Spring Spectacular

It’s gone a little crazy here. This bizarre early Spring is a month early which is not to say I am crying tears of Rage over it. That would be laughingly inaccurate.  😉

We took a small trip to Bernheim Woods because that’s where one goes to find out what the best things in this world are – and Bernheim delivered. Nor is this to say I did not have a hallucinating great time walking my local ville and even Owensboro, where I spent time with two wonderful people, one my very original old flame the other my most influential adult growing up. I could have easily and happily spent more time with each but I also left each feeling refreshed and soulful. And wanting more.

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The colorful Crabapple grove below is one of Bernheim’s greatest tricks. They tend to mass blooming things in fabulous arrays of sumptuousness for the eyes (and nose!) as the flowering Crabapples below testify.

It was further up the car-directed trails where my Ma and I were most driven to visit – all curious about what the Forest Canopy Walk would offer. The little succulent lime green leaves of Kentucky Spring are just trotting out some muscular leaf activity on these forests of crazily- and widely- mixed species.

The view over the edge goes forever, with beautiful punctuations of subtle colors which you must see to really understand. Great forest scents are out, with both the native Dogwoods and Redbuds pushing blooms like hot dog salesmen in the Manhattan business district.

I absolutely adore the iron work on this forest canopy walk. Simple, safe but still somehow visually arresting, the Bernheim Forest has themselves an absolute feature with this outstanding edifice.

This is my Mother, just before she jumped. Yes, I tried “talking her down” – I mean, I watched Dirty Harry – but she was having too much fun. I’ll probably miss her.

It’s actually a long way down and, no, she didn’t jump. I was just funnin’.

Notice my accent changing?

But it is the distant views that bring home the season like few other images. One can see Winter still has the slightest grip on some dubious trees, a little reluctant to bust out like their neighbors.

Lacy blooms adorn these dense hardwood forests like gorgeous necklaces around the loved ones nearby. Shared in scent, color and texture, the very depth of Nature’s Beauty shows off here in 360 degrees of fulfillment, delicately and yet boldly.

The subtle graces of these stunningly rich Spring forest views reveal themselves to a delighted populace who universally speak of and enjoy these forests with pride and a very real Kentucky wonder.

Almost diabolical in their tactics, planners of this luscious resource obviously take a perverse pride in augmenting these forests views with sneaky Fuschia coloring in their foregrounds, a trick of designing which never fails to absolutely hypnotize the rest of us idiots with a smiling pleasure. Honestly, this view is outrageous. Please enlarge.

Truth is, Mom and I caught more than one mere day’s worth of glory out there. For example, when we came back to town, we tripped over to Audubon Park where various crazy neighborhoods host a Dogwood Festival each year.

I mean, its hard to imagine why!

What’s New?

I’m pretty sure Winter is sometimes as forgetful as I am. I’m knocking on wood as I type this, but honestly, it is plainly deep into March and – I can’t put this any other way – Spring has officially sprung. What was most remarkable about this 2012 edition by far is in the way it sort of settled in back in January. Seriously, I am positive it was the most gentle January and February on record, leading to this glorious pass in which we now find ourselves. If Climate Change means this, then I’m darned if I can find the downside from a strictly Human Comfort perspective. Just like when I loved the standard average paradisaical weather in Santa Cruz, California, I’ve awakened mornings feeling guilty more than once. I mean, what did I do to deserve this gorgeous beauty? Can I repeat this every year?

No, my heart is not the least bit broken. 😉

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Here in beautiful downtown Douglas Hills, the Louisville suburb I live in, we’ve noticed the fresh young buds of local Dogwood trees strutting their stuff on incredibly aromatic Spring mornings and days, giving us not only the fresh scents of Springtime but the blooming promise of the days and weeks ahead.

From such humble and rather grinning beginnings, Spring is formed. It will get spectacular in mere days ahead as the days get warm, the muggy but still pure moisture always so present in the air maintaining a freshness one has to experience to believe.

The local Chinese Pear population, in the person of these ‘Chanticleers’, are always early and this year’s mini-heat wave has inspired not only their standard early riotous profusion but also timed so perfectly with all the other buds and blooms. There is a virginal quality to these lime-green urban forests that always seems to leave us in a certain awe of Nature’s possibilities. One must – absolutely must – regard the designs of some of the planners of these parks, boulevards and yards as just fabulously and totally inspired. Designing for Spring is simply the best.

This is a park a person can sink their eyeballs into!

 

The rich, Fuchsia-colored Redbud trees are another wonder.

Good days in ‘Tha Hood’!   🙂

Moving outwards, there is another “tiny matter” worth discussing.

Basketball. The University of Louisville and the University of Kentucky have both earned their way to college basketball’s Ultimate Tournament – ‘The Final Four’, played this year in New Orleans. The eventual winner of two games is crowned Champion, ruling over the entire amateur basketball world.

For those not familiar with the event, it must be said that it is nearly as big as the Super Bowl or – dare I say – the Kentucky Derby in the terms of American interests.

To give an idea of just how basketball-mad Louisville and the entire state is, take a look at how they invest their entertainment dollars. Below is the inside of a Palace – the Yum! Center in downtown Louisville. Only 22,000 Louisvillians can fit inside.

This is not your Grandad’s basketball building. 😉

Confession here: I am a Louisville fan. Pretty much everyone’s head will explode soon enough in this crazy state over an absolutely Tectonic and sweetly serendipitous occurrence, based on real achievement and a couple of groups of “thoroughbreds” which always satisfy Kentuckian’s senses.

Movin’ On Up In Landscaping – As A Career – Personal Tales

Spring is Springing. It seems a timely moment to deliver some “state of the landscaping career” thoughts, wherein I speak of whether landscaping as a trade is a reasonable career option for anyone who might be curious.

You could do worse, is always my conclusion. 😉

Can Landscaping be a career choice? Is it a good one? I have to confess to have seen both sides of this argument, from the bone-weary returns in the evening to that thankful hot shower and some surcease from the lifting chores of an average landscaping day to the cashing of a very profitable check from a delighted customer.

Landscaping’s finest hour can be upon completion of a project. All the snarls and problems involving solution and plain dogged determination mean a tableau of a front yard which invites some honor and regard for beauty itself. Some people prefer the beginning of projects – I am being serious – the destruction and rendering of some formerly-passable landscape to bare dirt does indeed have a certain appeal. Of course, in another life, they would spend time behind bars. Naturally, I know nothing of these things.  😉

I began landscaping by mowing lawns in Vancouver, British Columbia as a Summer job while attending Vancouver City College. I kept with the company as school commenced, then basically had no choice but to continue the work when I got turned down for a student loan for the semester because I applied late. I stayed with that little company for 8 years, it turned out. I fell in love easily with Vancouver. It has to be the single most scenic town in North America and among those anywhere in the world.

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Vancouver_ BC_ Aerial view

In the 15 years I lived there, not a day went by where I did not appreciate the clean air and the marvelous sense of Nature which surrounds this bustling but beautiful city. But they also had something else to draw my interest – many English people and an overall appreciation of gardens and garden design. This place is a wonder of plenitude and greenery. Things grow at a tremendous rate, taking advantage of the “Pineapple Express”, the warm currents which bring a bit warmer weather to such a Northern clime. And having said that, it’s also what supplies water – in buckets – a near constant rainfall from September until May. It dusts the surrounding mountains with snow, providing an unheard-of ability to be skiing not an hour out of town and totally accessible by public transportation. With the advent of night skiing up on Grouse Mountain, it gives a chance to seem to be teetering over the edge of the world, about to fall down into the big wide open urban landscape below – at day or night. Below is a view from the mountain, where you can eat and watch the sun set, then party.

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During the 15 years I worked there, I went from just mowing lawns and drinking beer at night to actually taking it all seriously – and still drinking beer at night.  😉  The little company had begun as a maintenance-only business then expanded slowly into landscaping construction – with an eye towards more. When the owner died, the wife of the owner and the Hungarian lead man asked me to help out and to move from lawn mowing/maintenance to landscaping. I was curious about it and made the move. It was the beginning of an interesting process where I actually took what I was doing fairly seriously and began studying it more. Now, in maintenance, I had the good fortune of dealing with all sorts of fabulous places – just marvelously designed and teeming with plants I came to know and to maintain. I learned of acidic levels for Rhododendrons and Azalea’s, the Hydrangea story, details and necessities of all the many annuals and I planted bulbs til the cows came home. I learned about pruning and trimming hedges and shaping plants. I had learned about roses and odd things, like Palm Trees, believe it or not, which could carve out a protected existence up there. But with the landscaping, I entered an entirely new phase.

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So I began helping with the bidding and how to acquire work on a commercial level. As we acquired work, I also did it – I mean all of it. My Hungarian friend Alex was a super landscaper and strong as an ox, so it became a labor of love in many ways because I liked him and vice versa. He told me stories of WW2 and being a POW in Russia, then serving in the Hungarian Army later and leaving in 1956 with the Russian Invasion there. Loquacious and quite satisfied with where he had landed in life itself, Alex and the business used me as a front man for projects owing to his broken English. I thus met people. I also recall actually negotiating my first contract for the business. Sitting in front of someone who wanted to cut down the price – in spite of our being low bidder! – I carved out a face-saving bit of the project and made it look as though he had saved his business some money. It was pretty cool and I recall nervously sitting and waiting for his assent. A bolt of sheer electric shock went right up my spine when he said he thought it was a terrific solution.

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I got better, too. I toiled with Cotswold Landscaping like this for another 3 years then I got edgy and decided to go out on my own. This is actually the point of the entire thread, by the way  😉 . With a partner and no money, one Spring I decided to give a try to running our own business. We had his Mom – he was local – cosign for a truck and we went from there. A local dentist was an old client who adored John – my partner – and he gave us a monster hedge to trim. This was a $500 project – enough to buy a weed eater and some more tools. Essentially, everything we owned we bought with money we earned. The business expanded with maintenance contracts and from the usual Spring Rush where we dropped small ads at doorsteps and got enough responses to continue on. By the second year, we began acquiring landscaping projects – which was all my purview.

Eventually – actually that year – we split up and the landscaping business became something entirely new and bigger and John stayed with maintenance. As the years have passed, it became yet other landscaping businesses with varying success, and in different locations. What did occur with me was a meeting of my own ambition with constant challenges to learn more and to not only appear competent but to actually be competent at installing superb landscapes. It also sent me into a designing frenzy which I will deal with in another post.

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My point in all this is to illustrate the path. By using myself as an example, this is somewhat typical of how landscape businesses form. Most landscape businesses we see out there began similarly. I know this because I have obviously been close to it all. Other start-ups have included everything from people who knew nothing about the trade but whose families or who themselves were once General Contractors who saw a need and stepped in by hiring appropriate personnel. (In fact, one of the more successful businesses I know of began this way). Other routes I have seen are people with degrees in either horticulture, landscape architecture and similar programs – even AA degrees from Junior Colleges – and who entered the market with a very conscious plan based on marketing and a sensible approach to business per se. These fortunate few gained from programs with the virtue of basic economics courses and which, Lord knows, I wish I had gone for.

The love of the field finishes a poor second to all sorts of concerns when businesses form. But that same love of the trade which generated one’s interest to begin with makes one heck of a marketable person, at the same time. Landscapers all search for good and knowledgeable people. Indeed, these are those business’s primary asset. A good foreman can make good money when he lands in the right place.

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People underneath me have also gone on to some success beginning businesses. No one is going to stop ambition. The primary elements to it all often depend on knowledge and a hell of a lot of moxie. But the more primary issue by far is in getting lucky with timing. Recessions peel off landscape businesses like nothing. I have sweated through 3 now and each one of them left either me or hordes of others languishing in search of the big market they once saw laid out like a Golden Road in front of them. If there was ever any advice I would supply an aspirant who wished to begin his own landscaping business, it would be to take full advantage of any marketplace which was responsive and then to solidify all that as soon as possible and as often as possible. It pays to clear debt yearly, if possible. It pays even more to save. Investment is one thing but saving for a rainy day means saving for a bunch of rainy days. When the market fails, it takes years, not weeks for it to rebound.

But this is the case in all businesses as well. I just know landscaping, personally.

A Winter look at a landscape/waterfall in Reno:

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Baseball is Life – Just Sayin’

Since I am in the beginning stages of my own writing project dealing with a central figure in my life and who was also a central figure in so many other lives, it has made me reflect on the sport of baseball itself. I have found a love of the sport among the more permanent diversions of my entire life – over the entire length of it, from cradle to grave, as it were. I recall my gracious older brother and sister allowing me to take a swing for the very first time as a baseball-playing youngster, over at Austin Pryor’s front yard on Shelbyville Road at the age of around 8. It was a line drive down the third base line.

From that point on, throughout a career that began in Little League in St. Matthews, Kentucky, thence to Bowling Green and finally Owensboro, my early years with the game were a riotous pageant. I have always considered my “career” to pretty much consist of my experiences in high school. I played a disappointing period of Div 1 baseball for almost a year at Murray State University, then went 18 more years without seeing one pitch, swinging a bat or even making a throw. Like some of my generation, I dropped sports as a participatory enterprise in spite of being asked to play now and then. I “moved on”.

It was in Santa Cruz in 1986 when my good friend from Owensboro, Steve Bare, asked me if I wanted to play on a slow pitch softball team. The local radical veterans who I very much liked were looking to form a team. My first question was: “So, do we try to win?”

Assured this was the case, I joined that team and – 18 years after hanging up the spikes and mitt – I found myself playing shortstop in a recreational slow pitch softball league. It was an ironic return to a first love and I subsequently proved that by eventually, year by year, upping my participation to playing tournaments on weekends and joining one or two other regular season teams. Nor did I stop.

In 2007 I played over 200 ball games. There were a few years where I must have played 300 games. I’ve joined forces with Homicide Detectives, Iraq War vets due to get shipped back (messing with our lineups), females, ex NFL players and a business partner in order to fully explore the competitive spirit together. It was always a labor of true love.

There are ample souls who despair over baseball’s “pace”. They feel it is somehow too slow for their tastes. I often wonder if these same people would enjoy golf played with Jet Ski radicalism, jetting quickly to the next shot and getting it all dealt with in half an hour – replays later on Sportscenter – (lasting an hour.)

Having played both football and basketball at a reasonably high level, I have encountered the pluses and minuses of these sports as well. A fine game for mesomorphs, football is a semi-lethal contest of weight and strength with a ferocity one has to experience to truly understand. I am quite sure my list of concussions is longer than what it might appear to be. You can get absolutely destroyed by the full force of an automobile crash and never even have seen where the damage came from. You can also not know you don’t know what bell got rung until you wake up on your feet, later, sometimes even on the field during play. As a study in human consciousness, football – the game – is not reliable because consciousness becomes literally variably memorable. Then, of course, there are the broken bones. I had about 3-4 broken bones, playing football.

Basketball is another story altogether. Frankly, when the players start rolling out who are above 6′ 6″ tall, it’s time to watch and not participate. My basketball career ended as a junior in high school when I found myself competing with eventual NBA player Butch Beard for a rebound under our basket during a high school game against his team of returning State Champions. As I “went up” for the ball, I swore I saw myself looking at Butch’s knees. Not his waist – his knees. We’re saying here that Butch could grab balls 7 feet more off the ground than I could. It was an epiphany. I also never went back out for the high school team.

But baseball – now baseball lets a 5′ 4″ shortstop like Chris Cates make his current way all the way up to the AA pro level. The best pitcher in baseball, Tim Lincecum, weighs around 175 pounds and the ball absolutely explodes out of his hands. Near-normal men play baseball!! What’s more, they are the best in the world at the sport. Like Soccer, baseball attracts athletes who are far nearer “normal” in size, although there are exceptions.

Then there is the pageant of the hit ball. Once a ball is hit, all 9 defensive positions in baseball are swinging into a choreography dependent on offensive players on base. Every single hit ball demands 9 defenders move in predictable unison to their various assignments. Every percentage is accounted for from bad throws to intuitive throws made to prevent advancement. The sudden bursts of activity in baseball accompany a luring sense of lassitude while people get comfortable watching the pitcher and catcher play catch. Suddenly, it’s on.

Baseball is played during the best time of year – Spring and Summer. Parents find time to watch their kids play, the kids learn to work hard to get better – I mean, there’s no real downside. The practice of any sport is the secret towards improving and advancing. It yields children who grow into adults understanding the work-ethic and what it brings as rewards, the true secret of athletic success.

Kids have no problem loving baseball. Like the requirements of the French language, one plays and corresponds better with a something one loves. The gaps between plays are numerous and sometimes boring to everyone. It is at these times that the game sometimes shows its greatest gift. I have heard jokes in a baseball dugout which stayed with me for life, lol.

I celebrate baseball more as time goes along. Recently, I have been attending University of Louisville’s baseball games. The current college game has advanced to a near equivalent of AA Pro Ball – with the best coaches in America opting to stay at the University level where tenure and longevity apply so much more than the shifting alliances of the professional game. There is more teaching going on and kids are forced to either sign pro after high school or else endure a minimum of 3 years at school before their next draft availability.

It has made for an exceptionally fascinating improvement in the game at that level. I have to believe it also raises the game as a sport since so many guys come into the game with more college behind them, where emotions and rivalries were rife with real emotional character and games played for such things as pride and loyalty. I also believe many of the coaches are more patient and plain better than a string of motivated or under motivated pro coaches.

So I’m enjoying the game as much if not more than ever before.

“Kill the ump!!”