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My preferred aspect on the Recommendations and Recommendations……..”Consideration will be given to suitability of the style at adulthood, not at installation”…..so many developers never take older dimension into account.  Does it really issue anyway?  The servicing guy can always use gas shears on them!

Thanks
outside living concepts

Modified my significant 3 periods before I discovered Scenery Structure. I really like it but the best factor you can do while discovering all your choices is know that it is okay to convince you. Higher education is a direction and sometimes you take a convert you never even new was an choice.

Thanks
outside living concepts

DON’T buy an HP! What a piece of junk – and won’t run AutoCad no matter what they tell you. Well, it will half run it and make you want to throw it out the window the other half of the time. 
Consider this – Puget Systems makes custom computers with prices similar to Dell and quality that easily surpasses Dell. http://www.pugetsystems.com.  We j…[Read more]

yeah, they look like death on a soda cracker!
I remember having lunch with Garret Eckbo many years ago and he was laughing at all the design experiminting he and his peers were doing with plastics newly on the scene in the 50’s….I was encouraged by the fact that even some of the greatest sometimes don’t have a clue what they are doing….
I…[Read more]

The wheel has already been invented
Along with almost everything else and if as a writer (Hemingway) I thought that nothing I did was worthwhile or as a designer I thought that all I did was operate a sophisticated rubber stamp I would give up.
I find the attitude expressed by Henry Cohen exactly the defeatist attitude that makes landscape…[Read more]

Imagine what the ones I used in the early 80’s look ike now…
 

My observation is that designs that are understated, simple and elegant remain a long time…these usually have a strong natural component. After all, isn’t it true that about the best we can do is to imitate nature?
And don’t get me started on sustainability….

trends come and go, they become tired and dated….
any of you remember the bradford pear trend?
 
 

Common knowledge has it that trends are curved and the aim is to be ahead of that curve, it is an odd image with no beginning and no end. Another possibility is that a ‘trend setter’ is king but if there is always a trend, this king will soon be unseated when someone comes along to ‘buck the trend’.
It would be nice (naive?) to think that the next…[Read more]

When I sat on the other side of the table (engineer’s side), the main reason we tended to lean towards piping was the maintenance of the bioswales (mowing, weeding, cleaning, and recommended replacement; some systems call for replacing soils every 5~10yrs, at least to get rid of fines/silt) which many clients are reluctant to commit to.  Selling…[Read more]

Hi Jim,
My best experience over years was to visit the local Botanical Gardens and other Open to the Public Private Gardens established “long time back”.
These people tried a lot, and what you see now are the successful plants.
The danger with books and similar material is that they very often paste and copy, especially the mistakes. Reg Ernst

I went from SoCal to Maui and then from Maui to Tacoma, WA in my career so far.

There’s something very visceral about visiting a good, large local nursery and just wandering around, taking photos and touching and smelling the plants.

Then, after I got home, I’d arrange the photos into my own plant catalog, looking up typical mature sizes and…[Read more]

If your considering buying a laptop, the minimum specs should be, i5 with 2.4ghz (not the ultrabook version with 1.7ghz), at least 8gb ram, SSD or 7200rpm hard drive (you can always upgrade the hard drive later), and dedicated graphics card with at least 1gb. If you can afford it, a laptop with a bright screen that can show a high sRGB gamut is…[Read more]

I would suggest getting a free subscription to this magazine: http://www.stormh2o.com/SW/SWhome.aspx
and try to at least get familiar with the terms and current topics.  Getting more overland flow and infiltration is a “hot” topic in some states that have legislation calling for storm water solutions that reduce pollutants and overall volume of…[Read more]

Is it an underdrain? They are typically used for bioretention cells, bioswales, etc. It is not a negative. They are used to dewater the soil in the event that the other dewatering techniques (infiltration, evaporation, evapotranspiration) won’t dewater the swale or rain garden (bioretention cell) in the 48 hr period (thats the dewater time here in…[Read more]

Andres,

You gave me a lot of great resources.  Thanks a lot.  I appreciate the time you took to put this together,

Thanks again,

Jim

Hey Jim,

A wonderful resource while I was learning at school was:
http://www.alexhogrefe.com/tutorials/  here you will find a little bit of everything (Effects, Styles)
More specifically on your topic:
http://www.alexhogrefe.com/site-plan-tutorial/

The plan shown here was made in 3d, the post-production work was done in Photoshop so you can ta…[Read more]

Michael —
The more I’m in this field the more I feel you should get two degrees: one in architecture and one in horticulture. Then you can do both.

Thanks for the reply.  I have actually bought that book in the past and didn’t care for it, so I returned it.  It may have been a little advanced for me at the time.  I will give it another look,

Jim

Yeah, speaking of discerning the differences… I remember a spring plant ID course that started when it was still winter, and we had to figure out if the buckeye was glabra, pavia, or sylvatica by the bark, branching, and bumps on the leaf buds alone.
Those teaching assistants were just cruel.  But I learned to feed the inner geek.