or is it based on scientific theories with testable hypotheses? To put it another way: Can we put the invasive species genie back in the bottle, or are we looking at a future in which nature itself becomes a cultivated entity?”  Peter Del Tredici from "Neocreationism and the Illusion of Ecological Restoration," Harvard Design Magazine.

I’ll confess: I am not an ecologist or an expert at ecological restoration. I have, however, worked with ecological restoration experts like Rutger’s Steven Handel. Consider my recent experience on a two thousand-acre agricultural site that we intended to convert into a mosaic of different native habitats. After going through the process of analyzing the site and preparing a restoration concept, my impression was that restoration was really not that different from the design process I use for any ornamental landscape. Obviously, the goals were different and our application of native habitats was based in a much more thorough site analysis. But the end result was the same: we imposed a human concept of what “nature” should be on the site. The end result would be entirely artificial and constructed.

Vernal Pool created in an area that once wasa parking. Van Atta Associates. Photo by Saxon Holt

In addition, our constructed “native” landscape would require years of intensive maintenance to get it established, and decades of ongoing management to keep it native. After this experience, Del Tredici’s analogy to gardening resonated with me.

Del Tredici’s conclusion for designers and gardeners is to “not to limit themselves to a palette of native species that might once have grown on the site.” He argues for using plants that will tolerate the conditions of the site, native or not, particularly in the tough urban conditions.

I have two responses to the article. The first is to agree with Del Tredici’s claim that ecological restoration creates “entirely artificial and constructed” landscapes. It’s absolutely true. It bursts the romantic notion that we can bring back plant and animal communities as they existed before Columbus arrived. It also challenges the myth that native plants are natural, good, low maintenance, and self-sustaining. They aren’t. They require human intervention. The sooner we can lose the mythology that “nature” will come back one day, the sooner we can get to the real work of creating entirely artificial, native landscapes that perform essential ecological services.  See my posting here for more on this.

Boardwalk at Lagoon Park in Santa Barbara by Van Atta Associates. Photo by Saxon Holt

Secondly, I disagree somewhat with Del Tredici’s direction that designers abandon the native only approach. I certainly don’t mind using some non-natives. But implicit in Del Tredici’s assumption is that natives are somehow weaker or less adaptive to the tough conditions of an urban site than some non-natives. I entirely disagree with this point.

Of course, some natives—many of which are ubiquitous in the nursery trade—are not tough enough for urban sites. The natives that are widely available in the nursery trade are mostly selected for their ornamental value. We’ve hardly explored the full potential of native systems to address the environmental challenges of the day. To judge the adaptability of native plants based on the scant selection of natives that are currently available in the trade is preposterous. Mark Simmons, a researcher at The Lady Bird Johnson Center, is doing research that proves that many native plants are much tougher than non-natives and capable of solving many of our environmental problems. I will feature an article on his research later this month.

I love articles like Del Tredici’s. The debate over natives vs. exotic plants is really a debate about what is natural. I look forward to the day when we drop our romantic notions about nature existing somewhere “out there,” and can start to focus improving the ecology of the human-impacted landscapes that we encounter every day.

What do you think?  I would love to hear other reactions to Del Tredicis article, especially any who have some experience or thoughts about ecological restoration.

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Bedrooms Design

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