Steve Snedeker’s Landscaping and Gardening Blog

At times, terrain determines style - that, the surrounding flora (if any) and of course, the geology. There are some typical arrangements in given situations, depending on other factors like budgets and neighborhood HOA restraints. But there are wide possibilities out there for designers and homeowners to work within given parameters and to still create interesting environments. One can take the flattest land and bring in a mountain, for example, like this example:

Conversely, one can simply use the hillsides bordering a property to produce a similar effect:

Flat does not have to be boring, for that matter:

One can even take a nasty drainage problem, such as the next two pictures, and just plain old make a swamp. This “bog gardening” is something I have done a few times and it has taught me which plants can thrive in such an environment. Some simply won’t grow in other environments and some very exotic bamboo’s, among other things, love bog conditions - almost too much so:

(Click the picture to enlarge these for detail)

But for sheer floral beauty and a wide arrangement of different colored blooms at different times of the year, it is difficult to match what a good bog garden can supply.

From bogs to desert mountainsides where creeks materialize from hill tops or simply meander slowly by the plants and other features of a landscape, all is possible. Landscaping is limited pretty much by imagination, in the end. We have gone into many people’s lots with the barest of plans. It’s pretty wild when that happens and I don’t recommend it as a constant tactic.

But so often general tactics get discussed at night over the phone or on site, with input and ideas going back and forth and some true excitement emerging on all sides. It’s unorthodox, but I ran things like that as often as not. There is much to be said for having someone who you can talk with and who you find yourself willing to work with. Our very best projects came from both sides, your bottom line. Landscapers have ideas and resources people don’t even dream of. But that’s what they do, that’s their career.

Why, heck, we can even supply the same seats Fred and Wilma Flintstone used on their outings! Check these out!

These are actually pretty darn nice. They stay warm from the sun well into evenings and make a definite sweet spot to sit on as the evening chill arrives.

Frederick Olmstead is the designer of New York City’s Central Park. He was an exceedingly busy guy. His mission was to beautify America and he did this like no other single person in the entire United States history. He laid out city plans and designed parks for New York, Montreal and for Louisville, Kentucky. Indeed, since Louisville was one of his final large designing efforts, it may also have been one of his best. In Louisville, Olmstead was given far more to do than merely set up and design park space. This time, he was tasked to design a city for the best effect. To this end, he designed the entire parks and parkway system for that gorgeous city, my favorite town of all I have lived in or visited. I honestly believe the graciousness of Louisville’s citizens is a combination of that ‘Gateway To The South’ charm and a reflection of the gorgeous and humane environment laid out by this wonderful designer.

I have a Mom and a brother who live there, in Louisville, and I try and make it back yearly, if possible. I was raised about 100 miles West, in a sport-mad town called Owensboro, hard by the Ohio River, my earliest playground. I once heard that, as a state, Kentucky has more rivers than any state in the Union next to Alaska. Inasmuch as I recall an amazing array of rivers and creeks coursing through Kentucky, I have no reason to disbelieve this. As a young fisherman, I think we always assessed the catfish possibilities in any creek wider than 8 feet. Creeks are also everywhere, is my point.

The creek featured in these photo’s is Beargrass Creek, a meandering, slow-moving creek on the limestone bedrock typical of Kentucky geology. It winds through the park and necessitated the erection of these fabulous bridges assigned by Olmstead to his by now well-known bridge and stonework corps of experts. They are all of stone or cement, though mostly stone, some much more fascinating than others. But they all bear the marks of some amazing professional and artistic expertise. There are 7 of them and I won’t feature them all here.

Some are now in poor condition, one even subject to vandalism, of all things. The community rallied around their bridge following a destructive vandalism event and raised funds to refurbish one of the older bridges. It re-installed a community sense of what they had in their midst and is a refreshing and altogether uplifting story of civic pride.

The precision and art of the masons is a wonder. Flawless bridges, carefully and expertly constructed offer yet another reason the park itself can be it’s own destination. My mother used to talk about Olmstead as we would drive through the park and I would crane my neck to see the bridges which we crossed daily when they lived hard by Cherokee Park. Indeed, the Park is still used as a short cut for many who daily traverse these gorgeous bridges. I love what Olmstead gave to the US. As a designer he gripped the 20th Century in his hand and formed it into something respectable in an otherwise cold, gray, utterly industrial period. The persistent beauty of Cherokee Park - and of the road system Olmstead designed, featuring Eastern Parkway and the well-treed streets of downtown Louisville have contributed hugely to making it one of America’s most livable places.

One last bridge:

I have been battling a bug and not up to my posting standards of unremitting and sensational posts.  Oh well, eh?  Here, then, is a recycled post from an earlier time, yet more relevant now, by far, owing to my recent posts regarding driveways and large surfaces.  Thanks, guys, I’ll be back in fighting trim in no time flat……….enjoy:

It is a truism in landscaping, road-building and all things related to the installation of any hard surface that the base is perhaps the single most important strictly functional element in the entire deal. It is also true that any surface will reflect in terms of longevity that preparation. So what am I talking about?

A “base” or “Sub base” is that material beneath the surface. If we lay in an asphalt driveway, we use this weird gravel material, spread out by graders and then rolled over a bunch of times by those big double-drum rollers, or “steamrollers” as we used to call them as kids in America. We watch this occur as if it were nearly natural. “Hey, it’s those rocks they put in under roads,” is our usual statement, as if it meant something. Well, yes, it IS rocks, but it is also “fines”, almost dusty material crushed along with the rocks in these gigantic machines used to crush rock which then gets taken by conveyer belt to a system of “sieves”……meshes where progressively smaller materials can get separated from larger from the processing.

In the end, one of the “sieves” only allows a certain limited size to filter through - in this case, let’s call it “3/4″ minus” material. Naturally, the “minus” deals with the powdery residue which is as necessary to binding compact able material as it is to cement itself. What happens with this material is that, when applied at a proper depth and thickness to the roadwork, a combination of water and compacting with these huge machines occurs. Those “fines” serve to nestle in, carried by either water or force, or both, to combine to make an amazing durable, hard layer. It is nearly, but not quite, cement - just at the flexible end of “monolithic”.

The real trick is assessing the need for what depth we need to achieve. If soils under this layer are moist soils with lots of organic material in them, there will be a need to add a very thick layer of base material to stabilize and maintain a permanently hard subsurface. Once the upper, or finishing, layer is applied, it will deal with issues like water and erosive factors which would affect the substrate. The problems of durability then become how the sub base was applied. If it is a thin layer, insufficient for compensating for loose soil under it, it will sink as the organics break down, or will become misshapen as pressure is exerted downwards, into vulnerable areas. If however, it is of sufficient depth to compensate for the always-looser soil underneath, one can expect a never-changing level for a sidewalk with far fewer eventual problems, such as concrete breakage or grade changing events.

I have seen some classic failures in driveways and even walkways and patios when someone tried to pinch a few pennies of the sub base and failed to achieve a degree of compaction that assured the surface of permanence. The sub base needs to be pounded and then pounded down again to achieve the degree of compaction necessary. Once this is achieved, we’re half way there. But this is, by far, the most important task of all that proceed from it. Ignore this one at your peril.

My advice to those interested in getting a new driveway or introducing some hard surface onto their place is to make sure full attention is paid to this seeming detail. Ask how much base material the contractor is expecting to use and at what depth. Do some math. Make sure your contractor realizes you understand how important a well-compacted sub base can be. Here we have just that: in the foreground, the compacted gravel comes out from the concrete blocks at the right. Notice we are adding an inch or less of sand above it in order to lay in the brick pavers.

If you want to see this in all its stages, click on the right of the main page of this blog for October 2006 and September 2006. It’s reversed, I’m afraid, but every step is dealt with there. Check it out.

So my claim is that driveways constitute a major part of almost any landscape. The move to suburbia over the last 40 years has given Americans at least, homes of substantial size, along with, often, huge lots. Driveways get us up to the door. They are typically darn near the first things we see at a home. They are definitely, generally speaking, the largest things we see. They are also - surprisingly enough - among the most ephemeral. They crack and break and get fairly ugly in due time, causing a need for replacement.

My contention is that this is not necessary at all. Furthermore, I think it is possible to construct a driveway that can meet aesthetic ends as well as an unheard of longer-lasting durability using todays cement technologies. Interlocking bricks are versatile as they can be, coming in many shapes and patterns - some utterly exotic - and their durability is legendary. Formed in manufacturing by machines that shake out the air voids common to all cement, they are made with additional cement and finer silicates that produce a compressed brick that is an unbelievable 8,500 PSI. To compare this to a typical poured cement driveway, consider that the typical pour iuses cement with a rating of 3,500 PSI. Our curbs and gutters on our public streets come in at a “toughened-up” 4,500 PSI. Obviously, the durability is over the top in terms of expected longevity. And there is more.

The segmented nature of their being composed of pieces, each snugly-fit in exact proximity with the fine tolerances and perfect shapes formed in manufacturing, means that they are flexible in essence. The heaving and malformations we see in severe climates which break monolithic slabs of cement and asphalt will not affect the composition of the surface whatsoever. Where monoliths break, then crack wider over time until they essentially disintegrate, brick pavers will be sitting there, intact and unbroken. A crack in a cement slab will never get better. The “cracks are already there” with bricks, something the old road builders knew back when bricks were the thing for streets. Indeed, Vancouver, BC, among other cities, is slowly replacing entire street with brick pavers.

So we now see that they are a definitely superior product in the sense of durability. What do they cost?

Well, they cost more. Brick pavers typically cost about twice as much as cement and, depending on the pattern and style, they can cost more than that. They are definitely a labor-intensive application and, like all surfaces, depend mightily on the sub strata all being firmly and most completely compacted. That many omit this step in installing cement happens to also be one of its downfalls. This is not as commonly done as we would hope, I happen to know. Costing twice as much is substantial, there is no doubt. But, and I am serious here, simply practically speaking, the durability is a real factor. You can pay more in the end however just by using cement again, especially when you consider the tearing out of the older surface - again.

The next factor is Curb Appeal.

Composition, color and special effects can make a driveway something far more than one dreamed. The top picture is a very straightforward look at a simple design using a cheaper paver. It was done for a lady who had tried and tried to chase the cracking driveway she had been driving on for years. She had used patches in the past - ugly swaths of different-colored cement which stood out like a sore thumb. And then they started cracking too. Three of us were able to change that driveway to what you see there - complete with a walkway to her back yard and a patio in the same material - in two weeks.

The final pitch in favor of brick driveways is their resale value. Ask any real estate salesperson if they hold the value of their investment and I wager you’ll get a resounding “Yes!”. At least, in my experience it has been that way. Brick paver constructions tend to be lumped in real estate terminology with the terms “value-added” and “special”. They are often foremost in listings as described “benefits”.

These other pictures illustrate yet more possibilities in driveway compositions. I look at many expenditures in landscaping and wonder why some of it is not investing in driveways which could be made to catch the eye. A cool driveway is a unique and obvious way of welcoming people with pleasure and some style. It does not have to be overwhelming - although it can be - but it can certainly make a place look better. It can - if one wants - also show a bit of whimsy or even creativity. Driveways, like gardens, are opportunities.

Is there anything - anything at all we can do for this irritating conundrum of the modern driveway? Our very entranceway itself, in most cases, stands there - entirely composed of some monolithic cement or asphalt slab of matter, uni-colored, boring, cracking and getting uglier by the millisecond, exponentially, the more we look at it. We typically work around these monstrosities of glare, doing our best to prettify things by planting abundant color or weird plantings abutting them, simply to dress them up a bit and to somehow make them become something they are decidedly not. No, those concrete driveways are no Prom Dates, for sure. In fact, they are not even suitable for masks or the infamous paper bags.

So what is to be done? Owing to their size alone, driveways are money pits, aren’t they? How on earth can one recoup what they spend on a driveway??? Lord love a duck, but they are huge! What’s the dang deal? How can Steve - or anyone else NOT in the paving field - advocate spending that kind of dough on something so basic and utilitarian as a stupid driveway? And, let me ask this now: “What’s in it for me? Hey, Steve tells great jokes. My hubby even likes him! I like Steve and I like that he buys his meals off my dollar now and then, but isn’t he being just plain selfish asking me to redo that admittedly homely-looking expanse I call a driveway? Is Steve a shifty-eyed bandit in disguise?”

No, dangit, I am not a shifty-eyed bandido, snarfing for your landscaping buck and sentencing you to an eternity of good gardens in the midst of some miserable and penurious existence. I am here to help! Remember me? I’m one of the good guys! And today, I don’t care about your garden at all. I want to sincerely give you the place you have always wanted and I want to make it last a while. You go prune the roses and let me “garden” that Godawful driveway of yours. Dear, you too, Sir - you guys need help. Stand aside and listen up.

Driveways of poured cement and of asphalt have a life expectancy of around 20 years, at best. Depending, of course, on the mix one uses, I hasten to add. But most of us deal with what we have. Typically, the modern cement driveway is poured of standard cement with a PSI rating of around 3500 PSI. The numbers of homeowners who do not trust this rating to yield anything more than some mind-boggling and useless bit of information are the same ones - us! - who simply want the doggone thing poured and to get the installers out of our hair. But this matters. It matters immensely, it turns out.

All cost benefit analyses comparing a poured cement or asphalt slab over time to that of, say, interlocking brick pavers, reveals that a cement driveway will be replaced at least 3 times over a period of 30 years. In that same period, the brick paver driveway will sit there, intact and being itself for that entire period. In truth, in the more challenging weather environments, that ratio worsens. The smallest margins of error in terms of drainage or compaction degrees under the surface of a monolithic slab can render a cement driveway useless and broken remarkably faster. This is a truly dispassionate look at a practicality, by the way. It leads to the question regarding a budget seen more over the long term, as opposed to relief of the current driveway-less situation. Or even that facing a homeowner who finds himself replacing his existing cracked and broken monolith once again, hoping against hope this will never recur without really ever knowing why it occurred in the first place.

So why are brick pavers a solution? And, yes, that is where I am going with this. I confess to a bias on the issue, but I think I might just prove the superiority of brick pavers as not only an aesthetic effect, but in also that most important issue of budget. Tune in for more details on this blocky subject. In Part 2, I describe brick pavers in much more detail and I compare them to the other solutions offered in the driveway marketplace. Bring your thinking cap and your eyeballs. Being a bit shy in those area myself, I need the help! I promise this though: I won’t rip you off. This is legit.

New York City is one of my favorite places in the world and it has been a full 20 years since I have visited, This is far too long. Like many, I still keep in touch with some of my old Army chums - not like I should, of course - but 3 of them live there. When I have visited in the past, I always drank deep of seeing old friends and making new ones. But it was the solo time which was nearly as - if not far more - memorable.

For me, the excitement of New York City is in the walking and the teeming sidewalks, the strange bustle which picks you right up with it and carries you along, almost effortlessly. There is a heartbeat which you have no choice but to resonate with in this charming town. It demands it and it energizes you.

My brother took his 14 year old daughter on a very cool daughter and Dad journey to New York, staying with a childhood friend, hard by Central Park. When I told him to take some snaps of the park, he was delighted. He likes looking at this blog where I have semi-immortalized his very front yard!

As you can see, it rained - one of those warm Summer rains. There is Zoe, hair steaming after they got caught out in the 85 degree weather in a quick rain shower. Her picture is under what they called the “steaming rock”. The heat is obvious as the humid air and high temperatures make the rock steam like a hot rock on a fire.

Central Park is a revelation to those who discover it. Wild and oddly quiet, the hum of the city does redound in the air but it is amazingly muted. Frederick Olmstead designed this park as a refuge in what was already a busy burgh. He wanted the size for the dampening effect it would have on the noise and hubub, plus the ecology it would develop being large and surprisingly wild.

But it was other constructions - many of them - that propel the interest here. Like the Parks he developed elsewhere in Louisville which I have also spent time in, Olmstead invited a free reign in his designs, both budgetary and artistic, to some great artisans and designers who added amazing artwork to the Landscape Art in almost all the works he was responsible for. Bridges and garden walls were built in both park systems by fabulous artisans, the best of their crafts. Here are two bridges which indicate better exactly my point:

Central Park is a revelation and a worthwhile visit at any time of the year. New York has always been blessed with energy and the sinew of business and human artistic enterprise. Central Park is a perfect compliment and contrast to New York City’s most amazing energetic style.

Typical of this blog, owing to my usual tendency to take multitudinous pictures ‘in progress’, I am having some trouble finding the final pictures taken of this pool project. I often take pictures for legal and educational reasons, the truth is.  I like proving the work was done appropriately.  It has less to do with suspicious motives or anything else, although in the event of contestations, the record is right there.  I just feel the clients feel better served knowing some of the history put into what they see. It also serves me extremely well in this blog because people can get a much better sense of what actually goes into a landscaping project.  When I tell clients to “Expect Beirut”, lol, I need a reason.  I do indeed mention that landscaping is just about 80% preparation and 20% finishing.  That’s the God’s truth, the fact is.

The picture above has to do for now.  It being wet illustrates the overall look when we finally put a bright sealer on top of the pavers, giving it a permanent “wet look”.

A little more perspective along the side:

When I find (grrrrrrr) the others, I will update this.  It looked fabulous, planted and sealed. I guess you’ll have to take my word for it.  There was a party opening it officially to the neighborhood, friends and family which was a challenge to survive.  I made it and slept over that night, lol.

We had always been around during the construction of the pool,  The pool-makers would call and ask for backfilling, once things became settled in the ground itself.  We paid a lot of attention to the future and the last foot or so of back-filling was devoted to putting in gravel and base material.  With the budget we had, this place will outlast the house by a century or so.  It could well be one of the most compacted surfaces I ever installed. I am positive it is in the 99 percentile of compaction.

So we began installing pavers around the pool.  We attended to drainage issues and found it necessary to install the drain shown protruding in the picture above.  The pavers we used were Belgarde’s “Bergerac” Pavers, an expensive but gorgeously-antiqued model, set in a random pattern.  They were also an additional inch thick!  These big beauties came in at 3 1/4″ thick, providing a huge challenge for not only our cutting apparatii (gas-powered table saw with a diamond blade) but also requiring substantial grinding for the wild number of curves.  Talk about labor intensive!

Obviously, we had other issues, such as a fire pit shown in the bottom picture.  The necessity to hand-shape curving pavers was especially intense when around boulders, as can be seen above.  The irregularities don’t seem so drastic when the boulders first get placed.  But, wow, they get intense when the finishing starts.

I am thinking the project lasted almost 2 months.  There was a lot going on in general - a water feature which was designed to appear to be supply the pool water from the front yard and a 130 foot creek, originating at a waterfall out front.  We tried to make the area behind the falls by the spa appear to be a bridge just to enhance this idea. 

At any rate, it was intense but as we neared completion and began planting, we started to see things coming together nicely.

(click all pictures to enlarge)

This group of nuts is enjoying themselves while their poor hard-working landscapers continue flailing away in the efforts to make them this happy year-round. There were always kids around us during this project and the truth is they made it more fun. Likable and almost always helpful, at worst they did their damage at night after we had left. We knew what we were heading into, however, since most of the guys working with me had kids of their own, as did I. Let me say right now, kids rock. As long as we don’t crush any, they can play along any time. A definite kid-friendly crew there.

This project is stuck back in the Ponderosa Pines along the route between Reno and Lake Tahoe, an upscale neighborhood tucked back into the hills. Relaxed and pretty friendly - with some notable exceptions - the ‘hood was home to bank managers and contractors, architects and doctors who seemingly “arrived” with places like these. At least, that was our purpose as the landscapers - to give a dream home some fleshed-out sensibility. It was a high-budget effort for a contractor who had done very well indeed.

While the above picture shows things upon opening it up - it was the first day of swimming - those below here give a better illustration of what we encountered when the pool work itself was almost complete - done by others - and when we began our own work in more earnest.

We also had an element complicating matters which showed up at the worst time, lol:

Life at 7,000 feet above sea level! It could snow almost any time, particularly in Spring. The fact was, in Fall, you waited until the first one, then went back to town and forgot about the area for 5 months, barring an unseasonable Winter. Summers, gratefully, the weather could be 5-10 degrees cooler than a hot Reno, Nevada where folks were dealing with 100 degree weather. Add the shade and you have the perfect mid year project.

We had helped at various stages to get the the pool underway, including the initial excavations, using a monster excavator or two. This sucker was going to be 11′ deep at the deep end, owing to the extreme possibility that the “Tree House” being erected would get someone diving in from virtually ‘high dive’ climes.

Looking closely, boulders can been seen strewn around the upper edges of the swimming pool. These were not ‘afterthoughts’ whatsoever. They were obviously always in the plan but they reqired more than just your average “Plop a rock in place” effort. These babies are cemented in place to prevent eventual cracking of the pool by weight and settling. Not only that, but we attached substantial angle iron braces to the boulders themselves as a sort of “staking”, to embed them in the native soil. The ground underneath was compacted thoroughly prior even to that. Thus we had the boulders which were penetrated and secured to the thick angle iron bracing, then set in cement. All this was done prior to the acceptance of the soils by the swimming pool contractor upon commencing his own work. Here’s a reasonable picture of one or two of the granite boulders, weighing in at about 5 tons. The big one there was the largest, weighing in at about 5 tons. This is not your every day pebble!

I’ll continue this next time. This, much like the Chinese Garden in Portland, Oregon, remains one of the most challenging and fascinating projects I ever worked on.

I often visit web sites and landscape galleries for the development of my own projects. I get abundant ideas and I have always tried to approach each site with a clear mind, hoping for a gem or two to take into my own designs and projects. Today, I am taking the liberty of shamelessly posting a few of this interesting designer’s pictures, lifted directly from her website. These are not only the designs from the company featured here, but also their installations. Heidi - who I have come to know somewhat via a small and hopefully developing correspondence - comes almost as close as anyone I have yet met on line to the sorts of projects I prefer most. It is not all that often I find someone who reminds me of me, lol. But in Heidi’s work, (and her firm’s, let me hasten to add), I see a similar regard for pleasing clients as well as an obvious urge to do things just a bit differently.

Her Business Site

The picture above illustrates my point. Details such as this can be a hard sell to a homeowner, first. Many don’t really realize the uniqueness they are being provided, bottom line. And, truth be told, some detail such as that above may be small potatoes in the overall scheme. There are certainly larger scale Landscape Architects whose projects in public and commercial centers are truly riveting and outstanding creative examples of the trade. But those, like many of their impressive and unbelievably expensive projects do indeed reflect the possibilities of landscaping itself and are noteworthy for that - by all means - however, making something special for the mid range residential client is what I personally have always prided myself on. Heidi “gets it” in this particular niche and her clients have got to be inordinately pleased.

In short, I like her work and her company’s persona as evidenced by her web site. If I lived where she worked, I would definitely have her come take a look and pick her brain a bit on creative ideas.

Another draw for her site is its navigation. I wish she had put in just a few more examples of their projects, frankly, but I do respect its educational aspects. She explains in adequate detail what factors a landscaper considers in development of grounds and she offers abundant applications, from Japanese concepts to Garden Art.

I am shamelessly pimping Heidi (pardon the reference, Heidi, lol) because I like what she is trying to accomplish. It meets every ideal I have had over the past 35 years, including good relationships with the people who consider contracting her firm. Good stuff, Heidi!