Posts Tagged ‘bad landscaping practices’

Pattern Literacy and the Landscape Trade, pt. 1 (aka ‘Goodbye to all that’)

What patterns did I notice in the landscape trade? For one, I observed an addiction to collecting knowledge. Not wisdom – knowledge. People can stuff their heads full of the stuff and never apply it for beneficial use. Perhaps feeding this addiction makes people feel like they are accomplishing something even when nothing is manifesting for lack of an investment of real sweat and labor. In Los Angeles, the city of projected dreams, tourists and the rich and privileged (or those who are trying to look that way) flock to idealized simulacra of Los Angeles such as City Walk in Universal City and the Beverly Center. There’s a pattern and principle in nature: "There is no such thing as AWAY.” The social fantasies of Los Angeles are propped invisibly upon the backs of low wage laborers that keep the machinery of the illusion working smoothly. Scratch the plasticized & painted veneers of the simulacra, allow the laborers to find new workplaces that respect their dignity and humanity at healtly wages, strip away nature’s “free” subsidies of water and power, and then ask, “What’s left?"

When some people figured out that I know my stuff, they pumped me for information…and pumped….and pumped….and pumped. They wanted the specifics of “what” connected to the precious mechanics of “how”. Depending on the context, sometimes I’d generously go all out because I genuinely wanted to help. It’s fine once in a while and I like being generous, but only up to a point because I can’t pay my bills with raving complements and thanks others gave me for the help they received. In other contexts when it was socially appropriate to communicate it, I let folks know that sustainable gardening and landscaping was what I did as a pro and then I observed that mouths would run on while pocketbooks would slam shut with the resounding finality of a solid-state walk-in safe. For reasons I haven’t figured out, the West L.A. crowd tended to want as much expertise as they could squeeze out but only for the bare minimum they could get away with paying, if not for free. I’m all for helping people get what they want but not at the price of vampiric exploitation – mine or anyone else’s.

“When you’re good at something, you don’t do it for free.” – The Joker (Heath Ledger) in The Dark Knight

The annoying and heartbreaking part is that, частіше, ніж ні, these folks wouldn’t even use the free advice they solicited. What was more astounding is that others wouldn’t even use the advice they DID pay for.

One client in the Big Rock area of Malibu name-dropped and bragged of having hired Rosalind Creasy for a consultation. On the appointed day, Wendy S. and Ms. Creasy went around the property while Rosalind fired off tailored advice off the top of her head. Fast forward 2 до 3 years later when Wendy S. hired me for some specialized labor. As she picked my brains as we made the rounds around the property, I could almost hear her make mental comparisons with Rosalind’s advice. When I gave her the same advice about caring for her forlorn containerized blueberry plants as Rosalind had given her, she piped up to say as much.  Do you see the irony yet? Even after consulting with Rosalind Creasy, Wendy S. still hadn’t used the advice she had been given so many years ago. The client’s windswept and neglected plants were no better off for hearing the advice all over again from me for one reason: it was simply and clearly not a priority to implement the expert advice she had sought. I wish that I could say this experience was singularly unique. It’s one thing to negotiate fees because someone genuinely wants your services, respects what you do, and respects your profession as a source of livelihood. It’s another thing to feed off someone else’s life energy as a symbolic parasite when you don’t respect anyone else’s need to make a living.

The client went through the laundry list of tasks she wanted done around the property. In short, she wanted her own private farm & garden worker and at bargain basement wages. Actually, upon reflection what I think she really wanted were the benefits such a worker would confer with all of the romance and bounty that country living on a farm invokes without the hard work, body aches, or the inconvenience of having to get her own hands dirty. When I told her how much it was going to cost at a fair rate, she backpedaled, made excuses for why she couldn’t afford the services, and struggled to save face after I called her on her unrealistic expectations and her hopes to exploit me for cheap, knowledgeable labor. Since this woman wasn’t willing to pay what the job was worth, she was still trying to save face indirectly through an associate long after I dissociated from her.

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Why one-size-fits-all garden designs don’t fit all sizes

In February 2010, the City of Santa Monica sponsored an Airport Demonstration Gardens Design Contest. A contact in Santa Monica nudged me to submit a design and she lit the proverbial fire under my booty with the prompting that the period for contest entries would end shortly. Так, my landscape contractor colleague and I visited the site in early March to conduct a site analysis. With a little over a week to go before the mid-month deadline for all entries, ultimately I decided not to generate a design. In principle, there was nothing wrong with the laudable objective, which was to show how “sustainable landscaping enhances our coastal environment, significantly reduces pollution and waste, і заощаджує час, money and water.” I’m all for that. It’s part of practicing what my colleague and I teach through Urban/Suburban Ecoliteracy.

What I took issue with was the concept of the city providing three “readymade, yet customizable sustainable landscapes suitable for neighborhood front yards” for public consumption. City of Santa Monica residents have the option of downloading the winning designs for use as templates for their front yard gardens. Now before you conclude that I’m just airing “sour grapes” complaints because I didn’t enter the contest, consider that no two garden sites are exactly alike, just as no two homeowners are exactly alike. Using the design as a template assumes thatevery front yard in Santa Monica has the same soil type, the same solar exposure, and a similar rectilinear shape of roughly the same dimensions. Somehow, I doubt that the garden template idea compensated for differences in soil type and solar exposure and the concept also assumes that a homeowner will use the same plant palette as the original designer.

Each of the final three designs chosen has a particular plant palette of a about a dozen plants associated with it according to the prerogatives of the designer. A homeowner could theoretically substitute a plant species or two out of his or her chosen design template, but this is assuming that the homeowner knows enough about plants to make a plant choice that will 1) have similar solar exposure, тип грунту, and water needs to original plants in the design and 2) know what plants will complement the altered design in appearance, звичка зростання і літні розміру. Іншими словами, non-designers would still have to know enough horticulturally and artistically to tinker with the design effectively without ruining it. What if the soil is different from the soil found at the airport? A different soil type and composition will affect the plant palette. How will a non-designing homeowner know which plant species to take out of or put into the design and in what relative numerical quantities in order to adapt the design to his or her own property? That would mean that a homeowner would have to know how to properly compensate for the mature sizes of the plants when determining the initial spatial arrangement when planting. One of the most common errors homeowners make is putting too many plants too closely together because they are impatient for the “full” look that comes with plant maturity.

Add to everything else the challenge of adapting the design to the specifics of a homeowner’s property. What if the homeowner doesn’t want to or can’t remove all the existing plants on his or her property? How does a homeowner adapt the shape of the design to his or her own garden’s dimensions? В даний час, adapting a design becomes daunting without hiring a professional designer whom the homeowner was trying to avoid hiring in the first place. Or, perhaps worse, a homeowner implements the template design and it flops. Nothing in landscaping is foolproof unless one opts for artificial plants and plastic turf. There is always some small percentage (i.e. 2 to 5 відсоток) of plants that don’t thrive shortly after a garden’s installation, but lots of struggling plants that are very slow to establish (i.e. 3 to 5 років) або великі збитки заводу (25 percent or more) indicate that something was very wrong from the start.

For all of the reasons outlined in this post, I refuse to recommend free garden templates or free garden design software to anyone. Templates and rudimentary or simplified garden design software tend to treat plants like furniture in a house to be moved around at will. Furniture doesn’t change shape, розмір, або форму. It’s an even bigger insult if the plant palette used by the software or the template uses the same generic database of ornamental plants and homogenizes geography and climate. Якщо ви знаходитесь в прибережних Мен, you’re not going to use the same plants as one would in coastal Georgia, nor would you use the plant palette for either state in the Central Valley of California. Spatially and aesthetically a design might seem to work until it is put to the test after implementation. Then the plants themselves would tell a different story.

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Minimize tillage, part 1

Are you one of those property owners who tills? Why do you till? More importantly, what do you believe that tillage achieves?

Maybe you think that the soil needs more oxygen. I’ll grant that soil life, including the plants, needs a combination of moisture and oxygen to survive, but soil with good texture already has oxygen in it! Soil that isn’t compacted from constant foot or vehicular traffic is just fine as it is.

Imagine a clear plastic or glass container filled with ball bearings. If you shake that container, the ball bearings will settle into an arrangement that minimizes the spaces between the bearings. This is what soil compaction would look like if you could magnify soil particles. But soil isn’t composed of only one particle size! The magical stuff that is soil is composed of varying particle sizes. If you go back to the image of the container with the ball bearings, now picture those ball bearings mixed in with kumquats, ping pong balls, tennis balls, and the occasional basketball. Those varying particle sizes allow for air and water to infiltrate the soil.

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A summary of what we do:

Urban/Suburban Ecoliteracy is a joint social enterprise between two sustainable landscape professionals, Wendy Talaro and Steve Hernandez. We teach applied systems thinking in workshops offered to the general public in order to 1) foster conscious and subconscious, visceral reconnection to nature and the planet; 2) help people unlearn linear, short-term and shortsightedly counterproductive thinking habits; і 3) teach relevant and practical sustainability skills so that a sound foundation may be created for integrated and authentic social, economic, and environmental sustainability.
 

© 2009-2012 Міські / приміські Ecoliteracy All Rights Reserved -- Copyright notice by Blog Copyright

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