I am adding pictures from photographs taken through the years, having recently recovered a stash of them, sent by my brother in Portland. They aren’t in this batch – I sure fooled you guys! – but they will come soon enough. I am delighted, but it’s a lot of work and I suddenly have become busy with various other different things, including actual work.
But I have this immense stash of pictures I want to do something with and I figured, what the heck – I’ll just post a bunch of them and arrange them loosely around themes which occasionally bear scrutiny – in particular the “Side Yard” issue, budgets and salvaging a landscape in total. Some are from projects, others from my travels both locally and in Portland and Reno, in particular Springtime shots from one of my very favorite Rhododendron Groves, Crystal Springs, in Portland. Without further ado -
First a look at a freshly-planted 4 month old project in Reno – front yard view. This shows the effort at bringing down lawn sizes to more manageable and less-water-consumptive size. The big leafed plant in the foreground is a gorgeous red-blooming giant Hibiscus.
(Click all images to enlarge)
Narrow Side Yard Alert!!
These following pictures answer a question: “What the heck do we do with these narrow pieces alongside the home?”
It’s actually a reasonable question and one that I eventually began taking a particular delight in. The fact is – a lot! The picture below features an arbor constructed by Steve, the homeowner and a crackerjack carpenter which is seen as an added gorgeous extension of the rear yard itself. But what’s under the arbor in quite lengthy, drawn-out fashion is a long narrow patch of Earth now displaying not a large number of much of anything - about 5 small Aspen trees, a Spruce and a few shrubs, all alongside a pathway.
At the end of the path, we find this view, which very much satisfied Steve’s wife, Mary, who worked away in her office, just mere feet away online, with her window open, gratefully listening to the spattering of water off the top of this lanky but space-clearing bubble rock. (pardon the hose, )
The point of this small exercise is that it does not take much at all to give yourself a present of a nice-looking side yard, if you are patient. And, the fact is, ways can be found to very much enjoy the area, surprising guests as well as yourself with simple beauty and – sometimes – some gorgeous blooms and foliage. Such strange transformations can lead one to preferring these areas to all the others, in fact. Go figure!
Even if the area is used as a repository for chemicals, compost bundles, sheds or whatever supposed nightmare one has in store for it, this does not mean it is either non functional or destined to be one nice-looking doggone area. Salvaging a side yard is easy and cool. A few plants, a little foresight, Vi-ola!
I have a better picture than this of this particular, very spare-looking side yard but I can’t find it currently. So this one will have to do. This is actually something of a favorite of mine, believe it or not. Needless to say, this was almost immediately after it was laid in. Since that time, much plant growth has occurred.
Yet another side yard alert -
This, of course, is a picture of a dog. The dog’s name is “Pyro”, if you can imagine. He is waiting for someone to help him eat and destroy that poor basketball, in no set order. Actually, his work seems half done already. Don’t you love the more senseless blogs?
Moving along, now – rapidly and apologetically – (not really, Pyro is a great and loyal dog – he just likes killing basketballs. I mean who among us is perfect? Everyone I know has at least one vice. Heck, I know a guy with dozens!)
Anyways, let’s visit the North West! This here picture is some ferns.
This here picture is some more ferns and a creek.
So?………. “What,” you are asking, “is this fern garden dealie?”
Well, if you look at the next picture, that “fern garden” sits below – in the shadow of – this shrub (or should I say, “this large cluster of shrubs”):
These are big plants is what.
Viburnum Mariesii (Doublefile Viburnum) has always been a big favorite of mine. The blooms resemble the more exotic Hydrangea’s. Here is a cool sort of 2-3 picture time lapse of some blooms:
And here they are, “pruned for effect”:
Other wonders - My daughter, her Peace Sign T shirt and her cousin, the gorgeous Zoe!
A model home we prettied up, including this little water feature and cement bridge.
Some Cherry Blossoms
A few more
The Willamette River in Portland
Want some wheat? Fill ‘er up!
I could go on.
Here is what is affectionately known in Louisville, Kentucky as “The Bucket”. Unfortunate naming rights belong to Yum! Foods, who paid $13 million to plaster their name on this gorgeous and unbelievable arena, seating 22,000 for basketball. But UL fans have adapted well, including a student section at ball games who wear Kentucky Fried Chicken buckets on their heads and who call themselves – imagine! – The Bucketheads!
It sits interestingly in the skyline, with this ‘under coinstruction’ view taken from a spot on the River Walk, a gorgeous park which runs alongside the Ohio River.
Joe Zawinul has long been my most under appreciated musician of my lifetime. Then again, I could be wrong. He is strong in those who loved his work. As I have mentioned elsewhere, he came to the U.S. to go to school to study music, whereupon he was told he actually didn’t need school. Cannonball Adderly agreed. So did Miles Davis.
From there, his path through the world of music included establishing the insanely good jazz band, Weather Report – and a new type of sound and music. Later work with his own bands merely cemented his status as one of the giants in modern music. He played a World Music which was really that.
Here a famous international conductor takes his music, a few of his band mates and performs a juicy rendition of one of my favorite tunes: “Tower of Silence”.
Since I’m going so strong, here’s an added tune from Anoushka Shankar, with an Irish accompaniment – also interestingly orchestral!
This is another recirculated post which I think stands another glimpse. Having recently rediscovered the advantages of the newer types fire breathing torches which can warm and subsequently loosen frozen sand and make it malleable enough to re-install pavers, my respect for innovations and machinery reaches a yet higher level.
Ah, now here is a favorite topic! My very favorite!
Innovations in landscape construction technology have brought about an entire industry’s flowering. Say what you will about gorgeous designs configured with wondernew computer programs, all splashy and easy to read, forced on poor landscapers by Draconian architects whose tolerance for ignorance is often quite small. Personalities can be nearly predictable. Ungrateful bastids. Who do they believe paved the way for such exotic things?
I’m mostly kidding, but I often like to ‘pick back’. It’s a fault. Let’s just call it a cheap form of revenge and leave it there. I’m good with that. I’ve met some unbelievably fascinating LA’s, so I’m being a hard case with cause. And some humor. Harry Haggard, are you listening?
Those “on the ground” know. This is not especially cast out because I have some bone to pick with anyone in the industry whatsoever, from designer to client. In the end, many are those in the Landscape Architecture field who appreciate modern innovations and what they can accomplish. My point is this – the advent of field innovations in figuring things out – on the installation end – has lowered prices and has made what was formerly impossible, far more possible. Indeed, I am convinced these innovations have opened doors which had no dream of access prior to their discovery.
Here, for example, from a video from a business I have worked around for years, from Portland to Seattle to Reno – and especially Ren0 – Parsons Rock Walls – is what is possible. Note the machine that does pretty much 100% of the work, with its knuckling fittings and how it moves a virtual 360 degrees while carrying 6,000 pound boulders. These guys actually do perform great work, by the way. Their legacy is all over the cities mentioned – extremely hard to miss. The clip is long and it is a bit of pimping for them, but it gets interesting, machine-wise. Which is the point.
These innovations in hydraulic coupling and rotating technology have lowered the price of wall-building astoundingly and – for sure – made even their very usage far more attainable.
We once had the front yards of 45 homes to landscape in northern British Columbia. It was going to require adding about 1,500 yards of soil, owing to the entirety of the existing land being Glacial Schist. We owned a back hoe with a rear “dipper” or bucket. But, lordy, how to level it all? Since the housing project was contracted by the Canadian National Rail Company and coming as it was on rail cars, stopped to tilt and dump next to our homes, we had a few advantages. We put our heads together with a welder friend and here’s about the closest proximity to what we arrived at:
Except ours was 6″ x 6″ bar, 16 feet wide (!) and had small cylindrical and rounded 1″ spikes on the bottom at 4 inch intervals to stir the soil as it graded. And no bucket – we adapted it so that it would attach directly to the boom itself. (Recent innovations, by the way, in “knuckling”, like above, provide an even more appealing rotating possibility, now up to a full 360 degrees.)
Other innovations just fly off the top of one’s head:
Sod Cutters – now 4 wheel drive and no longer those precarious machines which were incredibly heavy and which broke backs from those trying to steer them over uneven ground.
Laser technology now acquaints us with construction levels which can be operated by one person. To try and locate a half inch increment in a 100′ long plane can be done by pushing a button and walking to hold up a stick which returns the signal and beeps solidly when level. So easy a Cave Man can do it! These same lasers are now attached to graders and informed automatically when to gouge or fill to make a perfect plane. Don’t tell anyone, but modern exhibitions have unmanned graders and even bulldozers producing perfect earth work with the help of lasers.
Placing brick pavers has become a bizarre bag of tricks. At the Hong Kong airport, whose runways are entirely composed of brick pavers – and we are talking square miles and hectares – the machine of choice looked like this:
This one takes an entire layer of bricks, holds them together nice and tightly, and lays them down, approximately 50 at a time. Imagine the savings and also imagine the new possibilities implicit in being able to attack huge tracts in mere days instead of months.
The scale of landscaping is somewhere substantially smaller than, say, road building. Yet so many of the same principles apply. Increasing innovations made by sharp in-the-field installers have made steady increments in lessening prices and creating opportunities for newer waves in design. Water pumps alone have virtually revolutionized “pondless” waterfall systems and the newer and perhaps most interesting take-off – Bubble Rocks. The newer pumps’ durability is frankly off the charts.
Indeed, one of the most thrilling developments in landscaping – at least concerning “Hardscapes” – concerns the development of better and more versatile Diamond Blades and edges. The afore-mentioned “Bubble Rocks” are all bored by cylindrical plungers who bore their ways downward through fascinating and gorgeous stones and which allows water to be pumped up through them. For any aficionado of the real color of rock – this is a decided thrill.
My personal favorite machines are fairly obvious ones. In no hierarchy whatsoever, I absolutely adore the skid steer (or Bobcat as has become a near-common name) machine. I have loaded and carried 10,000 yards of soil on one job alone with one of these. Here’s one at work without me in the cab – a rare occurrence.
Secondly, the Excavator – and in particular the modern miniature – the Mini Excavator – are both shown in this picture where they played an irreplaceable role -
The world of machines has reduced the time it takes to make a landscape from the dirt up. Having said that, it has also enabled newer ideas to emerge from a strictly designing aspect. This synergy is essential in understanding why I feel Landscaping as an art is entering – or has entered over the last 20 years – a completely new flowering of possibility and of artistic expression.
From new innovations in lighting and transformer technology, pioneered by my good friends at Unique Lighting (who, I might add also developed their own techniques from field work and who were curious enough to apply this knowledge to actual artistic style) -
To the swimming pool-makers, who incorporate paving into the overall ambiance by utilizing the newest breed of modern adhesives and waterproofing-
All these things combine to make this world even fuller with wonders and which represent the artisitic and craftsmanship achievements and potentials of a fascinating combination of talent, dedicated to a principle of improving our lives.
This stunning and creative photographic capture is among a series of wallpaper pictures from this website: FantasyArtDesign. Photography may be the art form which has most enhanced the appreciation of water in terms of possibility and incredibly exotic representation……… But, then, photography is passive. It needs subjects to do its work. As a partner in such stuff, you are reading the blog of one of the most satisfied appreciators of photography in history.
But this is only tangentially a photographic blog. Landscaping and the range of possibilities in design and implementation is what this blog and what I am about. And today, I want the whole enchilada – let’s visit water and all the wondrous edifices and constructions which humans have made to celebrate our relationship with this vital and helpful element.
The work of water is fascinating. We see modern fountains which seem utterly other-worldy and which fascinate us beyond measure. Sometimes even huge, gigantic constructions comprising computer generated pumps and jets which throw coordinated spouts of water into hitherto-unheard of heights such as this monster in Jeddah, Saudi Arabia referred to as the world’s tallest fountain – shooting water 1,024 feet above the Red Sea.
Or the famous works of kinetic water sculpture such as those made so famous at the Las Vegas Bellagio, of course:
Barcelona, Spain finishes second to no one with their miraculous fountain, so appropriately named “The Magic Fountain of Montjuic”.
Enough Of Fountains
Let’s visit a couple of other water wonders artists have tossed together out of those creative minds over centuries of washing, swimming, boating and drinking the stuff.
The painting below was constructed by a lady with the absolutely appropriate name, April Waters. It can be resourced here, at the Oregon State University Agriculture Art Gallery.
What’s most unique to me about this particular painting is its utter realistic depiction of Winter on the American North West – complete with the deluges courtesy of the Pineapple Express’s warm ocean current and the plenty of weather it brings – the (cough, cough)……….AMAZING AND OFTEN DEPRESSING AMOUNT OF RAIN.
Other visual artists have become far more famous than April throughout history for their own representations of the liquid of life. Among my favorites is this gorgeous Chinese painting of a leaping carp, an ancient symbol of wealth. The artist is the contemporary Chinese artist Zhou Wen Xi (周文熙)
Since running water in Chinese symbolism also represents money in its ephemeral forms, I’m hoping this carp visits my house down the Ohio River and stays a while. I’ve always been a carp fan!
Speaking of which, here is some material art composed of animated substance, muscle and even a modicum of brain power who also enjoys the life afloat as well as beneath the currents and flows:
We should also take a moment to reflect at the vocal expressions regarding water. We sometimes do indeed acquaint ourselves with what water brings as our borderline single most precious resource. These people celebrate water in song -
And now for something completely different!
Not really. Here’s an interesting construction of a waterfall which I suspect would be really tough to reconstruct.
I have been a fan if the Bulgarian Women’s Choir forever since they first arrived on our shores back in the late ’70′s. Forgive for extending this massive blog post this far but I am thinking you might enjoy the journey even if you have to pick it back up later.
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