value
When I was a student, it generally upset me when a class came nowhere close to completing its agenda. This was especially true in college, but it even reached back into high school, when I'd feel almost cheated that the last five chapters of a 25-chapter textbook fell into some crack at the end of the year, never to be seen or heard from again. I could rationalize it in
How do you figure out how much water there is in a pond? This is a question that frequently reaches my desk - and it's important enough to know that I devoted this edition of "Ask the Pond Digger" to answering it. In the video, I approach this as a practical matter of how you figure out how many gallons a pond contains, offering a couple basic ways to
Swimming: Keeping Oldsters Going Despite Their Infirmities
Back in the early days of WaterShapes, I recall a long breakfast conversation with David Tisherman in which we discussed the importance of travel as part of a complete design education. It was the summer of 1999, and I was on the hunt for artwork to go along with an article Mark Holden was preparing on the history of watershape design: David was known as someone who had traveled extensively and, more to the immediate point, was an avid taker of photographs of superior quality. He’d brought several sleeves filled with slides (remember them?) along to breakfast, and as we talked and I reviewed the photos, I was endlessly impressed by how meticulously he’d recorded so many places and details. I’ve always been a traveler, too, but I never much cared for
When I was new to the watershaping world back in the 1980s, it always surprised and disappointed me when newspaper articles – most of them quoting real estate agents and officials as primary sources – told the world that a swimming pool added nothing to the value of a home. In fact, the articles contended, a pool probably lessened the home’s resale price by severely limiting the
We landshapers can and should attach a dollar figure to our knowledge, experience and integrity. That's a lesson I had to learn the hard way. About fifteen years ago, I was in need of a new dump truck for my growing business. I wasn't rich, so I decided to buy a used vehicle and found one in the local truck-trader newspaper. After looking at the truck with my trusty mechanic, I made an offer to my fellow landscape contractor, and he accepted. As we entered his office to complete the necessary paperwork, I came face-to-face with a landscape plan that looked very familiar: It was one I had drawn for potential clients. In fact, it was the colored plan I had presented to them only a few weeks earlier. I felt violated: That was my plan sitting on his desk. I asked him where he'd gotten it - an obvious and unnecessary question - and he told me that
My clients' eyes light up when they first discuss color. They describe intense images of saturated reds, violets, and blues. The more color we can pack in, the better. No one yet has asked me for a garden awash in neutral grays. But what do they really want? As a landshaper, am I delivering the best service by designing a landscape overflowing with pure, vivid colors? As the hired expert, how am I to produce a landscape design that evokes the feeling they really want? That end result - the feeling, or emotional response, that the client gets from the garden - will not necessarily be achieved by placing bright colors everywhere. What we want is a garden that sings, not screams, with color. Of course to design this kind of garden, we designers must understand color ourselves. There is, unfortunately, an abundance of misunderstanding and misinformation on the subject. Let's aim at a more thoughtful understanding of color by approaching it in a logical, sequential manner. Let's explore how color really works, and how to design with color to form compositions that produce the feeling your clients
Value is measured and determined in a variety of ways. When it comes to pools and spas, for example, I'd say that the straight-dollar value is only one of several yardsticks and that, for many clients, it's no longer the one that tops their lists. Instead, beauty, health benefits, artistic merit, pride of ownership and emotional appeal are more important than price tag for many of them - a wonderful trend, to my way of thinking. These measures of value, of course, are highly subjective. Every client is a little bit different, and the relative value of non-monetary factors can be
