plants

Forging a Path
As a landscape architect, I'm passionate about creating gardens of every variety. But I like my work to benefit as many people as possible, so I get particularly engaged when these spaces are accessible to the general public. This explains why I love working on botanical gardens and exploring the ways they allow me to focus on plants and education in fundamental ways. Through the past 30 years, I've had the privilege of working on slices of four different botanical gardens, so I also know the
2019/2.2, February 20 — Botanical Beauty, Disaster Relief, Purposeful Travel and more
THE ESSENTIAL E-NEWSLETTER FOR WATERSHAPE DESIGNERS, ENGINEERS AND BUILDERS February 20, 2019 www.watershapes.com BOTANIC ENCHANTMENT…
A Healing Art
As our business has evolved through the years, more and more often we've found ourselves involved in designing, engineering and installing waterfeatures associated with hospitals, medical centers and other healthcare institutions. These projects usually fall under the heading of "wellness gardens" or "healing gardens" - that is, spaces set aside for patients, families and staff to decompress, meditate or simply take a break. While these watershapes are generally simple in concept, there's typically more to the way they're designed and built than meets the eye - a fact that adds an extra layer of
Up from the Ruins
My recent article in WaterShapes left readers in some suspense. As reported last time (click here), we were most of the way through the design process and were actually getting ready to start important work on site when the homeowners sprung something new on us. They'd just returned from a trip to Europe, and they'd been so inspired by what they'd seen that they wondered if we could inject a sense of the "Old World" into the project. The goal had previously been about creating a naturalistic setting in which wilderness seemed intent on reclaiming the space. Their fresh desire was to make explicit the notion that a
Planting Places
'Growing as a designer,' wrote Brian Van Bower to start his Aqua Culture column in October 2008, 'is often a matter of seeing things from fresh perspectives.   'As one with roots in the pool industry, for example, I once thought first about water and about plants and softscape later (if at all).  That bias isn't uncommon, of course:  I know plenty of landscape architects and designers who think about plants first and only later
Planting Places
'Growing as a designer,' wrote Brian Van Bower to start his Aqua Culture column in October 2008, 'is often a matter of seeing things from fresh perspectives.   'As one with roots in the pool industry, for example, I once thought first about water and about plants and softscape later (if at all).  That bias isn't uncommon, of course:  I know plenty of landscape architects and designers who think about plants first and only later
2018/8.1, August 8 — The Right Revision, Comforting Spaces, Neptune Pool Repiping and more
THE ESSENTIAL E-NEWSLETTER FOR WATERSHAPE DESIGNERS, ENGINEERS AND BUILDERS August 8, 2018 www.watershapes.com FEATURE ARTICLE…
Foreign Correspondence
In any large-scale watershaping project, managing the logistics has a way of becoming the most important task of all.  In the case under discussion here, that might even be an understatement when you weigh all of the complicating factors. First, the job site was located in central Colombia, in the foothills of South America's Andes mountain range.  Second, that locale is essentially a tropical rainforest, and when it wasn't pouring by the bucketful, it was crushingly hot and humid.  Third, ours is a North American company that works with its own products and has no distribution in Colombia. And there's more:  To get the job done, we knew we
Considering Small Spaces
‘Whenever I receive a call for an initial meeting about a potential project,’ began Stephanie Rose in her Natural Companions column of May 2003, ‘I always envision – before the client ever opens his or her mouth – that I will be adorning a multi-acre estate with a classic garden that will someday be written about in books and examined by
Progress Report
In the last video I shared with you, I relayed information about upgrading a do-it-yourself pond into a watergarden that exemplifies the value of an informed, professional touch. This time, a pond we updated was large enough that I know it was installed by a professional - but one who at the time seems to have been a bit lacking in insight and imagination. There's only a brief glimpse of