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I grew up travelling around the world and was exposed to many different landscapes, many of them very beautiful, including Lebanon, Greece, the Philipenes and various European cities. When I graduated from college, I moved to Brooklyn, living right next to Olmsted’s masterpiece, Prospect Park. I worked as an urban park ranger and environmental…[Read more]

Back to the question: “Did company greed kill our jobs?”  No.   When times were good, those firms looked like geniuses. Now, not so much. I don’t think anything done in our profession had anything to do with our current suffering–the “big overhead” firms were just the first to fall (for obvious reasons)  
The bigger questions are “what are the…[Read more]

William,
I went backwards from where you are:  LA degree (graduated in the last great recession), landscape foreman, construction specialist, design and sales, head of design,  D/B business owner.
My advice to anyone wanting to make landscaping their profession?  If you are coming to it from mowing and maintenance, don’t skip steps. Learn ho…[Read more]

Sir William, you sound as if you’re smoking a few magic herbs right now! Pretty simple to figure out water covers most of this planet. Listen up, sport. In general, Landscape Architects don’t desire to be called Landscapers. It’s the image most of them try to distance themselves from. LAs have enough of a difficult time convincing the public that…[Read more]

Where’s the “like” button?

70% is water.
 
0.0001% is grass and someone has to smoke it. ….probably the real reason we all started on this career path.

No, I’m not mad about anything. I started this side track by saying that I came from digging holes and went into landscape architecture several years later. Henry said he came from a similar background. You mentioned that as a working man, you straighten out problems caused by designers who don’t know what they are doing.
 
It is an attempt at…[Read more]

i feel ya bro.  When I get a little jobby, I try to make it easy to maintain, usually because Im the guy thats gotta do it too.  As long as there is land, people need to scape it.  And i think I read somewhere that 70% of the earths land mass is grass, so someones gotta mow it.

Yea, I’m lucky. I still know people may age who don’t know what they want to be when they grow up. If they ever grow up. It can be tough to make the transition to maintenance, which is why I never did it since my college summer days. I went right into large scale commercial design. The maintenance aspects are very important though. I see many LAs…[Read more]

Im just funnin with you.  Dont be so dramatic.  Besides, I have philosophies of my own too.  One is to just shrug off the words of an arrogant dusty old fart that will be dead in a decade. 
Honestly, I dont even know where this went sour.  Im reading up and it just looks like you are just a jerk.   

Now I’m all depressed.  I guess I can leave that day open!!  See, you’re teaching us all kinds of stuff, like how it is best to use a pencil when you are writing the schedule!!  😛

I’ve never understood why the most harmless of things things are shot right down over some policy or ordinance.

Oh by far do I appreciate just about everyone in this line of work.  I’m not sure what you are communicating.  Like, are you mad about something I said?

Then you can appreciate what someone who came from the business end of a shovel brings to the table!

Sounds like you really got it goin on!!  Just wanting to do it is half the battle.  One day I would like to get out of the maintenance aspect of it all, but hindsight 2020, me being on a property regularly tends to get me more biz.  So in the same breath I kinda gotta keep on it.  But I’ll get there eventually I’m sure of it.

Where will you be in 2026?  LOL
 

Good point with the sole proprieters ot being part of the statistics. Those people also do not show up in the government’s unemployment numbers.
 
With regards to staff on websites, many firms do not house the site or maintain it on site, so it costs money to change things. Usually, only the core management staff is listed to keep the changes to…[Read more]