David Cristiani

Eastern Red Cedar (Juniperus virginiana) is also very good in a near dune situation up here as well. Probably the best bet for a tree in this type of environment in my area.

The beauty of design/build is that you are not producing bid sets, but rather a sales contract and layout plan for your crews to construct. The liability is not the same as a straight design plan. It is understood (legally) that you design for the best interest of the company that you represent rather than as a client advocate (they used to do a…[Read more]

Curious about good mulch being environmentally unsound.
 

Cape Cod Cooperative Extension has a nice list of plants appropriate for fresh water buffer zones and coastal buffer zones. This one is now used as the standard for most local town conservation commissions. It has recommended plant size and spacing as…[Read more]

Nyssa is a great tree with knockout fall foliage. Likes to be near hydric soils. I’d be afraid to use it too high and dry, if that is an issue.
 
Chokecherry is pretty good for survivability, too. If it is moist, Sassafras does well.
 
Rugosa is a weird one because it has an aggressive nature on a dune and it is not native. It still makes the lis…[Read more]

I’m farther north than you. Not many trees are going to establish in a dune situation as it is constantly changing in terrain (wind driven shifting sands, by definition). The only tree that I see handle a dune at all is Pinus rigida.
 
There are several native shrubs that live in dunes and sandy oceanside areras similar to dunes without the…[Read more]

Registering a “doing business as” (d/b/a) is simple, but you do have to do it. I believe it is the same everywhere. All you need to do is go to your town or city hall and fill out a “doing business as” form that allows you to use the name of your chosing. That’s it. It is illegal to use a different name, if you do not do that. Either way, you a…[Read more]

The second you find a way to add to a landscape and still meet the parking requirements, the developer and/or  his architect or engineer will add to the building or find some other way to snatch it all away from you. Perhaps that is why they are more often the Primary and LAs are not.
 
Each community sets its own values and applies them through r…[Read more]

Make sure that they keep the accreditation for the 4 year program. There seems to be a strategy to force students to get MLAs in orde to keep the student numbers up in some schools.

When I am not forced to make rain gardens (love the concept, hate the reality in small islands),my plants of choice are small ornamental grasses because they take a flogging and keep on trucking, so to speak.  Woody plants break and continue to get big. Grasses max out on size and don’t damage vehicles while recovering nicely when “mistakes are made”.

That is a fact. More importantly, that prognisis was developed prior to 2008. Clearly,they were totally wrong and based a ten year prognosis on very short term data taken at the height of a boom.
 
Landscape architecture is like the stock market. It has its ups and its downs. Some areas are more secure than others. Those that go up fast have a…[Read more]

Sorry that I missed the land mass part …trouble with that short term memory thing after all these years. … not sure why.

Do what you love so that you can love what you do.
 
No need to hurry. I got my degree at 35.

There is no reason why anyone in any business should not be allowed to enjoy aesthetics within their work place. Greed has nothing to do with that, as far as I am concerned. Excessive vanity is not a trait that I appreciate, but it still is not the same as greed.
 
Greed is when you exploit others for any reason, when you replace other values to g…[Read more]

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]

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

Ed got inducted into the Hall of Fame this year!

I used to be a landscaper with a bad back. I had very good training in plant composition from older European landscapers growing up. I saw lots of not so mind boggling landscape plans by LAs and noticed that they had clean finger nails, walked upright, and seemed to be making a better living in a better way than I was. … now at least my nails a…[Read more]

Resentment of people who are still in it and liking it is a very negative human condition.