WaterShapes Classic
'I've always been excited by innovation. I place creativity high on my list of aspirations and priorities in my own business, and I think my life gets most interesting when I'm involved with people who are similarly attuned to this desire to do and try new and interesting things.' That's how Brian Van Bower opened his
'When I paint,' observed Stephanie Rose at the start of her Natural Companions column in October 2006, 'I constantly play with color on canvas and experiment with various combinations to see what works well and discover what, to my eye, clashes or doesn't seem to mix harmoniously.' 'As a landscape designer, I'm aware of working through the same sort of
'In looking back over several recent projects,' observed Stephanie Rose at the start of her Natural Companions column in September 2006, 'I noticed that I've been using one particular genus of plants more frequently than just about any other.' 'Its name probably evokes thoughts of petri dishes and bacterial colonies for most of us, but this plant
'In my observation,' wrote David Tisherman in his Details column for the August 2006 edition of WaterShapes, 'steps tend to be afterthoughts and are seldom fully considered. But I've always taken them seriously because I see them as prime gathering places where people sit, move in and out of the water and in general spend a great deal of time.' 'Children also jump from the steps into the deeper water and
'In all of the discussions in print and in seminar rooms about advancing the watershaping trades,' declared Brian Van Bower in opening his Aqua Culture column in WaterShapes' July 2006 issue, 'it seems to me there's been a missing voice - that of the client. 'We spend lots of time dissecting, praising, disputing, criticizing and encouraging one another, but somehow we seem to have bypassed the thought that
'What if you were so bad at your job that a person in a related field decided, for the good of his own business, he had to learn your business and replace you rather than cope with your incompetence?' That's how Brian Van Bower eased his way into his Aqua Culture column in the May/June 2011 issue of WaterShapes. 'Most people,' he continued, 'would say that this would be a justified response to the fact that you
'I understand that everybody has to make a living,' wrote David Tisherman near the top of his Details column in the June 2006 edition of WaterShapes, 'and I've always known that there are many people in the watershaping world who make their daily bread by selling, designing and building the pool, starting it up, selling pool toys and acid and chlorine, servicing the pool, winterizing it in the fall and opening it back up in the spring.' 'The range of activities some people try to master beneath the umbrella of
'Gardens truly are for people. While that's manifestly an obvious statement,' wrote Bruce Zaretsky at the top of his On the Level column in May 2011, 'it seems to be a concept that insufficient numbers of today's watershape and landscape designers fully grasp.' 'That's nothing new. More than half a century ago, in fact, [Thomas] Church was motivated to
'It's a fact of life,' declared David Tisherman in opening his Details column 15 years ago this month: 'The best design feature in the world isn't worth anything if it isn't executed properly. And no matter how good your in-house staff or subcontractors are, they need guidance when it comes to the nuts-and-bolts work of getting the job done the way its designer intends.' '[W]hen you have good, tight supervision provided by a knowledgeable overseer working with good crews and a good set of plans, anything
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