travel
I feel as though I've just taken a big step into the Modern Age - and now I wonder why the heck it took me so long to get here. Long story short, I was having a problem with one of the valves on our pool-equipment pad not long ago, gave up with fixing it myself and called in a service-technician friend of mine to have a look. He took care of the problem, then lectured me about
As a garden designer, I've often heard about wonderful English gardens, historic British designers and specific design styles that have radiated from England through the years. I've studied books, seen wonderful profiles in magazines and searched the web for photographs and descriptions, but in recent years, the modern miracles of frequent-flier miles and house swapping have enabled me to experience these truly marvelous gardens for myself. My family and I, in fact, have visited England ten times since our first trip there in 1999. Each trip has given me the opportunity to visit amazing and inspiring gardens in different areas of the country - an education in design that I have fully integrated into my garden-design practice with Blue Hill Design in northern California. For their part, the English people are very welcoming - and especially, it seems, to gardeners: Gardening hosts on television are major celebrities, garden shows draw enormous crowds in a country where everyone
For most of my life, I've been lucky to live within easy driving distance of a bunch of great national parks. Yosemite, Sequoia, Joshua Tree - the names alone flood my mind with memories of towering waterfalls, raging rivers, incredible landscapes, amazing rock formations and campfires that couldn't quite keep the cold at bay. In all my visits through the years, I've seen these "neighborhood" parks as naturalistic-design laboratories, as settings in which careful observation influences the work, fills the spirit and send watershapers back to the drawing board with all sorts of general ideas that might be of use down the line. Conceptual and visual treats, in other words - the stuff of inspiration. Last month, my wife and I ranged a bit farther afield than usual, hopping a plane to visit Yellowstone National Park. I have to say that the experience completely altered my sense of what a "naturalistic-design laboratory" might be. In this one park, I saw more
I can't begin to count the number of times our watershaping writers have explored the topic of travel, either as the source of clearer thinking or for the inspirational value of seeing how others have addressed specific design, engineering or construction challenges - or how Mother Nature
'For years,' wrote David Tisherman in his Details column in the June 2005 issue of the magazine, 'people have asked me where I get my ideas - pools raised out of the ground, the small spillways, the drain details, the modular deck treatments, the color usage and the use of reflection, to name just a few. "Through my design education" is the short answer, of course, but I can get more specific if we take a look at
