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Do we need premium landscape maintenance services for our property? 

If you have invested in a landscape design that includes specialty plantings, hardscaping, and other personalized design elements – yes. 

Yes, because you will want to protect your investment. To keep your outdoor spaces attractive, healthy, and vibrant, hiring a company whose personnel possess a high level of expertise in design and horticulture is imperative.

How do you identify the right type of landscape maintenance company to take on the task? What should you look for? That’s a tough question because what you don’t see makes all the difference in what you do see.

Exceptional Landscape Maintenance Services Produce Exceptional Gardens

You can’t see the detailed workmanship and horticultural expertise that goes into top-notch landscape maintenance services.  But you can see the results of the refined workmanship involved. 

Look for the best garden on your street. Most likely it’s the one that is getting the personalized attention it needs to develop its maximum potential.

Implementing a personalized landscape maintenance plan makes the difference between a garden that flourishes in all seasons and one that doesn’t live up to its potential. 

This is how Surrounds President Barry Schneider describes top-level landscape maintenance in action:

“The moment one of our foremen steps onto the property they are scanning the landscape. The foremen are looking for the right green color, for blooms and buds that are full and healthy. If something doesn’t look right, they will check for insects and diseases. They will check to see if there is too much moisture in the soil or not enough.”

A specialty landscape crew isn’t just there to do a maintenance task and leave. They want to be sure the plants are happy. And if not, they will do something about it.

Beyond Basic “Mow, Blow & Go”

For basic yard maintenance, you have many good choices and the stakes are low if you choose poorly. Many Northern Virginia landscaping contractors reliably provide mowing, trimming, and weeding services.

However, a more complex landscape will likely include water features, irrigation, lighting systems, and a variety of perennial plants. Your garden care crew must fully understand how to identify perennials because they can easily be mistaken for weeds during spring clean-ups by an unskilled landscape crew.

A premium landscape maintenance services plan will provide comprehensive services that include holistic plant care and turf care, as well as mechanical and electrical systems inspections.

Proactive Garden Care Services

Here’s an example of how proactive garden care can benefit: During a service visit, a Surrounds foreman noticed something odd about a cluster of apricot drift roses. They were covered with buds—but the plants had poor color and none of the buds had bloomed. They discovered a disease in the rose plant that was taking energy away from the buds. So they treated the roses. A week later they were flourishing. They corrected the problem before the homeowner even noticed it.

This example also demonstrates the benefit of having landscape maintenance experts who know what they are looking at. Surrounds garden managers are Landscape Industry Certified or have a College degree in horticulture—or both. This high standard of care, diagnosis, and treatment is built into the monthly landscape maintenance contract.

Choosing a Landscape Maintenance Provider

It’s important to ask good questions before signing a contract for landscape maintenance services. If your property needs more than basic mowing and trimming you will want to know:

1. Who will be in charge of my account?
   Communication should be easy. One point of contact is best. That’s why Surrounds has combined the roles of account manager and site foreman. This eliminates a layer of separation between the client and the company.
2. Will the same crew come to my property on each visit?
   Yes is the answer you’ll want to hear. A dedicated crew “learns” your property and will always take care of it exactly as you wish. They will know how it should look when it is at its best; and will notice if something is amiss.
3. What services will be performed at each visit?
   Your service contract should list all details, exceptions, and pricing. In addition, you should request a written report after each service visit. The report should list tasks completed and observations about the condition of plants and garden systems.
4. What about pesticide and insecticide use?
   All plants should be inspected on each visit and treated if necessary. Surrounds employs an “integrated pest management” (IPM) system. That is, we spot-treat individual plants or defined areas rather than blanket the property. We do only what is necessary based on observation and horticultural expertise.
5. Will irrigation systems be inspected on each visit?
   The answer should be yes. Regular inspections ensure that your turf and plants are getting the correct amount of moisture throughout the growing season as weather conditions change.

Premium Landscape Maintenance Services for Gardens Large and Small

Bad things happen to gardens all the time. There are soil issues, changing moisture conditions, insect infestations, and disease. These issues could damage or even kill beautiful trees and plants without regular expert inspection.

In addition to the “living” part of your landscape, there may be water features, lighting and audio systems, and hardscape maintenance. There is a great benefit to having one company manage all aspects of your landscape. 

Whether large or small in size, investing in premium landscape maintenance services is worth it to the person who wants to get all the beauty and value out of their property. It’s for the person who truly enjoys a healthy, thriving outdoor environment. A well-maintained garden is a pleasure and worth the investment because it enriches your life.

Schedule a consultation with one of our garden managers to discuss how Surrounds can bring out the best in your landscape and gardens.

To prepare yourself for that discussion, consider downloading our eBook: Choosing the Right Kind of Landscape Maintenance Firm. It is full of valuable information to help you understand the fundamental differences between landscape maintenance companies.

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More than simply backdrops for cinematic action, landscapes carry narrative and visual weight.

By Martin Hogue, ASLA

Landscape representation has enjoyed a long and significant history in the fine arts, but it remains somewhat less explored in cinema—a medium for which it seems uniquely suited. Movies are shot on location all the time, of course, but more often than not, these settings merely constitute backdrops for cinematic action. Bernard Lassus’s observation that “Landscape is a cultural reading that renews the concrete space that surrounds us” suggests broad latitude in interpreting the meaning of the term beyond the usual references to the quiet, pastoral idyll. Whether real or fabricated as movie sets or through the guise of special effects, we are invited to consider the tantalizing range of means by which filmmakers are able to contrive such “concrete spaces” as significant visual and narrative features, which is to say, as landscapes in their own right.

The Title Is the Place

Sunset Boulevard (dir. Billy Wilder); Niagara (dir. Henry Hathaway); Paris, Texas (dir. Wim Wenders): As we walk past the promotional posters framing the entrance of the movie theater or click on one of the many options on streaming platforms, a movie’s title may offer the first landscape clue that an audience will encounter, and a potentially suggestive one. This handful of words beckons us in by helping to form a mental image of the world inside the film. Frederick Wiseman, whose idiosyncratic titles include Canal Zone (1977), Central Park (1989), Belfast, Maine (1999), In Jackson Heights (2015), and Monrovia, Indiana (2018), is deeply interested in exploring the physical environments and the activities, cultures, and beliefs of the people who populate them. Similarly, for RaMell Ross, who fears that “the ethics and values of [documentary filmmaking] are unsuited to deal with the complexity of Blackness,” the extraordinary film Hale County This Morning, This Evening (2018) helps the director “question the known and easy constructions of identity and place,” which begins with the title itself.

Landscape as Plot

Films can be driven by narratives explicitly focused on a range of landscape themes. The plot of Jean Renoir’s 1936 short film Une Partie de Campagne (A Day in the Country) concerns a Parisian family that escapes the confines of the city for a countryside picnic. Une Partie de Campagne subverts urban and rural stereotypes, as the Parisian patriarch and his future son-in-law are duped by two locals, who lead the men to a bad fishing spot to seduce their wife and fiancée, respectively.

There are few better examples of this genre than Terrence Malick’s 1978 film Days of Heaven. Set on an expansive North Texas wheat farm (shot near Lethbridge in Alberta, Canada), the film opens with the arrival of seasonal laborers assisting on a late-summer harvest and ends dramatically one year later. The fields surrounding the farmer’s mansion emerge as the film’s most dynamic narrative and visual feature—rich and plentiful at one moment, barren and covered in snow the next, born anew the following spring. Malick and director of photography Néstor Almendros shot most of the film during the “golden hour,” the time around sunrise and sunset, and the beautiful fields sharply contrast with the harsh economic calculations that govern the farm.

The Directors’ Viewshed

Key characters can stand in as proxies for directors. If a film constitutes a documentary record of a specific place, the actors can find themselves deeply engaged in the process of bearing witness. Examples include Peter Greenaway’s 1982 film The Draughtsman’s Contract, in which an artist is commissioned to execute a series of renderings of a 17th-century British estate; Jan de Bont’s 1996 blockbuster film Twister, which concerns a team of scientists chasing tornadoes; 5 Broken Cameras, Emad Burnat and Guy Davidi’s 2011 film in which Burnat documents the Israeli occupation of lands around the village of Bil’in in the West Bank; and Wes Anderson’s 2023 film Asteroid City, an ensemble comedy featuring several director-like figures, including a photojournalist, several scientists, a land speculator, a playwright, and a theatrical director.

In each of these examples, the different technologies (from the low-tech viewfinder to scientific probes and even a domed observatory) used by the films’ central characters reference the tools of the movie trade. Greenaway authored the 12 sketches in The Draughtsman’s Contract and ensured that the aspect ratio of his camera was the same as the instrument used by the draftsman for observation, thereby laying claim to two forms of landscape representation and setting a direct parallel between the documentary records yielded within the films and the films themselves.

Landscape Types and Genres 

The western and its modern descendant, the road movie, are perhaps the genres most closely associated with landscape films. Director John Ford became so enamored with Monument Valley, Arizona, when he shot the 1939 film Stagecoach that he returned to the area to shoot six additional westerns over the next 25 years. The valley’s red sandstone buttes rise as Ford’s archetypal image of the frontier in much the same way that John Wayne stands as the director’s unflappable yet sometimes flawed protagonist in several of these films.

For all their extraordinary landscape imagery, Ford’s westerns display a lack of cultural sensibility that was common during that period. The director employed racial stereotypes and often relied on Hispanic actors to portray local Indigenous characters, even though Monument Valley constitutes a sacred site for the Navajo Nation. Contemporary directors have fashioned more nuanced interpretations of western storylines, shooting locations, and characters. Notable examples include Kelly Reichardt, whose film Meek’s Cutoff (2010) depicts women’s experience of the Oregon Trail, as well as Chloé Zhao’s Nomadland (2020).

Gradients of Time and Space

By the time director Michelangelo Antonioni set out to shoot his classic landscape road film L’Avventura (1960), Technicolor had been widely available for decades and featured in more than half of all motion pictures. For Antonioni, the use of black-and-white film for L’Avventura was a choice that didn’t simply equate to atmospheric properties in the landscape (lighting, texture, mood with color) in the same way that characterizes Malick’s films; rather, this creative decision helped the director convey the existential bleakness and gloom experienced by his characters.

The character of Sandro is an architect who has long ago lost his creative drive. Sandro’s verbal observations—his color commentary, so to speak—constitute a useful trope to channel the director’s long-standing interest in architecture; when Sandro and Monica Vitti’s character, Claudia, arrive in a deserted modernist town built during the Mussolini regime, Sandro observes, “I wonder why they built it all?” Later, in front of the 17th-century Baroque Piazza Municipio in Noto, Sicily, he remarks, “How long do [modern buildings] last? Ten, twenty years at the most, and then?” In saying so, Sandro might as well be referring to any one of the three romantic liaisons he has pursued throughout L’Avventura. As Sandro and Claudia, facing an uncertain future together, stand next to one another in the film’s penultimate scene, Antonioni deploys a split screen that renders the lack of color in L’Avventura at its most effective. On the right, in the near foreground, stands the blank stone facade of a building that partially obstructs our prospect of the landscape beyond (Is this the end of the road for Claudia and Sandro?); on the left, far in the distance, stands Mount Etna, a volcano that is still prone to periodic eruptions (Is the fire of their love gone?!). Antonioni’s expert use of black-and-white film helps flatten the geological, architectural, and even romantic histories unfolding across this Italian landscape (2.5 million years for Etna, the night before for Sandro) with respect to both space and time.

Antonioni was himself influenced by 1940s neorealist directors Vittorio de Sica (Bicycle Thieves, 1948) and Jules Dassin (Naked City, 1948), for whom cities—Rome and New York, respectively—constituted powerful cinematic muses. Mathieu Kassovitz’s La Haine (1995), set in Paris and its exurbs, and Alfonso Cuarón’s Roma (2018), set in Mexico City, are contemporary films that build on this tradition of blending fiction with the realistic, documentary sensibility conveyed by the use of black and white.

Enhanced or Imagined Landscapes

Is there space in this discussion to extend Bernard Lassus’s interpretation of “concrete spaces” to cities and landscapes that are contrived as movie sets? Are such cinematic places any less real? Interesting examples of towns and cities built as movie sets include the abstract and hallucinatory staging of a small German village in Robert Wiene’s classic horror film The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari (1920) and the apartment and town house cityscape of Alfred Hitchcock’s Rear Window (1954), at the time the largest film set ever designed. The use of landscape sets can also comprise futuristic visions of places that have yet to take shape, such as in Fritz Lang’s Metropolis (1927), Jacques Tati’s Playtime (1967), or Luc Besson’s The Fifth Element (1997), or more recently Ryan Coogler’s Black Panther (2018) and Greta Gerwig’s Barbie (2023).

Peter Weir’s 1998 film The Truman Show inverts the paradigm in which film may function as a world all unto its own. Largely shot in the very real New Urbanist community of Seaside in Florida, the film’s conceit revolves around the fictional town of Seahaven, which functions as a set where the main character has lived his entire life in the longest-running reality television show ever staged. From the outset, the audience is made complicit by being treated to a series of opening credits—not for the film The Truman Show, but for a television program inside the film, also titled The Truman Show.

In this production—now in its 30th year, as we learn—Truman’s family, friends, neighbors, his job, as well as the buildings, the roads, and even the beach he frequents, are staged for the main character and the audience. Christof, the show’s creative director, is portrayed as acting in a godlike manner: When Truman is feared to have escaped the set in the middle of the night, Christof orders the staff to “Cue the sun!” so that he can be found. While Truman is ultimately able to escape through the exit door at the edge of the set, Weir’s comedy offers a dark parable of the engineered landscapes constructed by humans in the age of the Anthropocene, as well as of our inescapable place within it. As we make for the movie theater door with the smell of popcorn on our fingers and glimpse a drone mysteriously navigating the evening New Jersey sky, the line between fact and fiction in the world we inhabit is all around us.

Martin Hogue, ASLA, is an architect and associate professor in the Department of Landscape Architecture at Cornell University, where he teaches design studios and seminars on film and place.

The post When Landscapes Become Cinematic Characters first appeared on Landscape Architecture Magazine.

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By Justin Parscher

By my count, it has been more than a decade since there’s been any well-defined debate over style and form in landscape architecture. That last argument, between the New Urbanists and Landscape Urbanists, came to a head with the publication of Andrés Duany and Emily Talen’s 2013 Landscape Urbanism and Its Discontents, a collection of parting shots from the New Urbanists at their Ivy League rivals. The Landscape Urbanist contingent returned the favor by largely ignoring the attack, and soon after collapsed under its own weight. While that battle was fought over urbanisms specifically, it flowed back more generally into the big questions of how landscape should appear: hard or soft, conventional or unprecedented. Should the typical public space be a neat triangle of lawn or an overflowing bowl of curly landforms?

When I was entering the field around this time, the debate seemed a sign of health. It was heartfelt, but also pleasantly idle, because it was low stakes enough for there to be a choice at all. In studying the history of the field, I found that the dispute between New Urbanists and Landscape Urbanists comfortably resembled landscape architecture’s inconclusive battles of the past: the picturesque against the City Beautiful, the ecological crusaders against the postmodernists. Each time, designers had the pleasure of having a party to belong to. For others, who saw a false dichotomy and stayed unaligned, the debate was still useful in clarifying what was at stake in the field, and how a recognizable look could match an ethical agenda.

If I miss style debates today, it is because they often make the field easier to teach and think about. A debate over style takes two or more visions of the same field, each one of which seems (at least to its partisans) self-sufficient in uniting the things that art should be up to. Who should it challenge, who should it comfort; what should it hold up or condemn; what should it show, what should it hide? If that made for delusions where, say, straight avenues were thought to create well-governed cities, it also created the healthy expectation that there was a relationship between how a landscape looked and what it was meant to accomplish.

If I miss style debates today, it is because they often make the field easier to teach and think about.

Today, it is easy to believe that history has ended for landscape architecture. In the 10-plus years since Duany and Talen’s book, given the heating up of civil conflict, the deepening dread over environmental crisis, and the widening challenge to the centrality of the Western tradition, the lack of well-defined conflicts in the theory of landscape design is a blessing. I feel thankful that the ideology of landscape architecture—at least the landscape architecture that talks about what it is up to—appears to have converged into one vision for everyone to do their part in fulfilling. The dangers are too present to ignore, and as the anthropologist Mary Douglas wrote, “Attributing danger is one way of putting a subject above dispute.” A key factor making this convergence possible is largely dropping the idea that the appearance of landscapes is worth fighting about.

In the version of landscape architecture closest to what can be called “thought leadership”—the term that seems to have replaced the old critical language of “avant-garde”—a landscape form is not an end in itself but a vehicle for “building more healthy and equitable communities.” The site designs that these firms—as represented by SCAPE, Agency Landscape + Planning, or the Kounkuey Design Initiative—are involved with are meant to convey: “The community is here, and the community has accomplished something.” They will not be mistaken for a leftover piece of nature, or the handiwork of a single master builder. The form of the landscape is a child of the process; to push a specific design outcome from the beginning would be to put the cart before the horse. Accordingly, if many of the New Urbanism guidelines have remained valid, the significant exception is neo-traditional style, now more of a preferred option than a vital necessity.

If New Urbanism continues to succeed as a defined and organized entity, it is because it is able to change with the times without surrendering the bedrock assumption that there is a correct way to do things; that whatever Jane Jacobs and William H. Whyte discovered in Manhattan can hold true for everyone else from here on out. How often have I heard that, with the facts at hand, there is no choice but to put in movable chairs, to plant native oaks, to launch a Green New Deal? All these imperatives pile up into a body of evidence that the designer must either reckon with or recklessly ignore. It’s small wonder that research in the field has turned away from groundless speculation and joined the humanities in pivoting to data-driven, grant-funded projects.

There are few things more unrewarding to write, read, or argue about than confusion, and yet confusion is what we have now in the aesthetics of landscape architecture. A student can be counted on to enter a degree program with a take on the major problems of the day and a notion that landscape architecture is a creative field that can meaningfully address them. What they do not have is any sense of what landscape architecture should look like, or feel like to walk through, and how those choices might relate to what the designer hopes to achieve socially or ecologically.

It is easy to believe that history has ended for landscape architecture.

Confusion can still be productive, and with few gatekeepers or lineages to follow, it seems possible for landscape architecture to better serve more diverse practitioners and a more inclusive public. I recently asked my beginning graduate students if they worried about finding a formal basis for their work, or do they feel like they have a way to proceed? A few shared that though they find the discussions in books and magazines hard to enter into, they can use Instagram instead to connect directly to images of work that look interesting. They are sparking their personal taste instead of having to learn the terms of an in-group conversation. I wonder if the expectation to connect directly with what you are already into only adds to the anxious burden to be somebody, to be defined—a need that a predefined debate on style can both address and usefully frustrate.

If the indeterminacy that Landscape Urbanism championed remains part of the professional discussion, it is less through a language of algorithmic landforms and more as a guiding value for those who acknowledge their limits and share their power. I find in working with students that this form of indeterminacy also works as a cover for passivity, for saying that someone else will determine the shape of the community garden you have set aside space for. In that sense, indeterminacy can resemble another path of refusing to choose: to float along wherever capital takes you, through central Asian boondoggles and private infinity pools; to do what the client asks for, which resembles what the client’s rival already has. In either case, style and form lose their capacity to stand for the designer’s own aspirations behind the project.

To its credit, Landscape Urbanism identified one fallacy that shadows all the precepts about how to effectively design seat walls or habitat corridors or public workshops—the idea that because something is unthinkable or undoable now, it will continue to be so in the future. In his 2006 essay “Terra Fluxus,” James Corner, FASLA, made the surprising admission that creativity is the cornerstone of the Landscape Urbanist enterprise, that Landscape Urbanism “is first and last an imaginative project, a speculative thickening of the world of possibilities.” The ability to visualize potential is not the same as being able to harness it, so it is not a surprise that Landscape Urbanists never managed to steer the bucking bronco of urban development, much less international flows of materials and capital. But what Landscape Urbanism leaves to be realized is the idea that designers can create desires as well as follow them, contribute something new as well as channel what is present. That is a risky venture, but also a method of creating meaningful choices for ourselves and the people we serve.

Justin Parscher is an assistant professor of practice at The Ohio State University.

The post Are Landscape Architecture’s Style Debates Passé? first appeared on Landscape Architecture Magazine.

By Kevin Philip Williams and Michael Guidi;
London: Filbert Press, 2024; 240 pages, $55.

Reviewed by Danielle VonLehe

The garden designer’s relationship to shrubs is moderately troubled. In the 1980s, the New Perennial movement rejected the rigid ubiquity of sculpted shrubs (typical of the early 20th-century British garden) in favor of prairie-style meadow plantings of matrix-based stands of grasses and perennials. The authors of Shrouded in Light: Naturalistic Planting Inspired by Wild Shrublands, gardener Kevin Philip Williams and ecologist and horticultural researcher Michael Guidi, make a persuasive case for returning the shrub to the field of contemporary planting design to inspire a more ecologically responsible, botanically respectful, and conceptually “new wild” garden.

Resilient across habitats, shrubs thrive in the hottest and harshest places on the most remote parts of the globe, and closer to home, in sites of human–nature interface—what Gilles Clément calls “third landscapes” in his Manifesto of the Third Landscape: roadcuts, abandoned lots, heaths, bogs, and edges that teem with genetic diversity. As the arms of the Anthropocene reach every biome on earth, degrading and severing ecosystems, shrubs persist. They are our epoch’s disturbance-based growth form. Williams and Guidi define the shrub as an “intermediate growth form” that can “allocate biomass into a greater number of woody stems, each requiring less resource investment than the primary stems of a tree.” Such a structure enables resilience, allowing the plant to “exist in unforgiving environments where loss of one or more stems will still allow for growth and reproduction.” The reader is implored to consider the shrub, with a freakish evolutionary ability to endure extremity, as that with the potential to “create new worlds out of our fragmented, highly altered, mutating planet.” Shrubs are, in other words, Frankenstein’s anthropocentric monster.

Shrouded in Light doesn’t try to defeat this wildness, but instead coaxes a gentle coexistence. This begins with how the book is organized—three sections wherein the word “shrub” is progressively modified: “Understanding Shrubs,” “Seeing Shrublands,” and “Making Shrubscapes.” A key question raised by the authors applies to the practices of both landscape architecture and gardening. Namely, in spite of a long history of garden- and world-making wherein we humans in control squeeze and form-fit the natural environment into unnatural shapes to meet our needs (as exemplified by something as small as the boxwood ball or as large as changing the course of a river), how do we re-approach garden design in the post-Anthropocene “with the intention of shifting the future stewardship of the earth away from human-dominated models [to] start a true collaboration with other creatures”? The answer emerges only when we begin to reframe our understanding of what it now means to be wild in a volatile environment.

The book isn’t a conventional design manual. It’s more like if a gardening book was a punk album: graphic, expansive, and diverse. It is a celebration, a reflection, and an emotionally evocative and implicative anthem for the global spectrum of monstrous shrubs, as sung in the practices of both authors. Williams, based in Denver, approaches gardening with a style that combines “bioregional plant palettes, a hardcore punk ethos of NO CONTROL, and post-human aesthetics to craft wild and captivating spaces.” Guidi also offers a countercultural approach to gardening, engaging in interdisciplinary research that prefers “common and weedy plants to the rare and precious” to “broaden the definition of gardens and gardening.”

The shifting, unpredictable nature of both the graphics and language in Shrouded in Light mirrors the dynamic nature of the shrub as an organism.

The authors draw from a range of artistic sources that correspond to the multitudinous and often surprising compositional potential of the shrub as planting material. Such sources include contemporary collage, woolen tapestries, Claude Monet’s View of Bordighera (1884), conceptual photographic typologies, and AI-generated shrubscape images. This amalgam of artwork is intended to “show you possibilities, not certainties, and above all, inspiration, not instruction.” Their ethos extends to captions that span genres and themes including song lyrics, poetics, and Internet culture.

Throughout the text, Williams and Guidi pair magic-inducing phrases with precise and technical sentences. The authors speak of the bald shrub typology as “the land of Sparklehorse’s haints, hollows, mist and rust”; they describe the topographic distribution of vegetative strata in Crested Butte, Colorado, as “the gang vocals and pile-ons that we rehearse in our heads and hope we can experience again”; and the shrubs that preside over the former site of the Marconi Wireless Station in the Cape Cod National Seashore are “wireless shrubs transmitting transatlantic texts of triumph over telegraph towers.” Such linguistic playfulness makes Shrouded in Light, a book that might easily devolve into a series of obtuse diagrams and planting specifications, surprisingly humorous, enthralling, and fun to read instead.

The shifting, unpredictable nature of both the graphics and language in Shrouded in Light mirrors the dynamic nature of the shrub as an organism. In “Understanding Shrubs,” the authors unpack the diverse physical characteristics and psychological resonances of shrubs. They begin each subsection—“Stems,” “Fruits,” “Leaves,” “Flowers,” “Brush Beasts”—with poetry that foregrounds action-based verbs and subjective questions. “We peered into each mass / Crouching Hunkering Crawling Wondering / … When does damage become decor?” reads the introduction to “Stems.” These poems posit the shrub as an organism that continually changes. It exists perpetually in a processional state of becoming, never landing on a stable state or identity. “We need to remember that life is possible in all places, at all times, across an inconceivable spectrum. We need to embody an imperfect world, constantly in the process of becoming,” Williams writes. As such, the shrub is explored phenomenologically, as something that acts, whether by sheltering animals, supporting seedlings under a scratchy dome of dead sticks, reminding human onlookers of our own fear of death (what the authors term “necroarchitecture”), or occupying a conceptual, uncanny space, making them seem monstrous, dangerous, and alluringly wild. “Shrubscapes allow us to have deep and resonant conversations with places that we cannot control. They are reminders that the willful non-human Other exists.” A planting designer’s ability to release control and accept the continually changing nature of both plant materials and environments is a first step toward the collaborative future stewardship for which Williams and Guidi advocate.

For Williams and Guidi, “complexity in a garden imparts diversity, resilience and adaptive capacity, ensuring the long-term sustainability and survival of the design.”

Ten percent of the earth’s terrestrial surface is composed of shrub-dominant landscapes, which include the heath, inland barren, bald, shrub-steppe, dry and wet montane, desert scrub, chaparral, and coastal sage scrub. Staying true to their punk rock spirit, the authors also include shrublands that subvert the dominant paradigm. They identify transgressive moments within shrublands—extreme instances of shade, sand, water, disturbance—and tie these alternative expressions back into the tenet that it is the shrub’s unique ability to adapt and exist in divergent ecological niches that makes it an invaluable plant material for our radically altered, unstable planetary state.

Williams and Guidi include a series of case studies they call “shrubscapes,” such as Williams’s own SummerHome Garden in Denver and LA WAVE in Los Angeles. A shrubscape is a re-imagined translation of a naturally occurring shrub-dominant ecosystem (shrubland) as garden. Effective shrubscaping requires the plant designer to relinquish a certain amount of control and rely on the natural relationships that emerge. It is a micro-demonstration within a shared human-wilderness context, in which, according to the authors, “human wildness and plant wildness [are] expressing something together.”

Future shrubscape designers may take inspiration from a natural shrubland but are ultimately free to reimagine the constructed planting layout in a way that best fits particular cultural contexts and existing site conditions. Simple, brightly colored bubble diagrams drawn over photographs of natural shrub-dominant landscapes demonstrate how naturally occurring species distribution patterns that at first appear visually chaotic can be simplified and understood for application in the garden. This diagramming process does away with the exclusivity of coded and dense landscape architectural drawings that are mostly unreadable to the average client, making the shrub-as-medium accessible and inspirational, but not lacking complexity.

For Williams and Guidi, “complexity in a garden imparts diversity, resilience and adaptive capacity, ensuring the long-term sustainability and survival of the design.” The authors offer an intriguing planting design strategy called the “mesh” as a more complex, less controlled way to approach shrubscaping, embodying the collaborative potential of cross-creature stewardship. The mesh approach differs from the more commonly understood matrix planting design strategy, which originated in postwar Germany as a way to quickly replant acres of parkland within a replicable framework, and consists of a foundation of one to a few species, usually grasses, interplanted with species that provide more structural and seasonal contrast. For the authors, conventional matrix-based planting design “is often reduced to its ability to simplify, to make legible and save time. The application of a system is not the same as embracing a process.”

The historical definition of what it means to be wild has failed the shrubs. 

The description of the mesh as a processual approach to naturalistic gardening may be tantalizing—“a true interlacing of parts” that effectively creates a “complex starting point”—but it lacks definition and legibility for implementation. The closest they come to technical tangibility is to advocate for using seed mixes in the garden to create “a loose agreement between the gardener and the seeds that they will work together to make something happen.” However, the methodology for establishing shrub-dominant landscapes from seed, and how this process fits into larger successional schemas, is not articulated.

Other unpredictable and surprising planting design inspiration comes from human-wild systems such as graffiti, dissonant music, Swiss alpenflage (camouflage designed to blend soldiers into alpine plant communities), abstract expressionist painting, mud splattered on a dumpster, algorithms, and even computer glitches. Why look to these anomalous fields for planting inspiration? “Anthropogenic Wild Systems” are “where we are least like ourselves and therefore most likely to be able to successfully work with non-human Others.”

The historical definition of what it means to be wild has failed the shrubs. The word “wild” originates from the Old English “wilde,” meaning “in the natural state, uncultivated, untamed, undomesticated, uncontrolled.” It is this definition that has kept the necroarchitectural, monstrous shrub from having a place in the softer, gentler, and more welcoming traditional naturalistic planting style exemplified by the New Perennial movement. The wildness that we have selected as natural is one composed of artificial associations and a considerable degree of planning and maintenance. “Wild” reflects aesthetic values that don’t match the state of the disturbed world we are designing within. In Shrouded in Light, wildness is redefined as a place where we have “the potential to be delighted and challenged by the surprising thoughts or actions of others or ourselves.” By expanding a naturalistic planting design framework to include the adaptive, complex, and surprisingly wild nature of our hardiest vegetal companions, we will more honestly embrace the resilient future-stewardship needed to remain flexible in the speculative planet we created.

Danielle VonLehe is a landscape designer at TERREMOTO in Los Angeles.

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“We did a lot of fountain designs for them that didn’t resonate. It was the only piece of the project that didn’t make them happy right out of the gate. Then I had the idea: Why are we not just using the millstone? And it occurred to me that we could utilize the millstones in this fountain in a kind of subtle, low-impact way.”

—Richard Hartlage, Affiliate ASLA, Land Morphology

Richard Hartlage, Affiliate ASLA, is a celebrated planting designer and a skilled author and speaker on horticultural design, but that isn’t the only reason Yew Dell Botanical Gardens hired Land Morphology, the firm he founded. Hartlage grew up near the Crestwood, Kentucky, landmark, and he knew the botanical garden’s history and quirks. (The original owner hand-built a castle on the grounds and collected millstones, dozens of which were still on the property.) For a new water feature and focal point, a few false starts led to a design that layered the historic millstones above and below the waterline, allowing water to cascade down over the artifacts’ invitingly rough surface.

The post Backstory: Behind Land Morphology’s industrial inspiration first appeared on Landscape Architecture Magazine.

The post Winter Care For Trees: Top Tips appeared first on Borst Landscape & Design.

Every great landscape needs trees. 

Well-maintained trees make your commercial property more inviting, welcoming and peaceful. Everybody loves trees. 

Choose the right combination of trees and you’ll get stunning flowers in the spring, leafy shade in summer, vibrant fall color and intriguing winter interest.

What should you consider when it comes to commercial tree installation? Choose a tree whose needs match your site. Don’t plant trees too close to buildings or to each other. Be aware of  maintenance needs, including regular pruning. 

Pruning at the right time and in the right way is an essential component of a sound landscape maintenance and garden care program.

Artful pruning requires horticultural knowledge and a specialized skill set from the crews performing day-to-day garden care tasks.

Our garden managers and landscape maintenance staff at Surrounds share a commitment to our signature methods of holistic garden care. They understand that they are responsible for fulfilling the landscape architect’s vision.

Why Expert Pruning is Essential to a Successful Landscape Maintenance Program

Pruning stimulates growth, admits air and light into the interior of shrubs, removes broken or diseased parts, and guides the plant into filling out its natural shape. 

Regular pruning helps to perfect the appearance of your garden and contributes to plant health by:

1. Controlling the height and width of plants
2. Guiding the growth pattern and natural shape
3. Preventing overgrowth – which can cause disease or breakage
4. Boosting flower production
5. Optimizing limb structure for strength

Our garden managers do almost all of their pruning by hand because hand pruning, also called “punch pruning,” is healthier for plants, especially shrubs like boxwood. 

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You have probably seen other landscape maintenance companies racing around a property using electric shears. That technique is fast, but it only trims off the new growth on the exterior of a plant.

Over time, the interior of the plant may become overgrown and densely packed. Light and air can’t penetrate. And that can cause disease.

We train our crews to anticipate “what the plant is going to do.” So, if we know a shrub typically grows 18” during the season and we want to keep it at windowsill height when it’s blooming, we cut it back 18” below the sill while it is still dormant.

This makes a big difference because, if your landscape maintenance people wait until the plant emerges from dormancy and starts growing, they end up trimming off the new growth every month. Continuously shearing the plant to control the height causes it to become thick and unhealthy.

If you prune it back appropriately before it starts growing, the plant will fill out naturally. Then it just needs periodic light pruning to keep it looking nice.

Pruning Techniques: The Secret to Spectacular Landscape Care

Your garden maintenance people must understand which limbs to cut, where, and which to leave alone. They will employ a variety of techniques depending on the type of plant and the objective of the pruning process.

Terms for common pruning techniques include:

Heading: Cutting long, single stems above a healthy bud. This encourages lower branches to bush out.

Cutbacks: Cutting plants to the ground during dormancy to stimulate vigorous spring growth from the base. Roses and butterfly bushes benefit from this dramatic treatment because it keeps them compact and able to produce more blooms.

Thinning: Also referred to as punch pruning, this technique opens up the middle of the plant to admit more sunlight–which keeps the interior branches healthy and encourages new growth.

Shearing: Trimming the plant around the outside to maintain a manicured shape and structure.

The way we see it, it’s all about how you apply the techniques.

The guiding principle for our landscape management crews is what we call “design intent.” How does this plant fit into the landscape? 

Is it meant to join with others into a hedge? If it’s an ornamental tree, are we trying to maintain symmetry among multiple trees of the same shape? Is this plant intended to drape over and soften the edges of a walkway? 

The answers to these questions arise from a thorough understanding of the landscape design style, the natural tendencies of the plant, and the preference of the client.

Specialty Pruning Techniques

Here are two examples of specialty techniques that complement the growth patterns of a specific plant:

Pruning Technique 1: Roses

In early spring we start thinning them out, reducing their size, preparing them to put on new growth. This practice rejuvenates the plant. Getting rid of old, dead material lets them breathe and bush back out.

In this case, we are pruning in anticipation of what we expect that plant to look like in July. If it’s a shrub rose, we may want them to bush out full and low. If it’s climbing a trellis, we want to anticipate how high and how much spreading we want to see. 

A shrub rose will push out 18 to 22 inches of new growth each year. Knowing this, you can decide where you want to keep it and prune it accordingly.

It’s imperative to get your roses caned back early in the season. You can cut them to the ground if you want. Roses may look delicate, but they are tough plants.

Pruning Technique 2: Fruit Trees & Shrubs

Edibles are becoming very popular among clients and in the industry. Growers have come out with new cultivars that look attractive and produce edible fruit. They’re breeding them for aesthetic appeal as well as fruit production. Pruning is critical to the successful growth of fruit trees. We are pruning to maximize fruit production, and for structural strength, so the tree can support the weight of its fruit.

Artful Pruning Requires Expertise and Finesse

We never want the landscape to look” trimmed”. That’s the hard part. We are constantly doing little tweaks to keep plants at the desired size but retain their natural form and beauty.

Remember this: Your landscape maintenance people should not be shearing everything—even if your gardens are formal style. It’s not necessary. You can have the same formal look without putting a set of shears on it.

Pruning is one of the best things you can do for your shrubs. Well-pruned shrubs will grow fuller with a more attractive shape, produce more flowers, and be healthier overall. Artful pruning takes your landscape to the next level turning it into the balanced and captivating work of art it is intended to be.

If you’d like to discuss the possibility of taking your landscaping to the next level, please schedule a phone consultation with one of our landscape management specialists.

Are you wondering how to bring out the fullest expression in your landscape and gardens? Our eBook: Choosing the Right Kind of Landscape Maintenance Firm, is full of valuable information to help you understand the fundamental differences between landscape maintenance companies.

The post The Art Of Pruning in Landscape Maintenance appeared first on Surrounds Landscaping.

By Timothy A. Schuler

Though the warning signs had been present for months, the bad news officially came in March 2018, when forecasters at the Northwest Interagency Coordination Center (NWCC) in Portland, Oregon, released their long-range forecast of the upcoming fire season. Though it varied from state to state, in Oregon, light snowpack and higher-than-average temperatures combined to create a highly combustible landscape. “I’m worried about the 2018 fire season,” John Saltenberger, the fire weather program manager at the NWCC, told a Portland television station.

It was discouraging news for a state that, like California and other western states, has seen a growing number of increasingly intense wildfires in recent years. According to Oregon Department of Forestry statistics, 69 percent of the state’s largest recorded wildfires have occurred in the past 20 years. The largest, 2012’s Long Draw Fire, scorched nearly 560,000 acres of predominantly federal land in the southeastern part of the state. In the geological age known as the Anthropocene, the current epoch might one day be known as the Era of Megafires. A megafire is typically defined as a single wildfire that exceeds 100,000 acres. Such fires are “nearly commonplace now,” says Chris Chambers, who for the past 15 years has served as the forest division chief for the City of Ashland, Oregon. “Whereas 20, 30 years ago, a 100,000-acre fire was unheard of.”

Throughout the western United States, fires today burn hotter and longer than they did in the past. One study found that today’s fires consume, on average, 5,000 percent more land area than wildfires 40 years ago, and that fire season in the Northwest has lengthened from three weeks to more than three months. The U.S. Forest Service now spends more than half of its budget fighting wildfires, a figure that in 2017 topped $2 billion. This is partially owing to land-use trends. Between 1990 and 2010, the amount of land considered part of the wildland–urban interface, or WUI, those areas where houses and other development intermingle with nature, increased by 41 percent, according to researchers from the University of Wisconsin–Madison’s SILVIS Lab. The forest service estimates that 44 million houses occupy this zone, representing one out of every three houses in the nation. In Oregon, the figure is slightly higher: 36 percent of all housing units are located within the WUI.

The West is no stranger to fire. For millennia, it was a regular part of the region’s ecology. But these historic fires, with some exceptions, were generally low severity, regulated by a lack of understory and eventually snuffed out by natural firebreaks. As land managers adopted policies of total fire suppression, the forest changed. It filled in. These natural firebreaks disappeared. Today’s forests are pure fuel, with brush and young trees that burn easily and turn a relatively small fire into a blaze of biblical proportions. Such megafires pose a threat not just to human life but to watersheds and critical infrastructure, as California saw in early 2018 when what was then the largest wildfire in recent history—it would be topped by year’s end—left in its wake a barren landscape, creating the conditions for the mudslide that killed more than 20 people and closed Highway 101 for nearly two weeks.

Even more alarming, perhaps, is the global impact of such megafires. According to a joint study conducted by the National Park Service and the University of California, Berkeley, wildfires contribute hugely to greenhouse gas emissions by releasing carbon into the atmosphere. Between 2001 and 2010, California’s forests and natural areas were responsible for 69 million tons of carbon emissions, two-thirds of which were produced by wildfires. Statewide, wildfires accounted for between 5 and 7 percent of total carbon emissions. “The megareleases of carbon during these fires are a huge addition to global warming,” Chambers says. “Not only that, but the scale of high-intensity fire is eliminating conifers, and the carbon-holding capacity of coniferous forests is significant.” In other words, these megafires are part of a feedback loop in which climate change, through extreme temperatures and intensifying droughts, fuels enormous fires that spew carbon into the atmosphere and reduce a forest’s carbon-carrying capacity, which in turn accelerates global climate change. Each fire season, Chambers says, the cycle ratchets up. “Now, it’s just continuous.”

If the picture he paints is bleak, Chambers is no doomsayer. For the past eight years, he has helped lead the Ashland Forest Resiliency Stewardship Project (AFR), an ambitious, cross sector wildfire mitigation effort that, according to researchers, could serve as a model for other communities throughout the West. Ashland, a picturesque hamlet with a population of 20,000 people, is located within the Rogue River Valley, just north of the California border. It’s an outdoorsy place, a mecca for mountain bikers and backpackers. Nature is a major part of the city’s economy—and its identity. “There really is no line between the forest and the town,” says Tracy Peddicord, a landscape architect and real estate broker who is also a member of Ashland’s Wildfire Mitigation Commission. Where other cities have factories or tech companies, Ashland has the Siskiyou Mountains, portions of which are protected as part of the 1.8-million-acre Rogue River-Siskiyou National Forest.

Ashland’s other major draw is its annual Oregon Shakespeare Festival. The festival, founded in 1935, runs eight months out of the year and last year attracted nearly 400,000 people to the city. Since 2013, the Shakespeare Festival has been forced to cancel performances almost every year because of smoke from nearby wildfires. In 2017, the festival refunded $300,000 worth of presold tickets. “We had fires burning all around us,” Chambers says. “Every way the wind blew it was smoke. That lasted for 48 days.” As festivalgoers fled, so did some residents, Chambers among them. He took his family to San Francisco, only to find the city trapped in its own suffocating haze of wildfire smoke.

In 2018, which by October had become the costliest year in Oregon history for fighting wildfires, smoke canceled performances again. This time the festival’s losses were estimated at $2 million.

Despite these smoke events, Ashland has escaped the worst of the Northwest’s most severe wildfires. But the city’s leadership knows it’s only a matter of time. According to the USDA’s Natural Resources Conservation Service, Jackson County, which includes Ashland, “experiences one of the highest occurrences of wildfire in Oregon.” In a survey of more than 400 counties across the West, Jackson County ranked second in terms of vulnerability to wildfire.

The flames themselves are only a small part of the threat. Of greater concern is the danger a wildfire poses to the city’s water supply. Ashland draws the majority of its potable water from the Ashland Creek and Reeder Reservoir, perched at an elevation of roughly 2,800 feet several miles south of the city. With the steep slopes of the 15,000-acre watershed covered in a highly granitic soil (“people call it the big sandbox,” Chambers says), a high-severity wildfire could clog the reservoir with sediment—not to mention ash—a disaster for the city’s water supply. (Until recently, Ashland relied on the reservoir for 100 percent of its water.)

To prevent such calamity, in 2010, the City of Ashland, the Nature Conservancy, the Lomakatsi Restoration Project, and a number of state and federal agencies signed a joint stewardship agreement and began using a combination of controlled burns and selective logging—aka thinning—to remove highly flammable young trees and brush from the watershed. Doing so returns the forest to something like its historic condition and significantly reduces its fuel load, the technical term for combustible vegetation, living or dead. “We end up with something which is more parklike,” Chambers says. “It’s open, full of big trees with more space in the canopy, and more light and nutrients and water available to those trees.”

Ashland isn’t alone in its efforts to proactively reduce the risk of wildfire. A coalition of government and private landowners is using similar strategies on 128,000 acres of the Elkhorn Mountains in northeastern Oregon, funded in part through the Joint Chiefs’ Landscape Restoration Partnership. Still, Ashland has become something of a poster child for progressive wildfire mitigation.

From the beginning, the city’s restoration work has been creatively funded, starting with $6.5 million from the forest service, part of a federal economic stimulus project. In 2010, the City of Ashland and its partners had been working together for roughly seven years, through a memorandum of understanding. There was a vision for a much more robust forest resiliency effort but no plan as to how to pay for it. Then the Obama administration announced that it was looking for “shovel-ready” projects that could put Americans back to work. Ashland had one. To date, the project has produced 17 full-time jobs and more than 150 part-time or seasonal positions, not to mention indirect economic benefits.

Besides federal grant money, the city has contributed a good portion of its own budget to the project, including money from the government-owned water utility, given that the restoration work ultimately benefits the watershed. The city and the other nonfederal partners are required by the federal government to match 10 percent of the project budget, which to date has reached $20 million.

Today, the AFR has thinned more than 8,400 forested acres, approximately 500 of which have been burned. The project partners began with areas closest to the city, since they posed the greatest risk to private property, and worked their way deeper into the watershed. The vegetation that is removed is put into burn piles (to be burned during the rainy season, when the risk of spreading is lowest) while trees with diameters of at least nine inches are felled and trucked to a local sawmill. By the city’s estimate, the project has produced 14 million board feet of lumber, generating $6 million, revenue that Chambers says is put back into the project.

It’s a far cry from the “timber wars” of the 1980s and 1990s, which pitted the logging industry against environmentalists in the debate over threats to the northern spotted owl. The region was split. “You either were an advocate for logging or you were an advocate for [being] hands off,” Chambers says. “There wasn’t a lot of middle ground. And that’s where we’ve driven a wedge over the decades.”

Or rather built a bridge. Ashland’s biggest assets are its diplomatic civic leaders, says Paul Hessburg, a research landscape ecologist and a leading expert in the subject of fire ecology. Hessburg works out of the forest service’s Forestry Sciences Laboratory in Wenatchee, Washington, but spends a good deal of his time traveling around the country, giving talks about how communities can combat wildfires. In 2017 he gave a TED talk on the subject, “Why wildfires have gotten worse—and what we can do about it.” The video has been viewed more than a million times.

Hessburg says Ashland’s approach has been exemplary. The city has embraced an evidence-based approach that weaves together the most recent research in both landscape ecology and wildfire mitigation, while also continually updating its fire-adapted community policies. “They’re nailing it,” Hessburg says. Why? Because Ashland’s city officials have prioritized building relationships across departments and sectors and at every level of government, Hessburg says. He gives special credit to Chambers, whom he describes as a “critically important liaison between the structural firefighting community and the wildland firefighting community,” as well as Ashland’s mayor, John Stromberg, a “good point of the spear.” Both men, Hessburg says, are bridge builders, able to earn the public’s and other partners’ trust. And if communities in the West are going to reduce the risk of wildfire, it’s going to require rebuilding trust, Hessburg says, between state and federal agencies as well as between the U.S. government and tribal authorities.

If the AFR represents a model for future forest resilience projects, however, it’s also been a work in progress. Smoke from controlled burns, which in certain instances has drifted into town, has earned the sharpest criticism. “People aren’t too keen on smoke coming into the community, especially after very smoky summers from regional wildfires,” Chambers says. “Convincing people that more smoke is a good thing is quite an uphill battle.” The city tries to time burns with optimal weather conditions, but it’s difficult to ensure that smoke never reaches the community.

Equally difficult has been the reframing of public perception. A century of fire suppression has convinced people that today’s hyperdense forests are “natural,” and the city has spent significant time and energy dismantling that notion, tabling at farmers’ markets and installing interpretive signage along trails. Peddicord, the landscape architect, admits that walking through a thinned and freshly burned landscape can be disorienting for a person, especially if he or she has strong ties to the area. “It’s hard because what we sometimes think of as the native forest is still a result of 80 years of intervention,” she says.

Eight years after it was initiated, the AFR is building on its successes. The consortium recently signed contracts to expand its restoration work from the current 8,400 acres to 58,000 acres, the majority of which is private, paid for, in part, by a $6 million grant from the Oregon Watershed Enhancement Board. Meanwhile, the Nature Conservancy is monitoring the watershed and using fuel load modeling to evaluate how much effect the restoration work has had on the risks that wildfire poses to Ashland and its water supply. No matter what the models show, Chambers knows that “the ultimate measure of success is when the fire comes, what happens?”

Until then, Peddicord feels safer knowing that Ashland is doing everything it can to protect its residents. She too credits Chambers and the rest of the city leadership for the amount of progress made. “In an era of people complaining about government overreach,” she says, “I’m grateful that there are people who are working to try to make their community better in the face of real danger.”

Timothy A. Schuler writes about design, ecology, and the natural environment.

This article has been updated since original publication in 2019.

The post Taking the Wind Out of Wildfire first appeared on Landscape Architecture Magazine.

Effecting Change to Avoid Disaster: Communicating Effective Wildfire Planning Strategies, by Design Workshop, Professional Communications Honor Award.

“We were in need of a suite of graphics to effectively communicate to decision makers how the choices they make can help their communities mitigate the risks of wildfire. We wanted our audience to learn about different mitigation techniques to reduce wildfire risk to the structure and surrounding landscape.”

“The graphic showing the overlapping home ignition zones further makes the point that mitigation takes a collective response—particularly in areas of more dense development. Research shows that while a holistic, comprehensive approach is important for other aspects of wildfire safety, such as evacuations and response, the home ignition zone is a critical component for reducing structure losses and other property damage. These two scales of mitigation are not at odds; rather [they] work together when coordinated.”

—Carly Klein, Design Workshop, Inc., and Molly Mowery, Wildfire Planning International

Since 1970, wildfires have increased 400 percent in the United States, especially across the western states. At the same time, about 60 percent of new residential development is built along what is known as the wildland urban interface—a region particularly susceptible to highly damaging wildfires. Landscape architects increasingly need communication tools to help clients, public officials, and communities understand different wildfire mitigation strategies and include them in the planning and design process. In response to this need, Design Workshop created a series of graphics that underscore the importance of collective land use and wildfire mitigation decisions at the community scale, as well as the house, city, and regional scales. For example, a graphic on home ignition zones illustrates decisions that can be made in concentric circles moving from the house out to the surrounding area, including eliminating combustible material near the house, creating “fuel breaks” such as driveways and walkways, and maintaining a mix of appropriately spaced and pruned trees in the outermost zone around the home. “Armed with this visual toolbox of strategic risk-reduction methods,” the jurors concluded, “landscape architects are empowered to initiate conversations that would trade vulnerability for resilience.”

—Kim O’Connell

This article has been updated since original publication in 2020.

The post Awards Focus: Talking to Communities about Wildfire first appeared on Landscape Architecture Magazine.

By Bradford McKee

In several videos Robert Stine made of his nursery in Fletcher, North Carolina, on September 27, the windshield wipers slice away rain from the remnants of Hurricane Helene. All around his stranded Toyota van, brown water roils through the nursery, Botanical Treasures, where he grew more than 300 perennial varieties for wholesale. In videos recorded around 8:00 a.m., countless plants in black plastic pots churn in the water toward Stine from the direction of hooped greenhouse frames. An hour later another video shows more water coming, and no more pots.

The flood swamped Stine’s six tractors, his Sprinter, his pickup truck, and his workshop. When the water receded, most remaining plants lay stuck around some obstacle or other. Hundreds of thousands of plants were gone. “We’ve lost a minimum $2.3 million worth of plant inventory and in the infrastructure,” Stine said in late October. “We won’t be able to rebuild [the nursery] back to what it was, because it took years, right?”

In a crescent of roughly a dozen counties in western North Carolina flooded by Helene, there are about 130 certified nursery and greenhouse growing operations, more than in most states. Sam Marshall, a regional horticulture specialist for the N.C. Cooperative Extension, said the area is known for its “high-value nursery stock,” for its wholesale growers of large, field-grown trees and shrubs, regional perennials, and greenhouse plants; it also has numerous Christmas tree farms growing mainly Fraser fir. During Helene, rainfall of 10 to 17 inches was common across the region; the storm opened a scarcely anticipated Appalachian theater of climate vulnerabilities. Dozens of growers had part or all of their operations wiped out, and around them, public infrastructure was in ruins.

Conservatively, $125 million worth of trees and shrubs are gone, and losses would climb significantly, as that figure didn’t include totaled equipment or infrastructure.

“I’ve never seen such destruction,” said Jerrold T. Moody, the county extension director for Avery County, during an advisory webcast for growers hosted in October by his colleague Jamie Bookwalter. A U.S. Geological Survey dashboard documents nearly 2,000 landslides caused by Helene, about half of which fell into rivers or on roads or structures. Moody said that landslides destroyed up to 200,000 trees. “Some growers have lost actual land—five to 10 acres that has gone down the stream, and it’s nothing more than a rock field,” he said. He showed a photo of a plant container caught high in a tree.

A landslide cost Dee Clark a field of Fraser fir Christmas trees and a field of waist-high hybrid rhododendrons. About one-third of Clark’s business, C&G Nursery, based in the Avery County town of Newland, is in Christmas trees, and two-thirds is in woody landscape plants grown in the ground. Clark lost crops of landscape evergreens during the floods. Arborvitae, Norway spruce, and white pine were damaged by trash, debris, and silt. His Green Giant arborvitae crop ready for next year is mostly lost. The water pushed 10- to 12-foot-high trees halfway to the ground during the flood. “There’s no salvaging that. A four-footer, you can dig, straighten it, let it grow on. But a 10- to 12-foot tree, that’s a loss.” Clark estimates the flood destroyed 75 percent of his evergreens ready for sale. “My cash flow crops are gone,” he said.

Marshall, the extension specialist, says Helene affected about one-quarter of the nurseries in his region of 28 counties. He says that, conservatively, $125 million worth of trees and shrubs are gone, and losses would climb significantly, as that figure didn’t include growers’ totaled equipment or infrastructure—Clark lost two tractors and a pickup truck.

Fields for tree production had flooded over the past 20 years in the region, Marshall said, but not so pervasively and not in such volumes. Some trees growing in fields were left in two feet of sediment. Their trunks “are completely buried,” he says. The sediment may not kill the trees, but it’s safe for growers to figure on their dying as they estimate their losses.

Some growers carry crop insurance to cover tree crops, but it’s expensive. Clark says he stopped carrying crop insurance in 2009, when his yearly premium was $81,000. To approve growers’ claims, crop insurance adjusters “want to see dead plants before they’re going to pay out,” Marshall says, whereas doomed trees may appear alive for a while. For failed trees, their varying ages and sizes can make valuations of specimens too intricate to try.

The creek was now flowing through the nursery and had carried off most of the plants. “I guess there are different stages of grief,” Jones says.

During a lull in the tropical storm, Jones and his wife Jill drove to the nursery from their home in Asheville where, he says, he’d already emptied his six-inch rain gauge “a few times” over the previous day. With a mile and a half to go on Prices Creek Road, they began seeing nursery pots in a field; there are no other nurseries besides his along Prices Creek. And the creek, they found, was now flowing through the nursery and had carried off most of the plants. “I guess there are different stages of grief,” Jones says. “The first week was just shock and awe. And even though you don’t know what exactly to do, there’s stuff to do.”

The first thing to do was to salvage any remaining viable plants and irrigate them. Prior to Helene’s deluge, rainfall had been erratic over the summer, and then October brought next to no rain. Floods wrecked Jones’s irrigation hardware. Dee Clark reported that among five power units he had to operate the irrigation pumps, three were compromised by floodwater. One of Jones’s brothers in Asheville helped him get a couple of generators to get his wells running and draw water from an irrigation pond. By the end of the following week, Jones was able to water the plants he still had; volunteers had come to help clean up, and a GoFundMe appeal eventually raised more than $100,000.

Around Asheville, warm, dry weather followed the floods, creating a different crisis for Megan Riley, the owner of M R Gardens, a nursery of regional perennials in the Oakley section of town. Her inventory survived the storm. Like most of Asheville’s residents, Riley lost water service on September 28 because the storm severely damaged the city’s main treatment plant and its system of large delivery pipes. Some pipes would take weeks to repair.

“I initially was not worried about the [water] outage,” Riley said in an email. “I thought I would not have to water the plants that were outside during the storm. But then we had atypical temps for October—several 80-degree days in a row.” The plants began to dry out quickly. “I had thousands that needed to be watered,” she says.

Numerous people helped Riley manage the water emergency. Rachel Nelms, of Rachel’s Native Plants in Pittsboro, drove to Asheville to take a truckload of plants back to sell at her own nursery. A landscape architect in Durham, Preston Montague, ASLA, staged a pop-up sale at his house that sold out 250 plants of Riley’s in a few hours. “Megan, to her credit, mobilized herself really quickly,” Montague says.

Extension agents helped Riley find a 300-gallon tank of water on October 5, which ran out fast. She was set to refill the tank when, on October 8, she regained water service. (A city boil order would continue for weeks.) In November, Laurel Babcock, who owns Laurel’s Garden Design in Raleigh, hosted a plant sale for Riley and for Emily Driskill, the owner of Tanager Plants, a wholesale grower of Southeastern U.S. native plants in the town of Mars Hill. “All of this was quite nerve-racking,” Riley says, “and heartwarming that so many people chipped in.”

In early November, Robert Stine had equipment and supplies coming for a day of volunteer cleanup at Botanical Treasures. The Perennial Plant Association shared a GoFundMe appeal with its membership to support Stine’s early recovery efforts. When Helene came through, “We had many, many, many, many prebooked orders taped off, ready for people to pick up,” Stine says. He was talking with one customer about a big order the customer was preparing to plant in the following months. Stine asked the customer how he would go about getting enough plants now. “You know what he says to me?” Stine recalled: “‘I’m going to wait for you to grow them again.’”

Bradford McKee is an editor and writer in Washington, D.C.

The post Horticulture and High Water first appeared on Landscape Architecture Magazine.

Plant-eating insects are small, but they can do huge damage to your commercial property, and fast. 

A plant disease might not seem dangerous at first. Maybe a
black spot or two, or a couple holes in a leaf. The next thing you know, a whole bed of plants is wiped out. 

We’re talking bugs that can devour an entire evergreen tree. A virus spread by mites can decimate your precious roses. And a massively destructive new pest on the scene is so dangerous to plants and trees, experts want you to kill it on the spot. 

Knowledge is power. What are the most common plant pests and diseases on your commercial property? Aphids. Bag worms. Japanese beetles. Grubs. Cankers. Rose rosette.

And what to do about them? It depends on the bug, but solutions range from picking them off by hand to hosing them off to calling in professionals for skilled disease treatment or Integrated Pest Management. (More on that in a bit.) 

The post Living the Dream: Best Garden Landscape Design Ideas appeared first on Borst Landscape & Design.

By Michael Dumiak

Kristín Jóhannsdóttir woke at two in the morning, looked from her window over fields to the east, and saw curtains of fire. It was 1973. She thought the Soviets were coming. Then she wondered if there would be school the next day.

Soon Kristín and her neighbors would be on the trawler Danski Pétur, pitching through winter seas off the southern Icelandic coast. It took seven hours to sail by fishing vessel from her home on Vestmannaeyjar to the small harbor at Þorlákshöfn, on the mainland. It feels a lot longer than seven hours when you are 13 and seasick, with 100 other people in the hold of a cod trawler reeking of fish, not knowing when you’ll come home again.

That day was in late January, and a volcano called Eldfell was being born on her small island. It was bitter cold in the harbor but pluming molten rock over the town. Over the course of the next five long months, remarkable feats of endurance, pluck, and engineering saved—and shaped—the town harbor as everyday people, sometimes called the Suicide Squad, trained 1.5 billion gallons of water on the moving lava.

And now, from the high cliffs above the harbor on a clear day in August 2024, it is possible to see cloud plumes rising from the Reykjanes Peninsula, 50 miles away on the Icelandic mainland. Beginning at the end of last year and repeating more or less every 30 days, molten rock has rumbled in Reykjanes through rents in another volcanic system. It has forced the evacuation of a town, threatened power supplies, and periodically closed an area of great natural beauty. (Ironic, since the lava itself is a staggering natural beauty.)

Over the past 12 months, engineers on Reykjanes have built long curves of earthen berms between two prominent hills, and barriers forming lines against the advancing molten flow. And in June 2024, for the first time, fire engines began aiming water at the lava. The Icelandic government set aside US$3.5 million for pumping gear. The cooling operation is not at the scale of Vestmannaeyjar, but it echoes the concept. And the overall idea, as it was 50 years ago, is to divert and shape flowing lava.

It takes some adjusting to soak in an impression of Vestmannaeyjar. Start with the names, which can puzzle an outsider. Vestmannaeyjar is actually a chain of islands. They’re sometimes called the Westman Islands in English, only one of which, Heimaey, is inhabited. The biggest population on the island is the world’s largest puffin colony, consisting of more than one million puffins. The island with the harbor and town is Heimaey. The town on Heimaey, though—with its 4,300 people—is called Vestmannaeyjar.

The Icelandic writer and environmental anthropologist Gísli Pálsson had left his boyhood home in Vestmannaeyjar by late January 1973. Eldfell was sparking from the earth beneath a farm called Kirkjubær, about a mile from where he grew up. Now Gísli—who, like all Icelanders, is referred to by his first name—raises his prominent eyebrows while considering the end results of the Eldfell eruption as a kind of grueling improvisation. “It was a refashioned landscape, with the collaborative effects of cooling and lava,” he says.

There are few other places in the world where the built environment is so tied to natural elements, with its limited palette (Iceland has four types of native trees), its geography and geology, and its energy sources. Iceland is an indescribably stunning place, but people live here, too: It’s not just a collection of natural parks. To an unusual degree, the tension is visible here: Do we make landscape, or does landscape make us?

“Yeah, the landscape makes us,” says Pétur Jónsson of EFLA, a large Icelandic engineering and planning consultancy. “We can work with it, but not against it.” As a 16-year-old, Pétur wore a construction helmet and helped to take furniture from his grandparents’ house on Heimaey under the rumble and shadow of erupting Eldfell. His strongest memory of that day is the ash coming down from the sky like fiery rain.

Coming to Heimaey is otherworldly. On a gusty, rainy, sea-sprayed day, jutting rocks and cliffsides suddenly sprout from the water, bashed by surging waves, and the light moves so fast—there’s mist and then sudden sun and back to shrouding cloud. There stand the two sloping cones: younger Eldfell, and the slightly taller, much older Helgafell.

Rounding into the cold lava harbor through a curving basalt channel brings quick calm in the water. This harbor is why people are here. That, and the fish. When three-quarters of Iceland’s exports were fish, Heimaey was the most important fishing center. It is still hugely important.

When Kristín Jóhannsdóttir left Vestmannaeyjar in the fishbed of the Danski Pétur, she had little notion of how far she would travel before returning. She became a longtime reporter at Iceland’s public broadcaster, studying in Leipzig, Germany, in the formerly communist east of the country, and datelining stories from what was then East Berlin.

Now she is director of the Eldheimar, a newish museum and gallery dedicated to Eldfell. It sits up the hill from Vestmannaeyjar harbor over the excavated shell of a burned-out home. In the gallery, she stands in front of a pedestal that supports a huge disc, surfaced with a backlit map of the island. The disc makes a loud ticking when she spins it. It is counting hours and days. When the days spin forward, ominous red under the map flows outward from a single point: the night Kristín woke up and saw fire. Spin the wheel the other way, the red recedes.

If only it were that easy.

When Heimaey evacuated, a handful of people stayed behind to pump water, becoming the Suicide Squad. The lava that poured from Eldfell under a Plinian cloud (named after the fellow who wrote about Vesuvius and Pompeii as it happened in the year 79 CE) covered streets and 400 homes, burning them and then encasing them in solid rock. It also formed the new inner eastern edge for the harbor channel.

To what exact degree water cooling played a part in creating this shape is difficult to say. Engineers, scientists, residents, and observers have been debating it for 50 years.

According to cables from the time of the eruption, 19.6 million cubic yards of lava poured out of Eldfell in its first 40 hours. If it were concrete, it would be enough to pour more than four Hoover Dams. Fresh lava from the earth is about 2,000 degrees Fahrenheit: hot as a forest fire, molten, viscous, and incandescent. It cools both quickly and very slowly. As it hits ambient air, a lava flow forms a crust, the lava at the surface cooling so fast it turns into moving, clanking, broken shards of glass. It’s possible to walk on lava flow surfaces (many caveats apply here) and even put heavy equipment or build temporary roads on it.

Deeper down, the volcanic basalt is still thick, soupy, liquid rock. The flow crust thickens and acts as an insulator. Fifteen years after the Heimaey eruption, in 1988, John McPhee wrote in his vivid New Yorker essays that the loose ash soil felt cool to touch. Brush the surface as little as a third of an inch below that, and it was still so hot he had to pull his hand away. Cooling rates depend on how thick the lava flow is, the air and ground temperature, and the amount of rainfall.

Water is what fueled the harbor heroics in Vestmannaeyjar as the suicide squadders (who never much liked that nickname) made every attempt to influence the lava flows coming at them: Lava was pouring into the harbor, raising water temperatures to 110°F. The crews trained pumps on the lava—dozens of U.S.-supplied industrial pumps, with the sea as the ready water source—to try to slow and divert these rising tides of fiery rock.

“It had a crucial impact in the final stages,” Gísli says. “It saved the harbor. It made it an even better fishing harbor than ever before.”

A new headland the size of Lower Manhattan has become a long, immovable, black and lichen-green and red rock shield against the wild winds off the sea. The harbor was always a prime stake in the eruption. As then mayor Magnus Magnusson told McPhee: With no harbor, there is no town.

Today the harbor wharf smells like a fish factory, which it still is. A nearby warren of art studios is open: A watercolorist cleans brushes; a taxidermist mounts a puffin. If the seas are bad, the ferry gets canceled. Café hours here are limited. A good place to take a grocery-store sandwich, then, is up the Eldfell lava field, which starts at the end of the road.

Around a narrow bend from a rusted pumping machine marked with a memorial plaque, not far from Gísli’s buried boyhood home, is an informal and unlikely sunken garden. This is Gaujulundur, planted by Guðfinna Ólafsdóttir and Erlendur Stefánsson, longtime residents, both dead now. The greened garden features wild grasses, moss, and daisies; decorative Senecio cineraria; a tiny house, in disrepair, for elves; and a huge lava boulder that Guðfinna and Erlendur thought looked like a dragon but might also resemble a schnauzer.

Gísli Pálsson says that after Eldfell, many residents never wanted to go back on the lava: They thought it was ugly; it reminded them of being horrified. “So here was this case of culturing this lava, and making it appealing to islanders,” he says.

As a lava field cools, it returns to solid rock. The homes that Eldfell covered or burned have been mixed with stone, some many feet deep. The topsoil on a lava field is essentially ash mixed with whatever blows or is brought in: It feels light, gritty, loose. Plant life comes back to the soil as the rock weathers—the island of Surtsey, which emerged from the sea south of Heimaey in the early 1960s, is being used as a natural experiment to learn more about just this—but it takes a long time. A few steps away from Gaujulundur, the land is mostly lichen, mosses, grasses, and wind, with a touch of Mars.

Pétur Jónsson never lived on Heimaey but has visited there many times. “I never thought the lava was ugly,” he says. He designs in basalt. He’s worked on several landscape projects on the island: basalt retaining walls and flagstones and gentle green slopes around a wooden church, Stafkirkjan, a gift from Norway commemorating 1,000 years since the Icelandic conversion to Christianity. (Those early days would have been about 100 years after the first settlers built on Heimaey, possibly Irish slaves fleeing the mainland.)

His work shows up in a children’s playground near the harbor, in stepped gardens behind a renovated town hall, and also on the winding gravel paths and timber stairs that climb the slopes of the peak, rising tall on the far side of the harbor. This is Heimaklettur, or Home Rock, on Heimaey. From the top you are far above the sea. And now the plumes from the Reykjanes Peninsula to the west are visible on the horizon.

Pétur and his EFLA colleagues have also often designed around the Blue Lagoon, one of Iceland’s best-known places. The lagoon sits on Reykjanes and is formed by water runoff from the powerful Svartsengi geothermal plant, right next door.

Last November, small earthquakes around Svartsengi and the Blue Lagoon ratcheted into the thousands. By mid-December, fissures opened on the other side of the hills from Svartsengi. Nearby Grindavík, a town of 3,000, evacuated. Once more the land here is changing as if it were made of wax.

A volcanic fissure is a rent in the earth, the same as those that make cones, only these are linear and can run miles long. The fissures opening on Reykjanes remain an open question. Six times in the last year these fissures have erupted in massive lava flows and drapes of fire.

So the winding embankments near Svartsengi—the new berms that girdled the Blue Lagoon earlier this year—are part of the landscape, for now, at least. They’re built using the largest bulldozers in Iceland. Landscape designers at the engineering firm Verkís send models for what the barriers could look like to iPads that the drivers carry in their cabs. But the dozer operators follow plans defined by lava flow.

The environmental engineer Magnús Rafnsson, a cofounder of the Reykjavík-based architectural and engineering consultancy Línudans, has been independently working on a concept with his partners for many years. It goes in a different direction: planning materials and structures by which bridges would be built over key roads in places potentially vulnerable to lava overflow. Instead of inundating the road, the lava would flow over the bridges, making a kind of natural tunnel. He thinks the idea is timely.

There is a farmhouse between the southern road out of Grindavík and the sea, and if you don’t know it’s there you might not see it among the surreal lava fields. There is a curve in the road. As it happens, the road is a key route to the mainland harbor Þorlákshöfn. During another set of eruptions four years ago, Magnús figured this to be a good place for a lava bridge. The lava would flow over the bridge and into the sea. The road would be protected. The farmhouse could stay.

Back in Reykjavik, Hörn Hrafnsdóttir is a water resources engineer at Verkís. She models fluid dynamics and how floes of ice behave in flowing water. More recently she’s been drafted to consider the viscosity and movements of the molten rock pouring out onto the Reykjanes Peninsula at rates sometimes reaching 2,000 cubic yards a second.

“You are much more likely to get good results if you are just trying to nudge it. You know, don’t go there, try to go gently to this side,” she says.

The Verkís work is part of huge civil efforts underway in Reykjanes. Earthen barriers now arc around the whole of Svartsengi, from the big hill at Sýlingarfell to the big hill Þorbjörn. The berms are approaching 70 feet high and 180 feet across at the base in places. Residents of Grindavík, forced out of their homes, thought they might return only to be turned out again. Lava cut off heating pipes from Svartsengi in the middle of winter for three days. That heating goes through the entire Reykjanes Peninsula, which is close to the capital, Reykjavík, and includes its airport.

Maybe the barriers will be enough to preserve the town for the future, can keep the lava moving past the houses but not over them, and can keep the clean geothermal power flowing from Svartsengi and the lagoon open for bathing. Or maybe the lava will flow where it wants to flow.

Michael Dumiak writes about science, design, and culture, and has just finished editing Remote Places, Public Spaces, published in October by Birkhäuser. He is based in Berlin.

The post The Lava Shapers Of Iceland first appeared on Landscape Architecture Magazine.

If you want people to notice your property, nothing wows like bright, impressive annual flowers. 

Everybody notices them, whether they’re massed in impressive beds out front or packed in pots for intriguing up-close appeal. 

What are some of the best commercial landscape annuals here in the mid-Atlantic? Cheerful pansies and petunias. Stunning salvia and sunpatiens. Hard-working lantana and begonias. And you can’t beat the explosive impact of vibrant mums in the fall. 

New varieties of tried-and-true favorites add extra dazzle and intrigue. Impress tenants and visitors with flowers they don’t see everywhere else. 

The post Unique Fire Pit Designs to Inspire Your Backyard Oasis appeared first on Borst Landscape & Design.

Photo by Cindie Hansen on Unsplash

The post Is Intentional Landscaping The Best Deer Deterrent? Read On! appeared first on Borst Landscape & Design.

By Bridget Reed Morawski

Between 2011 and 2023, more than 90 percent of the nation’s congressional districts had at least one county receive a federal disaster declaration because of extreme weather. Some states, including California, Tennessee, and Oklahoma, have received dozens. The real number of congressional districts that have faced extreme weather could be even higher, says Amy Chester, the managing director for Rebuild by Design. The organization’s new publication, Atlas of Accountability, shows how climate disasters are occurring across the country, regardless of an area’s population density or geography.

“A lot of those districts [that didn’t receive a federal disaster declaration] have had high heat deaths and major heat waves,” she says. But “the federal government doesn’t give federal disaster declarations” for heat waves, so those events can’t be accounted for in the same way in the organization’s reports, such as its previous Atlas of Disaster. The data visualized by the map, which can be accessed on Rebuild by Design’s website, makes a nonpartisan case for more federal funding to adapt communities before a disaster, not just to build back what was destroyed. With additional funding, Chester says, designers and planners could “be a lot more creative in the way they want to respond.”

The post Mapping the United States of Disaster first appeared on Landscape Architecture Magazine.

Consistently cold weather is good for plants in winter while they are dormant.  It gives them time to “rest” between growing seasons. However, if the temperatures are inconsistent, that can cause problems.

An unusually warm winter with irregular temperature swings between freezing and warming may interfere with the “beauty sleep” your plants need to regenerate.

For example, in past years we have seen shrubs and trees display signs of winter damage. Although it may look bad, you needn’t be overly concerned.

Your landscape plants have an amazing ability to self-correct. And with a little TLC from your landscape maintenance crew, most of them will bounce back to where they were.

How Irregular Weather Affects Your Garden Plants in Winter 

Several years ago we experienced some out-of-the-ordinary temperatures that caused winter damage to some plants. Two conditions caused this:

1. an extended warm period until late in the fall followed by an abrupt plunge into freezing temperatures
2. extreme fluctuations between warm and freezing temperatures

Here’s how each of these conditions affected your landscape shrubs and trees.

1 Extended Warm Spell

If an extended warm period maintains the soil temperature at 50 degrees or above, plants will start to grow.

A few years ago, we observed roses with full green foliage – in December! Some were still blooming. Because of the unusually warm weather, they hadn’t gone dormant yet.

When the temperature suddenly dropped to freezing, a lot of those roses got tip burn that killed the foliage and turned it brown. Some customers were concerned because their plants suddenly looked terrible.

Normally, we’d have pruned roses well before then. We wait for them to enter dormancy to trim away diseased or dead branches because it’s easier to see them once the foliage is gone. Since they were still going strong, we waited to perform scheduled cutbacks.

By the way, the new green wood is the flower-producing part. Artful pruning at the right time of year encourages new (flower-producing) growth. You can prune roses any time of year because they are hardy. But we save the aggressive pruning (about 50% cut in height) for January or February.

An abrupt temperature change during an extended warm spell would shock a plant because it was responding to warm weather as if it were still in its growing season (but was not!). The plant may suffer because it did not experience the gradual transition into dormancy that prepares it for the hard freezes (mid-20s) that normally start in November.

2 Extreme Temperature Fluctuations

Normally, when a plant enters dormancy, the sap drains back down into the roots. The cell walls in the branches and buds thicken up. We call it “hardening off”. This prevents the cell walls from rupturing when temperatures drop to freezing.

If plants come out of dormancy and continue to grow there will be sap in the branches. Those cell walls may rupture and the buds break as the sap expands and contracts with the temperature changes.

Some damage to plants in winter won’t appear until April when the sap rises and the landscape comes back to life. Those of Southern origin such as the crape myrtle, holly, fig, gardenia, magnolia, camellia, and nandina may not look as full when they start to bloom in the spring. Why is that?

Even though bred to be cold tolerant, cultivars of Southern origin are vulnerable to the extreme conditions we experience in the Mid-Atlantic region. So in April, you may see fewer or no blooms. The damage may be unsightly but is not permanent. Your garden care crews will simply prune the dead material in spring and let the plant regenerate over the summer. 

Plants in Winter and Summer: How We Optimize for Hardiness

Plant Selection

There are particular plants that we use in landscaping over and over again because people love them. And they look great in your gardens. To maintain balance, we always work with a 60/40 mix of natives (those that naturally grow in our region) and cultivars of plants that originate in nearby regions.

Here in the mid-Atlantic, we are in a transition zone where warm climate plants give way to cold climate plants. The cultivars we plant in your yard, a mix of Southern and Northern origin plants, are carefully selected for their versatility and adaptability to our region.

The Role of Cultivars

Cultivars are constantly being developed by growers and college extensions to take hardiness traits from a related plant and put them into the desired landscape plant. They may breed them for cold tolerance, heat tolerance, or disease resistance. 

We use cultivars of northern-origin plants bred to tolerate heat and humidity. We use cultivars of plants of southern origin that are bred to tolerate winter cold. The breeding of cultivars extends the range of the origin plants making them more versatile and able to do well in our region.

Although we have no control over how Mother Nature will treat our plants in winter, we have learned over time to be adaptive and proactive in the areas of garden design, plant selection, and garden care practices. With good planning and regular landscape maintenance, we are able to maximize the beauty and longevity of the types of outdoor environments our customers ask us to create for them.

Have you been wondering how to bring out the fullest expression in your landscape and gardens? Our eBook: Choosing the Right Kind of Landscape Maintenance Firm, is full of valuable information to help you understand the fundamental differences between landscape maintenance companies.

The post Plants In Winter: Why Chilly Weather is Good for Landscapes appeared first on Surrounds Landscaping.

The post Your Design Guide For Luxury Rooftop Gardens appeared first on Borst Landscape & Design.

Planning your snow removal budget for the winter can be tricky. 

You want to make sure your contract covers all your winter needs. But what are your winter needs? And the big question: how much to budget for snow removal?

The goal: to protect everyone who spends time on your commercial property and minimize your organization’s chance of being exposed to snow and ice-related hazards such as slips, falls, traffic accidents, and property damage.

How to create a winter-proof snow removal budget? Opt for a seasonal contract. Or choose a time and materials contract with a readiness fee. Save money by limiting access. Understand that waiting until after a storm to hire snow removal won’t save you money. 

Joey Schneider, regional manager at Level Green Landscaping, offers some helpful tips, including:

Why snow removal budgeting can be tricky
Use your math
Opt for a seasonal contract
Choose a time and materials contract with a readiness fee
Save money by limiting access
Don’t just guess
Why waiting doesn’t save money
Pre-treating won’t cost you more
Extra money? Save it for next year 
The value of great vendor communication 
Use a single provider for your property’s needs 

Koi Pond Winter Care

Winters have become increasingly mild here in Northern Virginia, but winter is still the season when your koi fish and your pond equipment are most vulnerable. 

Here are the answers to some common questions about winter koi pond maintenance and koi fish care. We hope this information will help you choose the right kind of company to maintain pond equipment and the health of your fish.

Koi Pond Maintenance – What’s Best for the Fish?

There is disagreement as to whether it is better to let the koi follow their natural cycle and go dormant, or keep them active by heating the pond in winter. Some say it is better for the health of the fish to keep them active year-round.

Bianchi acknowledges that there is an advantage to heating a pond. Keeping the water warm in winter maintains much of the good bacteria on the sides of the pond and in the filter. The “good” bacteria contribute to fish health by processing waste and maintaining water quality. This is an important consideration because, when you shut the pond down for the season, all the bacteria die in the cold and must be regenerated in the spring when you restart the pond. This start up can take six weeks or more. And, during that time your fish will be vulnerable to disease.

Keeping pond fish active all year round in the mid-Atlantic climate zone is possible, but not entirely practical because heating a pond with a large exposed surface area is going to be expensive. For that reason, most pond keepers in the Virginia-Maryland area shut down their ponds and let fish go into their natural dormancy state.

There is disagreement among koi fish breeders as to whether it is better to let the koi follow their natural cycle and go dormant, or keep them active by heating the pond in winter. Some say keeping the fish active year-round is better for their health.

John Bianchi of Blue Ribbon Koi and Marine says there is an advantage to heating a pond over winter. Keeping the water warm in winter maintains much of the beneficial bacteria on the sides of the pond and in the filter. 

The “good” bacteria contribute to fish health by processing waste and maintaining water quality. This is an important consideration because, if you shut the pond down for the season, all the bacteria die in the cold and must be regenerated in the spring when you restart the pond. This start-up can take six weeks or more. And, during that time your fish will be vulnerable to disease.

Keeping pond fish active all year round in the mid-Atlantic climate zone is possible, but not entirely practical because heating a pond with a large exposed surface area is expensive. For that reason, most people in the Virginia-Maryland area shut down their ponds and let fish down-cycle into their natural dormancy state.

Prepare Your Koi Pond for Winter – Two Options

Winter Preparation One – keep the filtration system running.

This option is an easy do-it-yourself affair.

Fully heat the pond, run the filtration system, continue regular maintenance checks, and feed your koi fish as usual.

With this option, it is important to regularly check the pond filter to ensure it continues to run properly throughout the winter. The filter is home base for the “good” bacteria that clean the water of waste and keep fish healthy.

When you keep the filter running over winter, some bacteria will survive in dormancy rather than die off. In spring, the bacterial colony starts up much faster with a dormant filter as opposed to a dead filter. So you reduce the risk of losing fish to toxicity by shortening that pond start-up period.

Winter Preparation Two – shut down the filtration system.

This option requires the services of an experienced koi pond maintenance expert. 

Shut down the filtration system, drain water from all pipes and equipment, and run a floating heater or aeration device to maintain a hole in the ice. Keeping a hole in the ice allows the exchange of air necessary for the health of the fish.

If following option two, you will stop feeding the fish once the daytime water temperature stays below fifty degrees. Their bodies can’t process food properly at that temperature. So, you must stop feeding and allow their metabolism to slow down for the winter dormancy period.

One drawback of option two is that when the filter is shut down, there’s no oxygen flowing through it and all those beneficial bacteria die. So every season you will have to deal with what Bianchi (Blue Ribbon Koi & Marine) calls “new pond syndrome.” The bacteria colony will have to re-establish itself. 

That can take 6 to 8 weeks. There’s always the danger of high ammonia levels accumulating during that start-up period before the bacteria are able to handle the waste of the fish.

To counter this possible issue your pond maintenance expert may inject a winter bacterial treatment. Bianchi uses a product made by Ecological Laboratories called Microbe Lift. There is a winter formula that contains hardy bacteria that can withstand colder temperatures plus an enzyme that breaks down organic materials and waste.

Winterizing Your Koi Pond

This point bears repeating: In severe temperatures, it is essential to maintain a hole in the ice. That opening lets oxygen in and gases out. If the pond freezes solid, no gases can escape. Anything that’s breaking down inside the pond creates hydrogen sulfide—and that can be toxic and deadly to the fish.

Keep in mind that most garden pond designs are only three to four feet deep. That small volume of water can hold only limited dissolved oxygen for the fish. In a lake during winter, fish congregate in pockets. If the oxygen starts to deplete in one area, they just move to another area. They can’t do that in a shallow koi pond.

As long as you do a daily visual check, especially in periods of freezing temperatures, you should be able to catch and head off any potential problems before they can harm your pond equipment and fish.

If you’d like to get expert help maintaining your koi pond water quality and the health of your koi fish, schedule a phone consultation with one of our landscape management specialists.

Perhaps you’ve been wondering how to bring out the fullest expression in your landscape and gardens. Our eBook: Choosing the Right Kind of Landscape Maintenance Firm, is full of valuable information to help you understand the fundamental differences between landscape maintenance companies.

In severe temperatures, it is important to maintain a hole in the ice. That opening lets oxygen in and gases out. If the pond freezes solid, no gases can escape. Anything that’s breaking down inside the pond creates hydrogen sulfide—and that can be toxic and deadly to the fish.

Keep in mind that most koi ponds are only three to four feet deep. That small volume of water can hold only limited dissolved oxygen for the fish. In a lake during winter fish congregate in pockets. If the oxygen starts to deplete in one area, they just move to another area. They can’t do that in a shallow koi pond.

As long as you do a daily visual check, especially in periods of freezing temperatures, you should be able to catch and head off any potential problems before they can do harm to your pond equipment and fish.

If you’d like to get expert help maintaining your koi pond water quality and the health of your koi fish, schedule a phone consultation with one of our garden management specialists.

Perhaps you’ve been wondering how to bring out the fullest expression in your landscape and gardens. Our eBook: Choosing the Right Kind of Landscape Maintenance Firm, is full of valuable information to help you understand the fundamental differences between landscape maintenance companies.

The post Winter Koi Pond Maintenance in Arlington Virginia appeared first on Surrounds Landscaping.

As a former municipal forester, currently working as a forensic expert in tree-related cases, I frequently investigate felling and tree failure incidents that result in serious injury or death. I am consistently reminded why tree-felling safety is a MUST. Arborists and Loggers are sure to have felled many trees, while landscape and turf professionals likely range the gamut of tree-felling experience, from having never felled a tree to very experienced. Consider this a refresher for the experienced feller, and encouragement with a healthy dose of caution for the uninitiated.

Tree-felling safety is important because most tragic incidents can be prevented by following industry accepted standards of care.

Relevant standards for tree-felling are:

• ANSI Z133 Safety Requirements for Arboriculture Operations
• OSHA 1910.266 Logging Operations.

Get to know these standards and regulations if you are going to be tree-felling.

Training

If you are thinking about engaging in tree-felling, proper training and direction is essential. A reasonable foundation is a tree-felling and chainsaw procedure and safety course. Most courses consist of both classroom and field training. Many university forestry programs offer training through extension services.

It is also critical to match the sawyer’s skill level and training with the subject tree to be felled. The completion of a training program does not qualify a new sawyer to handle all trees/scenarios. Tree-felling is a skill that will continue to develop with experience and direction.

Personal Protective Equipment (PPE) & Equipment

Once you have completed your training in tree-felling and chainsaw safety, make sure that you are outfitted with the proper personal protective equipment (PPE). PPE for tree-felling consists of a hard hat, safety glasses, chainsaw protective chaps, hearing protection, sturdy footwear with steel toe or safety toe, and gloves. The chainsaw selected for felling trees must be the appropriate size (bar length) for cutting the subject tree and must be properly sharpened, fueled up, and in good repair. Having the appropriate equipment like tree-felling wedges, taglines, and other tree-felling gear may assist in the efficient and safe felling of trees.

Inspect The Tree

The first step is to inspect the tree and the site and decide whether the tree is a candidate for manual tree-felling. Consider your skill level and experience as you assess the size and degree of difficulty for each tree-felling candidate.

Inspect the tree for decay, cracks, or damage. Trees with structural defects are potentially dangerous candidates for felling. Trees with spiraling of the bark indicate spiraling of the interior wood grains, which may make it difficult to control the direction of the fall. Trees with dead branches or pockets of rotten wood are also difficult to fell by conventional notch and drop operations. Other danger trees in the area must also be considered.

If you find yourself unable to identify if these conditions exist, you may be in over your head, and you should consult with someone more experienced before proceeding.

The sawyer should examine the base of the tree. If the base is hollow or one side of the tree has rotten wood, it may not be a suitable choice for felling operations since the rotten wood can affect the direction that the tree falls. If the tree is leaning or has a slight lean the sawyer should use the bubble level on their phone or a hand level to determine the degree and direction of the lean.

The sawyer should also consider the balance of the tree’s crown to estimate the tree’s center of gravity in combination with its lean to determine where gravity will take it. Where possible, the sawyer should plan the felling operation in the direction of the tree’s existing lean and where the tree wants to go.

Appropriateness/Practicality Of The Felling Site

After inspecting the tree(s) as candidate(s) for felling, it’s essential to assess the area surrounding the trees, extending at least two times the height surrounding any tree to be felled. Is the location remote or heavily trafficked? Are there obstacles, structures, people, or property that will affect the ability to safely fell the tree? How much help do you have? Not all trees can be safely or practically felled. When in doubt, rely on experts with the appropriate equipment to perform the job safely.

I have felled many trees in my career but that does not mean I will attempt to fell a large tree in my residential yard near my house, roads, and many other obstacles. In a situation as such, it would be safer to have the tree pieced down in a controlled fashion by a tree climber or aerial lift operator. However, the same tree on an open piece of land with no traffic might be a perfect candidate for manual tree-felling.

Felling Operations

The next step is to plan an escape path, free of obstructions, to retreat from the tree as it begins to fall. The pathway of escape should be at a 45° angle in either opposite direction of the intended direction of the felling path and at least 20’ from the base of the subject tree being felled. The tree sawyer should always assume that the tree will fall in EVERY possible direction and take measures to ensure nothing can be harmed regardless of which way the tree falls. The tree sawyer must plan two retreat routes to use when the cut tree begins to fall.

Once the site is safe and clear and a retreat path is planned, the sawyer can initiate the felling-cuts. The most common technique used in felling a tree is a multi-step process that first involves the creation of an open-faced notch in the trunk. The notch consists of three precise and strategically made cuts: the sloping cut, the horizontal cut, and the back cut. In properly executed cuts, the notch positions the static load of the tree such that the sawyer, through the back cut and the remaining hinge, can reliably control the direction the tree will fall.

The typical notch used is called a “conventional” notch, but other notch styles are utilized depending on the circumstances. Properly performing and aligning the three strategic cuts is where I see the most mistakes. What may seem like a minor detail here can be the difference between a safely felled tree and a tragedy. If these cuts are not properly executed, it is possible to have the tree go the wrong direction and fall in an uncontrolled manner. I can’t stress enough the importance of perfecting the execution of these three cuts.

Start by sighting a downward sloping cut at a 45° angle towards a point that is approximately 1/3 the diameter of the tree. Then make the second horizontal cut to be level and meet the bottom of the sloping cut. These cuts should meet perfectly, and a 45° wedge should come out of the tree easily.

After this is complete, make sure that the notch is aimed in the intended direction of fall. Then give a warning to “stand clear”, and when assisting workers affirm “all clear” make the back cut. The back cut should be level and positioned slightly above the horizontal cut. Leave a strip of holding wood approximately 1/10 the diameter of the tree. Care must be taken to avoid cutting too deep or cutting through the hinge wood. If the hinge wood is intact, it will keep the tree on the stump and will guide the direction of the fall. As the tree begins to fall, keep visual contact with the tree with momentary exceptions for safely navigating your retreat path.

Even after the tree is down, there are still many hazards associated with limbing and bucking the tree, and the majority of the physical work remains. Just remember to stick with the tried-and-true techniques that have become standard, and don’t substitute online tree-felling videos for formal classroom and hands-on training.

Setting The Stage For Spring Tree Growth

Fall offers the opportunity to strengthen tree health and create a solid foundation for Spring tree growth. Read more…

Work within your skill level and graduate to greater degrees of difficulty over time as you gain experience and improve your skills. Happy/Safe felling!

Christopher Larson is an International Society of Arboriculture Board Certified Master Arborist with over 25 years of experience in urban forestry, arboriculture, and landscape design/maintenance. His work with Robson Forensic applies his expertise to a broad range of disputes related to the health, failure, and removal of trees, including injury, death, and financial claims.

Do you have a comment? Share your thoughts in the Comments section below, or send an e-mail to the Managing Editor at jessica@groupc.com.

“OTR has been aggressively recruiting talent to help us achieve our strategic goals, and John is a great fit to grow our aftermarket business segment,” said Mitch Mittlestadt, General Manager, Aftermarket.

King offers nearly 30 years of sales and operations management experience. This includes more than 10 years of experience in the tire industry, where he consistently increased sales growth for a major manufacturer. He is also responsible for improving customer experience through the development of sales tools, CRM system management, and more.

OTR Engineered Solutions is a market-leading global enterprise specializing in off-the-road tire, wheel, and track solutions for original equipment manufacturers (OEMs) and aftermarkets. Known for being an innovator in multiple off-the-road applications, OTR differentiates itself by providing value-added services such as warehousing, tire mounting, and sequencing, among other things. The firm has long established strategic partnerships with OEMs covering Construction, Lawn & Garden, Powersports, Agriculture, Forestry, Mining, Material Handling, and Specialty Vehicle markets. OTR’s infrastructure comprises 30+ facilities and warehouse locations throughout the U.S., Canada, Europe, and Asia, serving customers globally.

For more recent Turf Magazine coverage of OTR, click through the articles below:

OTR Introduces Grass Master XT Turf Tire

Get Equipped: Gas & Diesel Mowers

For many, the holiday season is a time for joy and celebration. However, the holidays can also be stressful, with additional costs and social expectations. According to the American Psychological Association, 38% of people said their stress level increases during the holidays. In another survey, 53% of people said they feel financially stressed by holiday spending, according to Principal Financial Group.

While stress may seem like a personal battle to deal with at home, The American Institute of Stress estimates that job stress costs U.S. industries over $300 billion each year as a result of: accidents • absenteeism • employee turnover • diminished productivity • direct medical, legal, and insurance costs, and • workers’ compensation claims as well as tort and FELA judgments.

Safety experts at Magid, a national PPE manufacturer and distributor, recognize that stress management is a growing concern. To help companies keep workers safe and avoid hits to their bottom line, Magid is offering free resources from its Safety Matters® Resource Center. Here’s their advice on recognizing and managing stress in the workplace.

Signs Of Stress

While the expectation at some workplaces is to  “leave personal problems at the door,”  that advice is never very realistic. And in this day of texting, social media, and a phone in everyone’s pocket, it’s even less likely. The communication age makes it more important than ever to make stress management a high priority But before you begin to tackle how to reduce stress, be sure you can recognize the impact and signs of stress in your employees.

Excess stress can be caused by personal problems or by work issues like lack of job satisfaction, or layoffs. But any source of stress can cause workers to lose focus. Stressed workers may also be more likely to turn to harmful ways of coping like alcohol, illegal drugs, or improper uses of prescription medicine – any of which can contribute to higher incident rates.

So just as you check for safety compliance, be on the lookout for signs of stress. Stressed workers often: seem overtired; have trouble concentrating; complain a lot or have low morale; seem anxious, argumentative, or irritable; and may have frequent accidents.

How To Help

What can you do if you have an employee checking some of these boxes? First, give them a chance to clear the air. Let them know your door is open and that you care. If the problem is work related, ask them what they’d like to see change and try to help where you can. The solution to the problem might be something as simple as:

Ornamental grasses can be real landscape superstars on your commercial property. 

Unlike lawn or turfgrass, ornamental grasses aren't meant to be mowed. These taller graceful grasses add aesthetic appeal to your commercial property, many growing to a majestic 36 or 40 inches or even taller. 

Landscape grasses offer year-round texture and graceful movement to your landscaping, without asking much in return. 

They’re low maintenance, cost effective, and some have frilly plumes that actually glow in the sunlight. 

And there are lots of these beauties that thrive here in the Mid-Atlantic, from Mexican Feather Grass to the cool-named Purple Love Grass. 

Since 2016, Dr. Drew Miller has served as the Director of the Turfgrass Management Program at Brentsville District High School. This program is the first of its kind and has an attendance of more than 200 students annually. As a result, graduates of this program have gone to top college turf programs and into professional roles in the industry. Currently, 18 graduates are enrolled in full-time turf programs at top U.S. colleges and universities, and eight graduates have taken roles in professional sports, university athletics and golf courses.

The Turfgrass Management Program takes students beyond the classroom and provides them with real-world experience in environments, equipment and grounds teams. Some experiences the students have had in recent years includes field prep for the ACC (Atlantic Coast Conference) Championship Game and the CONCACAF (The Confederation of North, Central America and Caribbean Association Football) Gold Cup as well as SFMA (Sportsfield Management Association) Student Competitions. Brentsville students have competed against collegiate programs around the country and have won several awards.

“Working with Toro is a dream, both for myself and for the students,” says Dr. Miller. “The dedication that Toro has to quality products, training and safety is critical to inspiring and educating the next generation of professionals in this industry.”

In support of the Brentsville Turf Toro Grounds Academy, Toro and its local distribution partner, Turf Equipment and Supply Company, are dedicated to helping the program transition to a complete fleet of Toro equipment. Toro will also be helping to develop classroom sessions which will include topics such as safety, maintenance, career development and more. Finally, Toro is investing in Brentsville students beyond their time in the Grounds Academy through two $2,500 scholarships. These scholarships will be awarded to graduating seniors that will be pursuing a two- or four-year degree in Turf Management or Engineering programs.

“We are invested in the future of turfgrass professionals,” says Lindsay Tucker, Marketing Manager at Toro. “In order to fully prepare students for a career in turfgrass, we believe they should learn on the best equipment possible and we are proud to partner with Brentsville District High School to help achieve that goal.”

Toro is excited to continue to grow with Brentsville and also explore partnerships with other high school turf management programs in the future.

For more recent Turf Magazine coverage of both Toro and the Green Industry’s interest in the future of the field, read through the articles below:

The Next Generation Of Lawn Care: Landscape & Sports Field Management

Mississippi State Turf Team Prepares the Perfect Pitch

Toro Announces Leadership Transition In Irrigation & Lighting

Bobcat Donation Supports Engineering School

AED Foundation & SkillsUSA Illinois Support Skilled Trades

From chest harnesses to chainsaws, this selection of tree care solutions will help your team of tree care professionals complete a wide range of tree services safely and efficiently.

Loftness 24SG Stump Ax™

Loftness has expanded its line of stump grinder attachments with the 24SG Stump Ax™. Featuring a 24” cutting wheel, the new model is designed for use with low-flow skid steers and excavators. The 24SG has a rigid mount, allowing operators to work quickly by repositioning the power unit rather than articulating the attachment itself. It has an angled hitch and forward-reaching boom to provide superior visibility and control. Visibility is further enhanced with Leonardi’s Phantom Wheel™ has cutouts, which create a see-through effect during operation. It is equipped with Tomahawk® teeth and is powered by a 110cc high-torque radial piston motor. The 24SG is compatible with 17 to 35.9 GPM flow ranges and requires 30 to 80 hydraulic HP. It can be ordered with a universal skid steer mount or a custom excavator mount.

Blue Diamond Attachments Excavator Drum Mulchers

The new lineup of excavator drum mulchers from Blue Diamond Attachments includes three models (Heavy Duty, Extreme Duty and Severe Duty) with cutting widths ranging from 30” to 50”. Compatible with compact, mid-sized, and full-sized excavators ranging from 4 to 20 metric tons, Blue Diamond excavator drum mulchers are built with high-quality components and steel to stand up to the harshest land clearing and mulching conditions. Cutting capacities range from 4” to 7”, and models are available to work with excavator auxiliary hydraulic flows from 9 to 45 GPM. A manual gate/door is available on the Heavy Duty model, while the Extreme Duty and Severe Duty models feature a hydraulic gate/door. A closed gate results in finer mulch, while an open gate cuts faster and is more efficient. The Extreme Duty and Severe Duty models also feature an extra counterblade on the hydraulic gate that can produce an even finer finish — and skid heights are adjustable on these two models for even more control. The Heavy Duty and Extreme Duty models come with one and two rows of chains each, while the Severe Duty model comes with four chain curtain rows and rubber side shields for extra protection.

NutriRoot Granular 3-3-3

NutriRoot Granular 3-3-3 from Arborjet | Ecologel features a blend of nutrients, seaweed extract, humic acid, surfactants, and humectants designed to increase root development and reduce moisture stress, the same benefits you’ve come to expect from the liquid formulation. NutriRoot Granular is easy to measure and apply, requiring no tank mixing. It also features a carbon-based backfill amendment for root collar excavation, radial trenching, and decompaction. Useable throughout the growing season, it is ideal for new tree plantings, and it’s the easiest way to fertilize new and existing shrubs, vegetables, annuals, and perennials.

Chester SRS Chest Harness

Designed by original 4SRT inventor, Mike Storey, the Chester SRS Chest Harness from Notch & Sterling is a comfortable, low-profile, and versatile chest harness purpose built for SRT (single rope technique). Made from lightweight and durable nylon webbing, the Chester is a serious upgrade from using a makeshift rope and carabiner to help tend your SRT ascent. Works perfectly with Notch Magneato, Rope Runner Pro and Sentinel Harness. Additional features include improved daisy-chain webbing and staggered clip-in loops.

Silky ZUBAT Ultimate Professional 330mm Saw

The saw that arborists and tree care professionals know and love, now with Ultimate improvements. The ZUBAT Ultimate features a progressive tooth design that provides a smoother start to the cutting stroke, while still maintaining efficiency with the aggressive curved blade. The new scraper-shaped GOKAI-ME teeth are perfectly designed to remove remaining sawdust and to make both rip-cuts, cross-cuts and slant cuts with ease. The new 3D roller lock system protects the scabbard from the teeth, giving it a longer lifespan. Electroless nickel plating coats the entire blade, giving it stronger rust resistance to ensure the saw lasts.

M18 FUEL™ 20” Dual Battery Chainsaw

The M18 FUEL™ 20” Dual Battery Chainsaw is designed for professionals who demand top performance and control. Delivering 70cc power, the chainsaw offers faster cutting with fewer stalls. The saw’s POWERSTATE™ Brushless Motor accelerates to full speed in under one second and maintains consistent performance under heavy loads. The versatile power mode select feature enables users choose between Standard Power Mode (4.4HP) for extended run time and cooler operation, or Peak Power Mode (5.8HP) for maximum power and reduced stalls in challenging conditions. Equipped with REDLINK PLUS™ Intelligence, the chainsaw ensures seamless communication between the tool and batteries. It’s optimized for use with (2) REDLITHIUM™ FORGE™ XC 8.0 batteries, providing up to 60 cuts per charge in 10” hardwoods.

Werk-Brau Rockhound Landscape Rake

The Werk-Brau Rockhound landscape rake removes rocks from ¾” to 8” along with other debris, leaving a level seedbed ready for sodding or seeding. With a 72” working width, the RockHound levels a wide swath but requires just 13-21 GPM of hydraulic flow. The attachment features rugged steel construction, weighs 1500 lbs., and ensures years of trouble-free service. Skid shoes allow operators to adjust the depth while limiting wear. Constructed of T-1 steel, the teeth are mounted to a double channel replaceable/reversible bolt on tooth bar. The rake bars and cutting edge are designed to provide better leveling for longer ground contact. A hydraulically operated bucket opens from the top for easy dumping and grading. The Werk-Brau RockHound attaches easily to any skid steer or mini loader, making it ideal for a wide range of landscape contracting projects.

Kress KC320.9 60V Top-Handle Chainsaw

The new Kress Commercial KC320.9 60V Top-Handle Chainsaw is the first piece of Kress Commercial equipment developed especially with professional arborists in mind. The KC320.9 rivals 45cc gas-powered saws, boasting 2.4kW of power and a chain speed of 79 ft/s. Its commercial-grade brushless motor delivers power and efficiency unlike other battery-powered chainsaws. With an optional 12”-, 14”- or 16” bar length and ergonomic, lightweight design – weighing less than nine pounds with its battery – the Kress Top-Handle Chainsaw is made for arborists who expect maximum power, precision and flexibility without the hassle, mess or expense of gas.

Read more Get Equipped features here.

Limited in production to only 50 machines, the uniquely designed 580 Super N backhoe loaders feature a metallic silver and dark gray color scheme, the throwback CASE “tread” logo, an air-suspension seat with special upholstery and individually numbered badge plates that bear the signature of CASE founder Jerome Increase Case.

The emblematic styling nods to a rich, 180+ year history of groundbreaking innovation at CASE. The company pioneered a wide range of road construction equipment and was the first to introduce a factory-integrated backhoe loader in 1957. CASE was also the first company to commercially release an electric backhoe loader, the 580EV, which came out in 2024.

The 97-horsepower J.I. CASE Signature Edition backhoe loader matches the industry-leading breakout forces and speeds of the standard 580 Super N and offers the same features like four-wheel-drive, PowerLift™ and Extendahoe® technology, ProControl swing dampening and ECO Mode for fuel savings. Different configurations are available with PowerDrive Powershift or Power Shuttle transmission options and pilot or the popular CASE foot swing controls.

To learn more about the J.I. CASE Signature backhoe loader, contact your local CASE Construction Equipment dealer or visit www.CaseCE.com/Signature580.

For more Turf Magazine coverage of CASE Construction Equipment, click an article from the list below:

CASE Releases First Electric Backhoe Loader

Get Equipped: 9 New Battery-Powered Options In Landscape Equipment

Edited by Kristen Mastroianni

Every month, LAM features new products of interest to landscape architects, from benches to fire pits, fountains, lighting and playgrounds.  We’ve rounded up 2024’s most striking products, including a Snøhetta-designed paving system, whimsical playground equipment, and an appealing outdoor lounger.

January: Public Furnishings

520VS SERIES: This new and versatile seating surface from DuMor features laser-cut bent steel straps. The method allows for a uniform gap between each strap, creating a clean and continuous look. The series will also include standard benches, tables, seat islands, and wall-mount benches.  For more information, visit www.dumor.com. 

February: Surfaces

FLYT FOR ASAK: In collaboration with the Norwegian manufacturer Asak Miljøstein, Snøhetta has designed a hexagonal permeable paver system that provides greater design flexibility as well as nature-based water management for urban areas. Different design options offer opportunities for creative and seamless transitions across urban spaces. The paving system also provides up to 28 percent permeability per square meter of water. For more information, visit www.snohetta.com. 

March: Water and Irrigation

STUDIOMADE CIRCULUS II: The Circulus II is part of Water Studio’s Studiomade collection, the design firm’s prefabricated product line. The basin is made of stainless steel, contains black river rocks, and runs on a submersible pump system. For more information, visit www.wstudio.com.

April: Plants and Planters

PYCNANTHEMUM × ‘SMOKEY MOUNTAIN MINT’: New for 2024 from Intrinsic Introductions is Pycnanthemum × ‘Smokey Mountain Mint’—a hybrid that will appeal to both people and pollinators. Growing to a height of 24 to 30 inches, it features lavender flowers and silver-purple leaves. It thrives in full sun and adapts well to most soil types, excluding overly wet conditions. For more information, visit  www.intrinsicintroductions.com. 

May: Cycling and Transportation

PARKLETS 2.0 CYCLING: Unused parking spots are repurposed with the Vestre Parklet 2.0 Cycling, expanding space for bike parking. Six modular units can be quickly installed and moved with forklifts, and the flooring adjusts to various levels with nonslip transition plates to ensure seamless integration. The racks are constructed from hot-dip galvanized steel with a lifetime anti-rust warranty, ensuring durability and environmental responsibility. For more information, visit www.vestre.com. 

June: Lighting

ADAPT TRUE RGB+W: Tivoli’s Litesphere True RGB+W LED strand is a commercial-grade outdoor lighting feature with several functional upgrades, such as a new receptacle design that prevents water penetration with a secure screw-on mechanism and double O-ring. Tivoli’s proprietary algorithm provides 16 million combinations of precise color tones that, along with audio, can be controlled through MADRIX software for a limitless spectrum of effects. For more information, visit www.tivolilighting.com.

July: Residential Furnishings

VINEYARD DAYBED: This spacious outdoor lounger provides both privacy and shade. A light Sunvision fabric or woven rope parasol roof is stretched on a triangular frame, sheltering a lacquered aluminum base for a double mattress that can be raised or reclined. The parasol options come in several muted shades, while the cushions can be customized in a wide range of colors and textures. Several options for subtle lighting at the base of the frame are also available. For more information, visit www.vondom.com.

August: Shade and Shelter

RESORT: Designed by F. Bruno Fattorini and Robin Rizzini for Paola Lenti, Resort is a modular outdoor structure that can be used to shade passageways or as a parasol. Made of aluminum with cast iron bases available in either matte or varnished colors, Resort comes in four fabrics: a white polyester, as well as Madras, Tamil, and Thuia, which come in a wide range of colors. Multiple structures can be positioned side by side or connected to create a large, sheltered space. For more information, visit www.paolalenti.it/en. 

September: Parks and Recreation

MOKU-YAMA: Blending the line between art and play, this open-ended playground structure encourages a range of social play. Designed by the Japanese architecture firm Kengo Kuma & Associates, the Moku-Yama is a play feature constructed from Alaskan yellow cedar posts mounted on steel brackets. It is only available in the colors of the cedar, keeping with the architect’s vision to follow natural form. It can be configured in a variety of ways, including options that allow for wheelchair users to play under the structure. For more information, visit www.earthscapeplay.com. 

October: EXPO Exhibitors

DUO TABLES & ENSEMBLES: These seating and table pairings feature waterfall edges and clean lines appropriate for a variety of low-profile installations. Powder-coated or polished stainless steel and Pennsylvania-sourced FSC hardwood can be configured in a variety of ways, including ADA-compliant bench options. For more information, visit www.forms-surfaces.com. 

November: Fences, Gates, and Walls

FREESTANDING TRELLIS: This versatile freestanding trellis can be used to create visual interest, section off outdoor areas, or establish a sense of enclosure. Available in two sizes, the trellis can be customized for its application. The frame is available in eight powder-coated hues, while the trellis is offered in 14 finishes, including Aluma-TEAK natural, white aspen, and driftwood. For more information, visit www.tuucci.com.

December: Fire and Heat

ARBOR ACCENT OLYMPIC STEEL FIRE PIT TABLE: Made of steel and accented with thermally modified wood, this table comes in a variety of sizes, colors, and finishes that can be customized. Offering a choice of natural gas or propane fuels, the embedded fire pit burns up to 470,000 BTUs. Accessory options include lava pebbles, wood or steel covers, and swivel casters. For more information, visit www.montanafirepits.com.

Do you have a new product that you would like to see in Goods? Submit your material to lamgoods@asla.org.

The post 2024: Goods of the Year first appeared on Landscape Architecture Magazine.

Czech garden machinery business Swardman s.r.o has partnered with power solutions provider Briggs & Stratton to create the Edwin 95 high-performance professional reel mower, featuring Briggs & Stratton’s Vanguard® 200 single cylinder engine.

One of the widest single reel mowers available worldwide, the Edwin 95 delivers an exceptionally precise cut with its 8-blade reel across cutting width of 37 inches. The mower is powered by the Vanguard 200 single cylinder engine, which delivers a power supply of 6hp, while remaining under the 44 lb. weight limit – both key metrics in the product’s development.

Swardman wanted a well-recognized industry name and good reputation for its partner in developing the Edwin 95, which led them to Briggs & Stratton. The two companies have previously collaborated, which further solidified the venture. The Vanguard 200 was integrated into the mower using 3D drawings supplied by the power provider, while the frame and mounting flange preparation was also accelerated using data supplied by the engine manufacturer.

Briggs & Stratton’s Vanguard 200 is a horizontal shaft drop-fit solution, with no reengineering required and features exclusive innovations, such as TransportGuard™, a 3-in-1 control that eliminates oil/fuel dilution. The engine enjoys optimized fuel management to improve resistance to stale fuel and lower total cost of ownership (TCO) thanks to its unmatched 600-hour air filter replacement intervals – double the industry standard. Plus, the Vanguard 200 includes a new optimized 3-step starting process that allows for a shorter rope pull with less force required. The mower’s performance of up to 7,885 m² per hour allows a standard football pitch to be mowed in slightly more than half the time of a match!

Fore previous Turf Magazine coverage of Vanguard and Briggs & Stratton, read through the articles linked below:

Get Equipped: Equip Expo Product Review

Ferris® Rebuilds Venture X & Introduces 300R Series

Dealer’s Choice

Ruppert Landscape has announced the promotions of Eric Long, Kevin Hill and Mark Anderson as Branch Managers to three separate locations along the east coast.

Eric Long has been named Branch Manager of the company’s Laytonsville, MD, landscape maintenance branch. In this role, Long will oversee all aspects of the branch’s operations, including the safety and development of team members, strategic planning, budgeting, training, customer service, and daily operations.

Long holds an associate degree from Raritan Valley Community College and is a Certified Landscape Technician (CLT). Before joining Ruppert, he gained valuable experience in general contracting, focusing on building and renovating homes and businesses. Eric began his career with Ruppert in 2012 as an Assistant Field Manager, and his talent and dedication quickly propelled him through several promotions: first to Field Manager, then Area Manager, and later Enhancement Manager. In 2018, he was honored with the company’s Branch Impact Award, recognizing his exceptional contributions and dedication. Earlier this year, he was promoted to Associate Branch Manager, where he accelerated his preparation for the Branch Manager role.

Kevin Hill has been promoted to Branch Manager of the company’s North Florida landscape installation branch. In this role, Kevin will oversee all aspects of the branch’s operations, including the safety and development of team members, strategic planning, budgeting, training, customer service, and daily operations.

Hill brings over 30 years of landscaping experience and holds several industry certifications. He joined Tree Amigos in 2008 as a construction foreman and later transitioned to maintenance management, overseeing a premier portfolio. In 2011, he took on leadership of the irrigation team, and by 2012, he advanced to Construction Manager in the landscape division. When Tree Amigos joined Ruppert in late 2023, Kevin was promoted to Associate Branch Manager, and his continued success led to his promotion to Branch Manager of North Florida this August.

Ruppert Landscape has also promoted Mark Anderson to Branch Manager of the company’s Richmond North (VA) landscape maintenance branch. In this role, Mark will oversee all aspects of the branch’s operations, including the safety and development of team members, strategic planning, budgeting, training, customer service, and daily operations.

Anderson joined Ruppert Landscape in August 2023 as Associate Branch Manager of the Richmond North branch. He brought with him nearly 20 years of industry experience in the Richmond market, having previously worked with two well-established local companies.

Ruppert Landscape Appoints Kang President & COO

Project EverGreen & Ruppert Landscape Renovate Park In Raleigh

Editor’s Letter

Mark Chisolm, certified arborist with Aspen Tree Expert Company, doesn’t see business slowing down as Autumn sets in. He sees it as the perfect time to “strengthen tree health and create a solid foundation to ensure landscapes will thrive come spring.” From pruning and aerating to fertilizing and leaf removal, there is still much for commercial landscape companies to focus on as the weather once again becomes crisp in the fall.

Being able to make informed, premeditative decisions is imperative to tree health. Researching potential problems and spending the time to complete inspections can save you from having to correct completely avoidable mistakes in the spring. Tree felling, for instance, requires proper training and knowledge to be done successfully. Part of that knowledge includes knowing which tools will work best for you and your crew, and the job at hand.

For all of the reasons mentioned above and many more, fall is the perfect time for tree care professionals to brush up on the most up-to-date products and procedures within the industry and Turf Magazine is here to help.

Jessica Schwartz

jessica@groupc.com
TurfMagazine.com
Twitter: @TurfMagazine

Sign up here to get your free subscription to Turf magazine!

As fall begins to emerge, tree care becomes a critical focus for landscape pros. With peak foliage arriving late September through mid-October, it’s the ideal time to prepare trees for colder months. Fall offers the opportunity to strengthen tree health and create a solid foundation for Spring.

Aerating and Fertilizing. Fall is the time when trees focus on root growth, so aerating and fertilizing are vital for their long-term health. Start by incorporating some fallen leaves into the soil to boost its nutrient content, being careful to avoid aerating too close to the trunk to avoid larger root damage. A well-aerated and fertilized root system in the fall will result in healthier, more resilient trees by the time spring arrives.

Pruning for Growth and Safety. Fall is ideal to prune branches and limbs. Trimming branches that pose risks of breaking during winter storms helps maintain safety and health. For high branches, tools like a pole pruner can help professionals reach them safely. Make sure to use with feet firmly planted on the ground, avoiding electrical conductors.

Protecting Young Trees. Newly planted, young trees need special attention during colder months. Thin, younger bark and trunk tissue make them vulnerable to weather and deer damage. Wrapping trunks and branches with protective material shields them from cold and allows roots to breathe. Regular inspection of wrapping is necessary to prevent pest infestations and ensure trees remain protected throughout winter.

Leaf Removal and Composting. Fallen leaves can clutter landscapes and lead to rot if not cleared. Professional-grade blowers or a mulching mower can help maintain tidy commercial sites. Rather than discarding leaves, consider composting them. Composting enriches the soil, promoting the healthy growth of younger trees in the spring.

Fall is the perfect time to give trees the care they need to stay healthy and vibrant year-round. Fertilizing, pruning, protecting, and composting ensures trees are prepared for winter and ready to thrive in spring. A little extra attention in the Fall can make a significant difference in tree health and landscape appeal for the coming year.

Mark Chisholm is a third-generation, certified arborist with his family-owned Aspen Tree Expert Company in New Jersey. His expertise in tree care has made him a sought-after consultant and industry spokesperson for the world of arboriculture.

Do you have a comment? Share your thoughts in the Comments section below, or send an e-mail to the Managing Editor at jessica@groupc.com.

How do we perfect the look of our landscaping?

Many landscaping services companies in Northern Virginia offer a standard menu of seasonal garden care. The best companies are proactive. They customize their service offerings to address the changes they observe in your landscape. They recommend garden enhancements, updates, and custom treatments.   

“Perfection” in a garden is not an endpoint. It is a process that involves making little improvements and enhancements over time to support its natural growth. It is a process of giving a garden the care services it needs at the right times in the season–then getting out of the way and letting it do what it does naturally: change.

A Garden is Never “Done”

Your landscape constantly changes: Plants fill out and mature, seasons pass from one to the next, and your sense of style evolves–as it should.

As your landscape changes so should the way your landscaping services company cares for it.

Your landscaping represents a significant emotional investment. It deserves the time and attention to reach its full potential. The key is hiring a landscaping company with the expertise to recommend the appropriate enhancements and upgrades to keep your landscape at peak potential over time.

Adaptive Landscaping Services “Go With the Flow”

What is perfect when you first plant it can become less so in a few years. Sometimes it’s because the plant’s location no longer meets its needs. It may have become shadier because neighboring plants filled out. Or perhaps soil conditions no longer provide an optimal environment.

Sometimes plants simply fail to thrive. In that case, the solution might be to move a plant to a more hospitable part of the garden and replace it with one better suited to the conditions in its former location. Because a landscape is a living entity that’s always in flux, it’s essential to have a knowledgeable expert to keep you informed of what is happening in your gardens and the best options for maintaining it going forward.

Just as the conditions in our landscape evolve, so do our preferences. The more your landscaping company takes an interest in your likes and dislikes, the more they’ll be able to display opportunities for improvement. As your relationship grows and trust builds, they’ll offer more value when matching your style.

Updates and Enhancements for Mature Landscaping

Mature landscapes, even ones that are doing well, require detailed attention. You could think of your landscape as a child. In just a few years, it has grown and has different needs. How your landscaping services provider cares for it will adjust to these changes.

A  specialty landscape maintenance company will invest the needed time and attention your maturing landscape needs to keep it beautiful as it grows and changes. They’ll shift their focus from primarily watering, weeding, and fertilizing, which are essential in the early stage of your landscape, and focus more on pruning and pest control in the later years.

For example, let’s say you have a tree on your property that looks good from a distance, but in five years, it’s become overgrown. It might offer great shade, but if it’s too bulky, it could cause problems for plants underneath the canopy. 

An expert would see how the crown could be thinned out to let in more light and balance the appearance of its shape and structure. With sensitive pruning—removing branches that don’t serve a purpose—your landscaping services firm can take your nice-looking, mature tree and turn it into something truly stunning.

Consider This: All the great gardens of the world (e.g. Longwood Gardens in Philadelphia and Butchart Gardens in British Columbia) were designed and installed by the best of the best. But that wasn’t the end. They are still cared for every day by full-time landscaping crews who can replace old plants, remove debris and dead materials, and make changes as the years pass. Your garden deserves the same attention.

Proactive and Detailed Garden Care is Essential for a Beautiful Landscape

There is always room for improvement in your landscaping, and you must hire a landscaping services company that knows you and your garden well enough to make the necessary adjustments. They should be proactive and candid about what to expect from your landscape over time and what they can do to keep it looking its best.

The truth is that investing in enhancements, modifications, and upgrades to your landscape services is a natural part of tending your landscape.

Are you wondering how to bring out the fullest expression in your landscaping and gardens? Our eBook: Choosing the Right Kind of Landscape Maintenance Firm, is full of valuable information to help you understand the fundamental differences between landscaping services companies.

The post The Best Landscaping Services Adapt to the Needs of the Garden appeared first on Surrounds Landscaping.

Flower Bulb Planting Guide: 10 Tips for Commercial Landscapes 
Planting flower bulbs is the ultimate plan-ahead gift you give yourself and your customers. 

Tuck ordinary-looking bulbs in the ground in the fall, and celebrate in the spring with an explosion of cheerful color. 

Spring bulbs are like a party on your property, shouting the blissful arrival of spring in riotous hues of red, yellow, purple, pink, coral and blue. They’re the first thing you see in the spring, before other flowers appear. 

You don’t have to look too hard here at Level Green Landscaping to find bulb super fans, including the company’s managing member and head gardener Doug Delano, who has personally planted close to 50,000 or so daffodils and tulips at his home in Maryland.
Just a fraction of that number can make a huge impact on your commercial property. 

But you have to plan ahead. 

When to plant bulbs? Where to plant bulbs? What kind? How many?

Plant spring bulbs from the end of September through October, in high visibility spots throughout your commercial property, from entrances to signage to huge impressive masses in beds and borders. What types of flower bulbs thrive here? Tulips and daffodils are always favorites, but crocuses and hyacinths also add a cheerful boost your customers and tenants will love. 

Need a bulb planting guide? Keep reading to learn more about tips for planting bulbs, including: 

When to plant bulbs
Where to plant bulbs
Types of flower bulbs
Planting flower bulbs: top tips 
You can’t go wrong with tulips
Delightful daffodils 
Combining bulbs with other plants 
How many bulbs should you plant?
Your bulbs have bloomed! Now what?
Why leave bulb planting to the pros 

Just when you think the watering season is winding down and you can forget about your hard-working irrigation system for a while, you can’t.

Your sprinkler system needs crucial attention before the winter chill moves in. 

Winterizing irrigation is critical here in the DC area, where freezing temperatures can quickly destroy an irrigation system that wasn’t properly winterized. 

What’s so important about sprinkler system winterization? 

It’s crucial to remove all the water out of the pipes, valves and sprinkler heads. If pooling water freezes and expands, your pipes break.

Actually, lots of things can go wrong with your irrigation system if you don’t have it winterized, from cracked valves to a broken manifold to a ruined backflow device.

Keep reading to learn more about winterizing irrigation, including:

Don’t winterize too soon
Get all that water out
Don’t forget the backflow
Why this is a job for pros
Common winterization questions 

Ask a few knowledgeable plant lovers for their favorite low-maintenance plants and get ready for the floodgates to open.

There are so many amazing plants that don’t need much fuss, from shrubs that look great in your commercial property’s foundation plantings to easy-care perennials to anchor your planting beds.

Why should you care? 

There are lots of benefits to a low-maintenance commercial landscape: reduced water usage, less pruning, fewer fertilizers, and less time-consuming maintenance.

Level Green team members have some great suggestions for low-maintenance plants, so let’s get right to it.

If you’re sipping cider, watching football or figuring out your Halloween costume for the neighborhood contest, winter’s just around the corner.

Is your commercial property ready?

Winter brings with it safety and liability concerns, worries about property damage and a long list of commercial property fall tasks. Chances are, you could use a hand. 

How to prepare your commercial property for winter? There’s a lot, from securing snow removal services to leaf removal to winterizing your irrigation system. 

Keep reading to learn more about important commercial property fall tasks, including:

Sign a seasonal snow contract

Partner with a company that prioritizes proactive communication 

Get a pre-season property inspection 

Tend to tree branches

Plan for ice

Install snow stakes 

Leaf removal

Winterize irrigation 

Protect plants and trees with mulch
 
Fall fertilization for healthy turf

If you’re driving through Prince George’s County and notice big riding lawn mowers on the job — but nobody’s riding them — you’re not seeing things.

They’re robotic mowers, powered by rechargeable batteries and innovative technology to precisely, safely, efficiently mow grass with no landscaping crews aboard. 

Level Green Landscaping is testing two of the high-tech machines manufactured by Colorado manufacturer Scythe, making it among the first landscaping companies on the East Coast to use the innovative mowers. 

As robotic lawn mowing technology continues to advance, you’ll be seeing more of these meticulous mowers out on the job — maybe even on your property. 

Why should you care? What are the benefits of these commercial autonomous mowers? 

Plenty. They’re quiet, incredibly accurate, safe, better for the environment than gas-powered mowers and free up landscaping crews for other tasks on your property that require more critical thinking skills. 

Is it worth the investment to include a landscape irrigation design in your landscape plan? Yes. Think of irrigation as an insurance policy for your landscape. It will be there when needed to sustain your gardens through a prolonged dry spell.

Here in Northern Virginia, our increasingly unpredictable precipitation patterns don’t always cooperate with the needs of our landscapes. When the rain comes makes all the difference.

Established trees and perennials, especially natives, aren’t much affected because they can withstand dry periods. What we are most concerned with are the newly installed plants. They haven’t had sufficient time to develop full root systems.

 

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The Importance of Irrigation System Management

Regular precipitation in late winter and early spring is critical to landscape plant development. A prolonged dry spell at this time of year can be destructive to plants because they are just coming out of dormancy and putting all their stored energy into growth.

About 80% of landscape plants do most of their growing from March to mid-June. And, aside from autumn, this is typically the time of year when we get most of our rain. If the rains don’t come, the irrigation system can fill the gap.

That’s why it is important to do system maintenance checks and adjustments to the settings so that your system will work properly when it is needed. Here are a few tips to help you ask the right questions when selecting a garden maintenance team to manage your landscape irrigation system.

Adjust Landscape Irrigation Settings for the Way Plants Use Water

First, we want you to understand three principles of how plants use water that directly impact your irrigation system settings and the watering schedule:

1 When to water

Morning is best because plant root systems take up water most efficiently early in the day. The evening is okay as long as you are certain that the plants being watered are not susceptible to fungal diseases. For example, red twig dogwood likes damp soil, but for many other plants, nighttime watering could cause problems. A well-designed garden usually has plants grouped according to their soil, sunlight, shade, and moisture requirements.

2 How much water

Water generously and infrequently. Infrequently? Yes. A deep, thorough soak followed by a period long enough for the soil to dry out in the top several inches will stimulate deep root growth. This makes the plants more hardy and self-sufficient.

3 Water delivery system

There are two basic types of irrigation: overhead spray and drip. Most shrubs, small trees, and planting beds will do better with a drip system that lets water penetrate directly into the root zone. If set up properly, the drip method is extremely efficient: no wasted water and almost no loss to evaporation. For lawns, overhead spray delivery is the way to go.

Conditions That Affect the Effectiveness of Landscape Irrigation

There may be special conditions on your property that influence how effectively your landscape irrigation system works. Here are some technical adjustments to your system design that will support water conservation while ensuring that your plants get the most benefit.

1 Plant Types With Different Moisture Needs

The well-planned landscape irrigation system design will include high and low-pressure nozzles, or nozzles preset on differing cycles. This way, different groupings of plants can receive only the water they need.

2 Compacted Soil

When soil is hard-packed or dry, it takes longer to absorb moisture. So, unless you rework a compacted area, you can’t fully soak it in one cycle because it won’t have time to penetrate. It will simply run off and be wasted. The solution for this issue would be a programmable sprinkler set to deliver small amounts of water at intervals that allow water enough time to penetrate the roots in between cycles.

3 Small or Oddly Shaped Areas

To achieve even coverage in small or uniquely shaped areas, use more sprinklers and adjust the water flow accordingly. This will conserve water keeping by it on the lawn and landscaping–and off sidewalks, driveways, patios, and decks.

4 Uneven Terrain

Slopes and low spots can cause overwatering (areas at the bottom of the slope) or puddling which can cause problems, particularly with turf. Here again, your landscape maintenance contractor can make adjustments to flow rates or add sensors that will shut your landscape irrigation system down if flooding occurs.

Modern smart irrigation systems are adaptable to a wide variety of site conditions and weather conditions. Having the right equipment in place is just as important as having the right garden maintenance contractor with the expertise to manage the system for you. 

If you have questions about your landscape irrigation system and would like an assessment, contact one of our garden management specialists to schedule a walkthrough at your home.

Perhaps you’ve been wondering how to bring out the fullest expression in your landscape and gardens. Our eBook: Choosing the Right Kind of Landscape Maintenance Firm, is full of valuable information to help you understand the fundamental differences between landscape maintenance companies.

The post Landscape irrigation design tips for northern virginia homeowners appeared first on Surrounds Landscaping.

Landscape water features such as ponds add an extra dimension of sensory pleasure to your overall backyard experience. But you should be aware that pond maintenance requires an extra level of attention and expertise from your landscape maintenance provider.

Routine inspection and cleaning by knowledgeable landscape maintenance technicians is imperative to ensure the proper functioning of your pond pumping and filtration equipment.

And if your pond happens to be a koi pond, the need for the expert care of a koi specialist is critical to the health and longevity of your koi fish.

So what is required for simple pond maintenance and what else on top of that is required if your pond contains koi fish?

The Pond Maintenance Checklist

Landscape pond maintenance is fairly straightforward. Your Surrounds Garden Management crew will regularly run through a checklist of tasks that includes:

1. Skimming debris off the surface
2. Flushing the filters
3. Maintaining the correct water level
4. Cleaning filters
5. Checking the pumping system to ensure it is operating properly
6. Netting (in autumn to prevent leaf litter from clogging the system) 
7. Draining and flushing the system to prepare the pond for winter

The first order of business is to confirm that the correct equipment is being used. For a pond to function effectively, the pumping, circulation and filtration system must be adequately sized for the water volume. If a system is incorrectly sized, it will have to work too hard and may need to be replaced prematurely. 

If you plan to grow aquatic plants in your backyard pond, we advise that the pond be located in a sunny spot because plants need at least five hours of sunlight per day to thrive. Also, aquatic plants do best in still water. So, if you wish to include a waterfall in your pond design, you will need to position plants far enough away so they won’t be subjected to turbulence. This is particularly important for floating plants such as lotuses and water lilies.

It is also important to note that plants don’t do well in the presence of fish–because the fish eat them! If you do want to combine fish and aquatic plants, the plants must be separated from the pond water by containers to keep the fish from nibbling on them. The use of floating islands for plants is another strategy for keeping them in the pond but separated from fish.

Unlock the full potential of your lawn and gardens!

What’s the difference between a conventional landscape company and one whose staff understands design, horticulture, and landscape systems? To find out, click the button below.

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Additional Requirements for Koi Pond Maintenance

1. Filtration. A koi pond requires two types of filtration systems: one extracts waste produced by the fish and other organic debris; the second filter houses beneficial bacteria that convert toxins into harmless substances.
2. Aeration. Depending on the size and the number of fish in the pond, you may need an aeration device to circulate oxygen through pond water. Sometimes, incorporating a waterfall into the design can fill the need for aeration.
3. Purification. Pond water must be tested to monitor nitrate levels and to maintain the correct pH balance. Water must be treated because chlorine or other chemical additives present straight from the tap can kill koi fish.
4. Pond Depth and Size. To keep fish healthy and safe from predators, a koi pond must be at least three feet deep and contain a minimum of 1,000 gallons of water.
5. Shade. In addition to overhanging foliage to help diffuse sunlight, the pond design should include a slight overhang around the edges to provide additional shade for the fish during the hottest times of the day.

Although items number 4 and 5 in the list above are related to fish pond design rather than pond maintenance, they are important to note here. Why? Because if your pond does not already meet these specifications, it would not be advisable to introduce fish to the environment. 

Pond Maintenance Requires Expertise

Because of the unique needs of live fish, our landscape maintenance staff refer to specialty vendors with expertise in balancing pH, keeping bacteria levels in check, and physically inspecting fish for health.

If you want to deep dive into the topic of koi pond maintenance, we have an article on our website that focuses on fish health called koi pond maintenance tips. Another of our articles will help you understand how to be prepared for winter koi pond maintenance.

Water features, especially ponds, can contribute an extremely desirable and calming effect to a backyard environment, making it feel like a private sanctuary. We just want you to be aware that these beautiful enhancements require a bit more care, attention, and expertise from your landscape maintenance company to keep them beautiful.

If you’d like to learn how to take better care of your pond and water features, schedule a consultation with one of our Garden Management specialists. Perhaps you’ve been wondering how to bring out the fullest expression in your landscape and gardens. Our eBook: Choosing the Right Kind of Landscape Maintenance Firm, is full of valuable information to help you understand the fundamental differences between landscape maintenance companies.

The post The Pond Maintenance Checklist for Northern Virginia Landscapes appeared first on Surrounds Landscaping.

Before you begin a landscaping project, there’s an important question you need to ask yourself: Should we hire a landscape architect, or not?

The answer to that question depends on the size of your project. Unless it is fairly simple and limited in scope, you should speak with a landscape architect first. Here’s why.

Landscape Architect, Landscape Designer, or Garden Designer?

Should we hire a landscape architect or a landscape designer? Before you can decide, you need to understand the differences between the three types of landscape design professionals. Although portions of their expertise and training overlap, each design professional has a specialized area of focus, and you want to be sure you choose the one that is best suited to your project.

Landscape Architect
A landscape architect is registered as a Professional Landscape Architect (PLA) and licensed by the state in which they practice. They may also be a member of the American Society of Landscape Architects (ASLA). They have training in site analysis & engineering that enables them to solve complex grading and drainage issues. They have expertise in construction methods for hardscaping and structures. Landscape architects possess extensive knowledge of plant materials regarding local ecosystems.

Landscape Designer
A landscape designer is an expert at designing hardscape features such as patios, retaining walls, and walkways. They are also skilled at plant selection and building structures such as fences, arbors, and pergolas. They may have a degree in landscape architecture, but they do not yet have a license from the state.

Garden Designer
A garden designer is focused primarily on horticulture. Their skills lie in designing, planning, and installing garden plants. They are best at designing the layout for planting areas, selecting plant varieties, and focusing on the artistic and sensual characteristics of a garden.

Benefits of Hiring a Landscape Architect

College degrees and licensing credentials are by no means a guarantee of talent. That being said, a landscape architect is trained to be the most thorough evaluator of a site. They weigh the challenges and opportunities available on your entire property to create a master landscape plan that ensures your home and outdoor spaces work together harmoniously.

Begin your project with a dream and a plan!

You are at the threshold of an exciting journey. This eBook will provide sound guidance as you take your first steps.

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Assuming that talent and creativity are evident in the architect’s design portfolio and in the ideas they discuss with you, here are some of the benefits you can expect a landscape architect to bring to your project:

1 Master Design Plan
A landscape architect can help you see both the big picture and fine details to create a landscape master plan that takes all your ideas and transforms them into a well-balanced composition.

2 Overcoming Site Complications
A landscape architect is capable of creative problem-solving when faced with a complicated site. Steep slopes may have to be terraced or worked creatively into a design. There may be mature trees that must be preserved and fruit trees or large shrubs that need to be moved to a better location. A landscape architect can fully assess your site for what can be preserved, replaced, or moved.

3 Grading and Drainage
Before you can plant the first perennial bed or lay down your first slab of bluestone, you need an expert grading and drainage plan. While you’ll never see this work, it must be done if you want your landscape to thrive. Proper drainage will keep rainwater from pooling on your hardscape surfaces and creating a nuisance. And it ensures your plants get the moisture they need without drowning them.

4 Curb Appeal
A landscape architect’s trained eye will heighten the visual impact of your front yard by determining an approach to the property that shows off the house and makes the front entry inviting.

5 New House
If you are building a new house, a landscape architect can assist the residential architect in strategically positioning the house on the lot. They consider multiple viewpoints when assessing how a house will relate to its surroundings by analyzing existing grades and sun exposure, and by asking how you expect to spend time in the various outdoor spaces.

Does It Cost More to Work with a Landscape Architecture Firm?

Sometimes, yes. It depends on whether your landscape architect works for a “design-only” firm or a landscape design-build firm.

If you hire an architect from a design-only landscape architecture firm (no construction services), you’ll often pay a premium. They start at a higher price point for design services because that’s all they do. And some people are okay with that because, once they have the design, they can shop it around to different landscape contractors to get pricing for the implementation. There will be a range of cost estimates depending on how accurately the different contractors interpret the design and how they do their pricing. This approach leaves you open to a greater margin of error.

The advantage of working with an architect from a landscape design-build firm is that one company—specializing in landscape architecture and construction and project management—will be accountable for all parts of your project from start to finish. And their cost estimates can be extremely accurate because they are already anticipating construction/implementation requirements while they are developing the design.

In either case, a landscape architect is best equipped to evaluate the assets and challenges of your property and work with those characteristics to develop a landscape design that accomplishes your goals. Unless your project is limited in scope, it is to your advantage to speak with a landscape architect.

If you are thinking about investing in a landscape design project, our eBook: Expert Guide to Planning the Landscape Design of Your Dreams, is full of valuable information to help you develop your ideas.

The post Why Hiring a Landscape Architect Ensures the Best Outcome appeared first on Surrounds Landscaping.

You know that you want to work with a landscape architecture firm. But you aren’t entirely clear about the difference between a design firm and a design-build firm. Which would be right for your project? 

If you are in the early stages of planning a landscaping project, this question is bound to come up. And the short answer is that both types of firms employ landscape architects. The key difference between them is in the process. That will affect your experience of the project from design through the construction of your landscape.

What makes landscape design-build beneficial to the client is that it is a seamless approach. We are responsible for every aspect of the project.

Howard Cohen, Professional Landscape Architect

Advantages and Disadvantages

A design-build firm combines the services of both a landscape architecture firm and a landscape construction firm. There are efficiencies built into this approach to landscape architecture that can be advantageous to the client. Chief among those advantages is that the design and the budget are developed in tandem. When the design is finished, you have an accurate cost estimate for constructing it.

Alternatively, if you hire a landscape architect for design services only, you must enter into a “design-bid-build” process. In this model, the homeowner will seek multiple estimates from contractors in hopes of striking the best deal. A potential disadvantage here is that the merit of an individual contractor’s bid depends entirely on how well they read and understand the design plans.

Creative Partnership & Quality Control

The design-build approach to landscape architecture starts with a partnership between the client and the landscape architect. The architect is a member of the same team that will construct the design that you create together.

All team members work together for a shared purpose under a shared set of standards from day one until project completion. High-level communication and quality control are built-in. This is a significant benefit to the client—and there are many more benefits to consider. Such as:

Begin your project with a dream and a plan!

You are at the threshold of an exciting journey. This eBook will provide sound guidance as you take your first steps.

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1 Value Engineering

Another benefit to the homeowner is creative value engineering ideas. For example, when the budget is near the limit, design-build landscape architects know where to find flexibility in the design. By modifying methods or materials, they may accomplish parts of the construction less expensively without having to go through a major redesign. They are able to do that because they routinely communicate with the construction department and understand the costs involved.

A design-build landscape architecture firm has that flexibility built into it. We can help our clients get very close to their desired outcome and maintain reasonable control of the budget in the process.

2 Efficiency Maximizes Budget Dollars

A design-only landscape architecture firm must produce many pages of intricately drawn construction details (called sections) to make sure the selected builder will have a thorough explanation of how a design is intended to be built. Our construction crews don’t need as many detailed sections because they work with the same group of landscape architects every day. Our landscape architects are in the field checking with crews at least once a week. The benefit to the client: Budget dollars saved from reduced need for construction documentation can be allocated elsewhere in the project.

3 Seamless Design to Construction Smoothes Out the Bumps

With multiple parties involved, there is an increased possibility of miscommunication during construction. If not addressed promptly, these “hiccups” may result in delays, unforeseen costs, or contention.

Imagine that a construction contractor encounters an issue on the job site and must make a decision before continuing. The contractor calls the client and asks them what they want to do. The worried client calls the landscape architect. The architect visits the site and checks the design plan. It turns out that the contractor misread the plan… Get the idea? A lot of steps (and time) are required.

In a design-build project, communication between construction and design is ongoing. If there is a mistake, we own it because we promised the client.

The construction management component is built into the Surrounds process. It’s not an add-on.

Barry Schneider, President, Surrounds Landscape Architecture & Construction

4 Direct Sourcing: Best Materials at Best Price

A design-only landscape architecture firm may specify a particular tree or type of stone in their design only to find out weeks later that these materials are unavailable—or that the price has changed significantly.

A design-build firm will characteristically be in touch with the current costs of plant stock and construction materials because their landscape architects and job managers order plants and construction materials every week.  They know what materials work best, what is available from their vendors, and when there is excess stock that may result in discounts to be passed on to the client.

Why Don’t More Landscape Architecture Firms Offer Design Build?

That’s a mystery. Although the benefits are clear, only a few landscape architecture firms offer the design-build approach. Surrounds is both a landscape architecture firm and a landscape construction firm. We build what we design. Our architects know construction and our construction crews understand design. Your project benefits from the formal training and a broader range of capabilities of a professional landscape architect who will design and oversee the construction of your project.

If you are still thinking about investing in a landscape design project, our eBook: Expert Guide to Planning the Landscape Design of Your Dreams, is full of valuable information to help you develop your ideas. Or, if you are ready schedule a consultation call with one of our landscape architects.

The post Landscape Architecture and the Benefits of a Design-Build Approach  appeared first on Surrounds Landscaping.

Landscape architects use stone retaining walls and other hardscape features to define functional areas and to create connections between them. They may use multi-level patios, steps and walkways, for example, to finesse natural elevation changes on a site. Hardscaping and retaining walls give shape to the landscape overall and enhance its natural beauty.

Strictly speaking, a “retaining wall” is used to retain soil when it’s necessary to hold back a steep grade. However, we use walls of differing heights in landscaping to achieve various goals in service of the design intent. Aside from terracing slopes to create level areas on a site, we use retaining walls and freestanding walls for

• Bench seating in a gathering space
• Low borders along raised planting beds
• Defining outdoor rooms
• Privacy and security

Retaining Wall Construction Methods

1 Masonry block walls (our preferred method) require a poured concrete footer, cinder block, and natural stone veneer that is fixed to the block wall with mortar.  We run rebar through the channels in the cinder block and fill them with concrete for reinforcement. The cinder block wall provides a rigid structure to support the natural stone facing which is purely decorative and has no structural function.

2 Segmental retaining wall systems (SRWs) are manufactured wall systems consisting of interlocking concrete blocks that are vertically secured by an adhesive. The wall sits on a gravel base rather than a poured concrete footer. To maintain horizontal stability, SRWs use synthetic mesh fabric anchors called geogrids. These extend from the back of the wall and are buried in the backfill.

Begin your project with a dream and a plan!

You are at the threshold of an exciting journey. This eBook will provide sound guidance as you take your first steps.

DOWNLOAD THE E-BOOK

Custom Built or Manufactured Wall?

The advantage of manufactured block wall systems, says Jeff Taphouse of Techo Bloc, is the speed of installation that comes from the efficiency of a complete system. “You don’t have to wait for a poured concrete footer to dry. You can dig, pour gravel, install the base course, and build your wall all in the same day.

That speed can translate into cost savings on labor because there is no requirement for highly skilled craftsmen. 

The obvious advantage of custom-built retaining walls is creative freedom. In the hands of skilled stonemasons, there are no limitations on the design vision.

What to Expect When Retaining Wall Construction Begins

There will be dirt and lots of it. Whether the project is large or small, retaining wall and hardscape construction proceeds methodically through five phases. 

The first three of those construction phases require meticulous attention to detail. The beauty and longevity of your landscaping project depend on the thoroughness of your landscape construction crew. They are building a foundation to support the colorful, living landscape that will emerge at the end.

1 Site Preparation

Crews create access to bring equipment onto the property, and they identify a staging area where they will store materials. They also take care of any demolition needed on site to create a blank canvas. This first phase can be shocking to some clients if, for example, we’ve torn out a section of fence and put what appears to be a road through their back yard. They know it’s part of the plan, but the reality can be a bit disorienting at first.

2 Excavation and Drainage

We start shaving down the grades or filling low areas to prepare for patios. We dig trenches for subsurface infrastructure: drainage, gas and electrical lines, and wall footers. We work with our subcontractors to install pipe and run cables. After county inspection, we backfill the trenches and start building.

3 Wall Building

We begin to build masonry block walls and get the sub-base ready for patios and other hardscape features. Next, we set stonework and lay pavers. After we complete this phase, we are at the halfway mark.

4 Rough Grading

We fill in any holes that we’ve created, fine-tune grades, and add soil where beds are going to be built up. We complete work on the drainage system that we started earlier. At this point, the property looks exactly as it should, but there are no plants in the ground, no mulch, no sod. It’s all dirt and stone, but it looks orderly.

5 Lights, Sound, Plants

Now the transformation happens. We bury lighting and audio cables and run irrigation. We bring in plants, install lighting fixtures, mulch the beds, and roll out sod. In a matter of days, we’ve taken this months-long job from a hardscape desert to a lush landscape.

Retaining walls are an essential part of the hardscaping portion of your landscape. Freestanding garden walls, stone retaining walls, and borders fit together with patio areas and walkways to make a complete composition and to present the flower beds and other plantings in the most flattering way. 

If you’ve been thinking about investing in a landscape design project, our eBook: Expert Guide to Planning the Landscape Design of Your Dreams, is full of valuable information to help you get started.

The post How Landscape Architects Use Retaining Walls to Define the Landscape appeared first on Surrounds Landscaping.

2023 may not be an easy year when it comes to landscaping business profit margins. 63% of Chief Economists surveyed by The World Economic Forum expect a global recession later in the year, and 91% expect a slowdown in demand. This is likely to have a severe impact on the landscaping industry as customers try to cut down maintenance contracts and delay any new installation projects. On the other hand, any projects that do take-off might be impacted by the record-breaking inflation that may only ease deep into 2023. How can landscapers stay on top of these economic trends and avoid them from cutting into their landscaping business profit margin? We’ve got you covered!

Read the full post below to understand the state of the economy and tactics to maintain a healthy profit margin.

What to Expect from the Economy in 2023

Canada and the US have similar economic indicators for 2023, as the central banks for both countries attempt to rein in inflation. Bank of Canada policy rate has reached its expected peak of 4.5% already and further hikes could be in store. US Federal Reserve officials have also indicated a policy rate hike between 5%-5.25% in the upcoming year, based on how the job market evolves. As a result, both countries can expect tighter borrowing, a decline in new house starts, and a slowdown in the service sectors that depend on real estate growth – such as landscaping, lawn care etc. Greater policy rates will also squeeze household budgets across North America, which could impact maintenance contracts and landscaping business profit margins in the residential sector.

For commercial and city landscaping, the outlook is likely to be more balanced, with the federal funding for climate change and infrastructure coming through. However, continued labor and material shortages could delay project takeoffs, and some commercial real-estate projects may be put on hold as businesses assess the economic situation.

Impact on the Landscaping Industry

The ‘highest ever inflation’ since 1982 was the chief concern for the landscaping industry in 2022. Many owners, especially those with a smaller landscaping business profit margin chose to increase their prices to respond to the expensive costs of fuel and labor. As reported in the Wall Street Journal, prices for lawn care services such as mowing increased by 22.4% in 2022. Now with a recession looming ahead, the higher costs may no longer be sustainable in 2023 for many customers of the landscaping service providers. As households grapple with uncertain times, cutting down on their lawn maintenance contracts may certainly seem more appealing. While the commercial landscaping sector may not be as volatile and reactive, large projects can be shelved until markets in the US and Canada stabilize. In short, the year ahead might present significant challenges in terms of cash flow for many landscaping businesses.

Tactics to Improve Landscaping Business Profit Margin

While the general sense of gloom can be demotivating, landscaping businesses that adopt an agile approach may come out stronger from the slowdown. Here are a few tactics that can help maintain or even increase your landscaping business profit margins:

1. Raise prices for immediate relief
2. Plan a customer outreach about costs
3. Be more financially prudent and review spending
4. Use technology and third-party services for procurement

1. Raise Prices for Immediate Relief

Increasing your prices can offer an immediate relief to landscapers as extra costs are passed on to customers. However, landscaping businesses can be more strategic about increases and conduct a ‘lifetime value’ analysis to make sure your most valuable customers get lower hikes. Another way to ensure you don’t lose customers to price hikes can be spreading them across multiple months and adjusting them more proactively based on actual cost fluctuations.

2. Plan for a Customer Outreach about Costs  

How you communicate any price hikes to your customers can be as important as deciding the percentage you want to increase them by. Communicating your reasons and rationale for the hike transparently and informing your customers that this could be a temporary hike linked to your costs can go a long way in renewing contracts. For customers who choose to not renew their contracts, you can still keep in touch. This way you’ll be the first company they consider once the situation improves.

3. Be More Financially Prudent and Review your Spending 

An economic downturn is often a great opportunity to review spending patterns that affect your landscaping business profit margins. This means not just cutting down your costs but also being on the lookout for smarter investment decisions. For example, if you’ve been putting off switching to electric lawn mowing, the higher fuel costs present the perfect opportunity. Another interesting idea would be to be more nimble with your budget by adopting a monthly or even weekly budget process to keep tighter control of your spending.

4. Use Technology and Third-Party Services for Procurement

While a slowdown is never desirable, its effects on technology adoption can be the silver lining in the long run, especially for landscaping business profit margins. As per Harvard Business Review research, companies that strategically invest in technology and decentralize during a downturn emerge stronger once the economy picks up again. Often this can also help control costs and make your processes more efficient. For example, partnering with GoMaterials can ensure you get high-quality materials without any delay, making sure your crew is never wasting any time. When every hour of billing counts, it can be a game-changer for your landscaping business.

As we approach spring, the landscaping industry is likely to get a clearer idea about which way the winds are blowing. Regardless of the market condition, landscaping businesses that tighten their belt, and are ready for the challenge are likely to emerge leaner, better, and stronger in 2023.

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What do you think would be the biggest challenge for maintaining a healthy landscaping business profit margin in 2023? Let us know on social media!

The post Maximizing Landscaping Business Profit Margin During Inflation appeared first on GoMaterials.

ChatGPT seems to be making waves as the next best thing since sliced bread. From instantly writing mobile app codes to mimicking the writing style of Bob Dylan, the internet has found many novel ways to use it. But is it another fashionable online tool or can using ChatGPT for your landscaping business actually save you time? The GoMaterials team decided to take a closer look!

Read the full post below to learn how ChatGPT can help your landscaping business and how it can be important in the long run.

What is ChatGPT and generative AI

Let’s start with the basics. You may be familiar with text or voice-based AI assistants such as Apple’s Siri, Amazon’s Alexa, or Microsoft’s Cortana. Most of these programs have a simple goal – accurately predicting your intent in a way another human can. Of course, it’s easier said than done, and simpler AI tools often misunderstand human language usage. Generative AI is a new class of intelligent programs that can ‘generate’ a wide range of content – from written content to audio and even deep fake videos. For example, Open AI, the makers of ChatGPT, have also created DALL-E, a tool that can artificially create life-like photographs. What DALL-E is for photos, ChatGPT can be for any text-based output – from poems to essays or blogs.

How to Get Access to ChatGPT for Landscaping Business

While there was initially a waiting period and invitation-only access for ChatGPT, it’s very easy to sign-up for the AI tool nowadays. You can sign up with your personal or business email in a few simple steps – similar to any free online service like Gmail. Once you have your id and password, you can start using ChatGPT for your landscaping business. For the newer ChatGPT4 version, you may need to join a ‘waitlist’.

Three Ways of Using ChatGPT for Landscaping Business Today

The landscaping industry is facing an ongoing labor shortage in the last few years. Each passing year fewer young people enter the industry, adding pressure on the current workforce. While ChatGPT cannot solve this issue, it can reduce the stress of managing all aspects of your business with a small team. For larger landscaping businesses, it can open up greater efficiencies to save time and overhead costs of research, training, and communications. Here are a few ways your landscaping business can start using ChatGPT immediately:

1. Using ChatGPT for Landscaping Business Administration and Research

Smaller landscaping crews often suffer from the need to achieve everything, everywhere, all at once. Does running installations and rushing back to email quotes while you talk to a new prospective customer sound familiar to you? ChatGPT cannot take away hundreds of calls you normally make every day, but it can help you save those hours of staring at a screen, unsure of how to word an email. Of course, you can always rely on your friendly humans at GoMaterials to do the calling. 🙂

The more well-defined your prompt, the easier it can get to get an email written from ChatGPT. Here is a simple email we generated with a simple prompt.

It’s important to remember that you can also give instructions about how the email should be. The outputs can vary based on your intent. Try out a few different ways until you get the right tone. ChatGPT can also modify the email to add a few snippets. We even got it to write a small joke, although it will not be hosting Saturday Night Live anytime soon!

Pro-tip: ChatGPT does not know your customers and employees as well as you do, so don’t forget to add a few lines to customize your message.

2. Using ChatGPT for Marketing Your Landscape Business 

Digital marketing and search engines have changed the game for small and medium landscaping crews. By ranking higher on Google or Bing, you can now reach a wider audience than ever before. At the same time, it can feel like the odds aren’t in your favor, particularly considering the time it takes to write SEO-friendly articles that will help your landscaping business rank higher or to write social media posts about a current topic. As a single business owner, you may even be unsure of the right marketing strategy for your landscaping business.

ChatGPT can be your writer, marketing strategist, and social media manager all rolled into one, as long as you’re willing to spend the time adjusting its input. Here is a simple blog we generated by adding a prompt – ‘write a blog post about why customers shouldn’t get rid of landscaping maintenance contracts during a recession’.

Pro-tip: ChatGPT output can sometimes trigger plagiarism detectors, which can penalize your blog and site rankings. Remember to scan any articles you create using ChatGPT through free plagiarism tools such as Grammarly.

3. Using ChatGPT for Operations and Training

As an industry facing regular employee churn, onboarding new employees and operations team members can sink your productive time. Especially training recruits on plant zone knowledge and substitution guidance can be challenging without an expert arborist on your team. ChatGPT can shorten the learning curve and help new employees pick up the reins faster. It can also be a handy research tool for your operations team when you are in a pinch due to plant shortages and need an alternative.

Pro-tip: ChatGPT cannot replace an arborist’s knowledge of ideal substitutions or the experience of sourcing experts who know on-ground conditions well.

ChatGPT and the Future of Landscape Industry

Technology has an astounding ability to double or triple its capacity every few years. For example, the smartest household computers of the 2000s cannot compete with the computing power of the latest iPhones. In many ways, ChatGPT is still in its earliest stages of development, yet to unlock most of its potential. When it’s ubiquitous, it will change how landscaping businesses manage their supply chain, respond to customer queries, or even build strategies. As a result, landscaping businesses that adopt it earlier than others will have a competitive edge.

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Have you tried using ChatGPT yet? Tell us what you used it for on social media!

The post How to Use ChatGPT for Your Landscaping Business appeared first on GoMaterials.

If you have been worried about how to bid on landscaping jobs, you are not alone. With more competition and an ongoing labor shortage, bidding and estimating have been one of the leading causes of stress for landscapers. Underbidding or overbidding can directly impact your profit margins or win rate. This article will explain the basics to get the right balance in your bid to ensure they are both competitive and profitable! We will also highlight some common mistakes that cost landscapers profitability on their bids.

How to Bid on Landscaping Jobs using the Right Pricing Strategies for Materials

As explained in our profitability guide, landscaping materials generally contribute around 40% of the total project cost. However, this also presents an opportunity to increase your margins. Finding the right pricing strategy for materials is crucial to your profitability.

Strategy 1: Use the latest market pricing whenever possible

Many landscaping companies opt for blanket or formula-based pricing for their materials, particularly for plant/tree materials, to save time on bidding. It is also not uncommon to plug in prices based on the pricing catalogs shared by nurseries. Unfortunately, the enduring plant material shortages and supply chain constraints have had a chaotic effect on pricing trends – which means you may end up paying big for not using updated pricing. For instance, it’s a common practice for some to use the pricing saved in their estimation software for multiple bids. However, as our 2022 Plant Shortage Report revealed, the pricing for 1-gallon pots increased by almost 40% in 2022. Imagine the impact on your profitability having to go ahead with a large planting job based on an outdated bid.

Strategy 2: Never use the cheapest quote from your supplier, and leave a buffer

Another common trap that landscaping teams get sucked into is using the cheapest quote as standard pricing in their bid. What happens if the supplier can no longer deliver the items at the quoted price or runs out of stock before installation? You will either have to purchase materials with inflated costs or switch vendors. Both approaches can cut into your profits. It is better to use average market pricing for the bid to have a safety margin. This way, when you win the bid, you can use the crazy cheap pricing for a bigger profit margin!

Strategy 3: Get more competitive by searching beyond your usual network

Busy landscaping project managers and estimators prefer going to the same suppliers for convenience. However, researching out of the state/province for your materials can sometimes offer a surprising competitive advantage. Factors such as local weather also play a role when bidding. For example, the GoMaterials team helped many Texan landscapers control their pricing during the freeze of 2021 by sourcing materials from other states with similar plant zones.

Strategy 4: Account for the landed cost of your materials

In our deep dive into landscaping transportation costs, we explained why 74% of truckers expect the delivery costs to rise. Multiple factors including volatile fuel costs, and a snowballing truck driver shortage across North America are responsible for the highest rise in transport costs. As a result, your landed costs can often have an unpleasant surprise that can deeply damage your profitability. It’s safer to add a buffer for transportation costs in your final bid.

How to Bid on Landscaping Jobs like a Pro by using GoMaterials for Pricing

Not everyone has the time for this level of analysis for a bid. In fact, most landscapers do not. The discrepancy between estimated and actual cost of landed materials is unsurprisingly the root cause of barely profitable landscaping projects. There is a simple way to bid like a pro-choosing GoMaterials for material cost estimation. GoMaterials experts help professional landscapers win bids without losing profitability with a proven strategy to get the most accurate pricing for wholesale plant materials.

Here is why our customers rely on us for material pricing for their bids:

• Latest market pricing from trusted nurseries
• Price comparison with a large pool of suppliers in and out of state/province
• If you specify it’s for a bid, we will leave a safety buffer in our pricing to account for fluctuations in price
• If you win the bid, we will re-quote the materials 2-3 weeks before the job, knowing we no longer need a safety buffer – to make sure you get the most competitive pricing
• We help you through any negotiations to get the pricing you need to be profitable
• We get you pictures of all materials before delivery and so much more!

Bonus Tips on How to Bid on Landscape Projects

Understanding how to bid on landscaping jobs for your business requires you to pay attention to the often-neglected procurement and supply chain aspects. It can take some time to get used to evaluating each bid on other criteria apart from the hustle to win. As you grow your business, you might want to also factor in the long-term impact of a job on your crew, equipment, and sometimes just your peace of mind. The good part is, you can always rely on your friendly material-sourcing experts at GoMaterials to keep you profitable. All the best on your bids for the 2023 planting season!

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What is the trickiest part of bidding on landscaping jobs? Tell us on social media!

The post How to Bid on Landscaping Jobs, Explained by GoMaterials Estimator appeared first on GoMaterials.

Amidst fears of a slowdown and high input costs, 2023 can be a challenging year for budgeting and maintaining landscaper profit margins – especially for contracts awarded 1-2 years ago. Understanding the plant material demand and cost trends across categories such as trees, perennials, shrubs, palms, and conifers can help improve your profit margins. Not sure where to get this data? We’ve got you covered! Check out our analysis below to get pricing-based insights on our best-selling material in Q1 of 2023. You can click on the links below to jump to Canada or Southeast USA sections.

Canada Trends

• Perennials
• Conifers
• Trees
• Shrubs

Southeast USA Trends

• Palms
• Perennials
• Shrubs
• Trees

Canada Plant Cost Trends 

As per our analysis, prices for many plant categories have seen a correction after consecutive years of price increases. The cost of trees, for example, decreased by and average of 4% across all sizes for best-selling specimen trees. Check out our analysis of each plant category below to estimate how it impacts landscaper profit margins.

Perennials

On average, plant costs for the most popular perennials have slightly decreased in Q1 2023 vs last year, averaging -5% in price for all sizes. Prices for certain varieties in smaller pot sizes have increased however. For instance, the price for the 1L Achillea Millefolium increased by 5%.

Conifers

While perennials are trending down on average, the price of conifers has roughly increased by 10% YoY when considering the most popular sizes. For example, the highest price increases for both Picea Glauca and Pinus Strobus are for the 200-centimeter sizes, at 10% and 17% respectively. For Larix Laricina, 200-centimeter varieties may not be the highest, but are still selling at 21% higher prices.

Trees

Landscaping trees are the most interesting category in our analysis, with a drop in their prices after consecutive years of growth. As explained in our post last year, 40mm to 70mm trunk diameter sizes have been the most popular in recent years, with a 10%-15% increase in their prices in 2022. However, midway through Q1-2023, prices for the same sizes have either remained the same or dropped by at least 10%. Across the top-selling trees, 30MM Acer X Freemanii ‘Autumn Blaze’ is the only variety selling at 25% higher tree costs.

Shrubs

Interestingly, shrubs in Canada have exhibited volatility in their plant cost. This pattern has made it difficult to draw any meaningful conclusion about its impact on landscaper profit margins, but we will be keeping a close eye on present plant cost trends in the coming quarters.

Southeast USA Plant Cost Trends 

A consistent theme across all plant material categories in the Southeast USA seems to be a decline in plant cost. This drop in material prices has opened opportunities to increase landscaper profit margins. Read on to learn more about our analysis of each category below.

Palms

Palms have exhibited diverse changes in price in Q1 2023. Similar to Canadian shrubs, the palm’s inconsistent changes in pricing makes it difficult to pinpoint the exact root of the change. We have noticed that Sabal Palmettos have fallen out of demand (-35% YoY) and the Ptychosperma Elegans have increased in presence on orders (+55% YoY); trends both reflected in their respective price changes.

Perennials

While the perennials season is only getting started, their prices have not dropped across the board. Partial recovery from the plant shortage and more diversification can be some of the factors responsible for the early trends. As we approach Q3, we will be better able to provide a clearer picture of what this means for landscaper profit margins.

Shrubs

As the outlier across categories, shrubs offer some insight into the effect diversification tends to have on plant costs. For example, Wax Myrtle, a regular best-seller has been displaced by Clusia Guttifera, perhaps due to their greater availability and lower costs. More innovative swaps such as Clusia Guttifera can ensure greater landscaper profit margins as the year progresses.

Trees

Consolidation in the tree selection preferences seems to be the only indication of any impact of a slowdown for landscaping trees. Order volumes for all best-selling trees grew by 20%-40% in Q1 2023. Another noticeable trend in the tree category is Acer Rubrum falling out from the best-selling list. A drop in the prices for Myrcianthes Fragrans and an inclination towards hardy and native ecosystems may have helped change the pattern.

Keeping Up with Plant Costs for Greater Landscaper Profit Margins

Landscaping is a hardy industry not unlike the plant materials used for many landscape construction jobs. However, it’s not untouched by macroeconomic trends. As slowdown concerns mount, landscaping businesses need to keep a closer eye on the material they have already committed to procuring. Working with a professional procurement team such as GoMaterials can be a great way to ensure you capitalize on opportunities to increase landscaper profit margins!

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Are you researching prices for an upcoming job? We can help! Send in your plant list to our sourcing experts to get the best estimate from hundreds of nursery partners.

The post Q1 2023 Plant Cost Trends & Impact on Landscaper Profit Margins appeared first on GoMaterials.

The Northeast USA and parts of Canada have experienced a more severe shortage of specimen trees in recent years, accounting for almost 80% of tree shortages in this region. When it’s harder to source the item, using a tree broker to keep the costs in check seems like the most logical thing to do. However, traditional tree broker services may not always be the right fit for high-value projects, where the smallest deviations from timeline or price can snowball into larger issues jeopardizing your profitability. The need of the hour is a reliable partner who can go beyond the scope of traditional tree broker services. From estimation to delivery, GoMaterials can help you in ways traditional tree brokers just can’t.

Discover six game-changing services offered by GoMaterials below.

#1 Real-time communication

One drawback of relying on tree brokers is the communication lag between landscaping procurement and suppliers. Especially when dealing with items in short supply, price and availability can change on a daily basis. Delayed communications about these micro fluctuations can eventually catch up with you, causing a crisis that can suck up your productive time. For example, a last-minute no-show by the supplier can set back your profit margins and sour the relationship with your customers. It can get even more frustrating if your tree broker is absent while you sort out the mess. At GoMaterials, we help avoid this situation by handling all communication between landscapers and tree nurseries to track delivery schedules more efficiently and solve issues before they arise.

#2 Pictures for quality check

Another thorn in the landscaper’s side is the lack of transparency about quality. It can unleash a chain of avoidable events – such as rejections by city inspectors. For example, receiving a lower grade tree, say a ‘Florida #2’ tree instead of ‘Florida Fancy,’ can force you to arrange for returns, and a fresh order may not be at the same price. Not all tree brokers will stay and help landscapers deal with the aftermath.

On the other hand, GoMaterials facilitates a picture-based validation of all materials so you get what you see, saving countless hours spent dealing with an avoidable situation.

#3 Delivery follow-ups

A common complaint most landscapers have when dealing with tree brokers is the lack of follow-up and follow-through. Most traditional tree broker mandates end before the final delivery, leaving the landscapers alone in their struggle if a delivery goes wrong. In contrast, the GoMaterials team is with you until the trees are in the ground and the project is officially over. For example, our team went above and beyond a traditional tree broker in Florida when a customer’s project was delayed due to a hurricane. We also helped arrange last-minute storage to prevent the materials from dying since they were already loaded.

#4 Rejected material processes 

Getting approvals on materials is one of the most stressful routine activities in the 2022 GoMaterials & Synkd Stress Survey. Not only does a quality rejection delay the project, but it also impacts other jobs. Lack of a well-defined process and lack of support from your tree broker adds more pressure on operations, accounting, and landscaping crews. This picture looks very different when you partner with GoMaterials. Here are some examples of the unique processes we follow in case of a rejection.

• Getting picture-based proof for the rejected material
• Figuring out the best-case scenario to support the landscaping team (arranging refund, replacement, or discount)
• Coordinating new replacement materials with the supplier
• Working around the clock for all of this to save time for landscapers

#5 Expanding your material search range 

The unsaid rule in landscaping is to know and master your crop. Many brokers in Florida and other Southern states, for example, specialize in a specific category of plant materials. While this method has served brokering service providers well, it can add limitations in the era of mixed-material planting. Most large landscaping projects today have a complex plant and tree list, which requires estimators to go beyond their regular suppliers. It’s common for a single large order to be filled using multiple nurseries. With our vast supplier network across Canada and the US and unmatched procurement flexibility, GoMaterials can easily fulfill full plant lists that traditional tree brokers may find tough to keep up with.

#6 Modern, tech-based approach to landscaping procurement

Despite a consistent push by various industry associations, technology adoption in agricultural and landscape enterprises is still low. Most tree brokering services aren’t an exception to this rule, with many opting for old-school methods such as paper catalogs. Unfortunately, the demand and supply cycles for the industry are changing too rapidly for this approach to be sustainable. Recognizing the need to be more responsive, GoMaterials has invested in proprietary technology that ensures competitive pricing and optimized truck routes to reduce transport costs. We have also extended the transparency of our operations with a digital dashboard that lets you keep track of all estimates, in-progress orders, and product substitution notifications from your web browser.

As industry trends transition to allow for greater diversity in tree selection, landscapers need a new type of support system. From estimations to delivery, GoMaterials can be the partner that sets your landscaping business for success in the new era of landscaping.

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Searching for a tree broker in Florida, California, New York, Texas, the Carolinas, or Canada? Contact us to explore how we can help.

The post GoMaterials vs. Traditional Tree Broker: 6 Unmatched Services appeared first on GoMaterials.

Attending a landscape conference or tradeshow is necessary for anyone in the industry – nurseries and contractors alike. With thousands of visitors attending green industry conferences, attendees have a golden opportunity to make connections and get updates on the latest trends in the industry. However, it can also be overwhelming to attend a conference or a trade show without a solid plan. It’s easy to lose track of your objectives at the event.

The good news is that there is a simple way to avoid trade show prep hassles and ensure a positive show ROI. Keep scrolling for our ultimate checklist for landscape conferences and tradeshows!

The Ultimate Checklist for Any Landscape Conference or Trade Show 

1. Finalize and align your objectives
2. Ensure you’re attending the right landscape conference or trade show
3. Set mini targets for each business objective
4. Map out the floor to maximize your efficiency
5. Set aside time to explore new solutions, connections, and companies
6. Plan custom cards or leave-in material
7. Delegate sourcing needs to focus on business growth at landscape conferences

Finalize and Align Your Objectives for the Landscaping Conference

Zeroing in on your exact objective needs to be the first step in your landscape conference checklist. It can instantly boost your efficiency and help manage your time at the tradeshow. For example, if you plan to attend a plantscaping conference to grow your business, a networking event or mixer can be more efficient than workshops or panel discussions.

Ensure You’re Attending the Right Landscape Conference or Trade Show

Landscaping conferences and tradeshows can be expensive investments when you factor in association membership fees, entry costs, and, when applicable, exhibitor charges – not to mention the travel and stay expenses for everyone traveling for the show. It then becomes critical to understand the focus of a conference. For example, while a tradeshow can be open to everyone in the industry, the focus can be more on hardscape or technology. Unless you plan to upgrade your software or you focus on hardscape installs, this kind of a show may not be the best fit.

Set Mini Targets for Each Business Objective

With the high stakes involved in each landscape conference, you need to be as thorough and exact as possible with your goals for the event. If meeting suppliers is your primary objective, be sure to include details such as the number and type of nurseries you want to meet. Adding these granular details can also be a great way to prioritize the conferences you want to participate in.

Map Out the Floor to be More Efficient with Your Time

A conference can be highly distracting, with each exhibitor vying for your attention. It’s a lot like going to a famous tourist destination where simply winging it without an itinerary can lead to feeling unaccomplished and dissatisfied. The best way to avoid this scenario in a landscape conference or tradeshow is to study the floor map beforehand. Be sure to note the locations of exhibitors you want to meet and the sessions you’re interested in to estimate the time you will need to cover all destinations. This way, you will not miss any booths or exhibitors you should be visiting to achieve your objectives.

Set Aside Time to Explore Newer Solutions and Companies

No travel itinerary is complete without setting aside dedicated time for unexpected exploration. The same applies to any landscape conference or tradeshow. Identifying future trends early on is usually a good idea, no matter your objectives for the show. However, there is a better way to explore newer solutions and potential partners. For instance, you can dedicate time in your schedule to walk around the booths or network with industry peers. You may even end up making a valuable connection in the process!

Plan Custom Cards or Leave-in Material for Each Landscape Conference

Making connections at a landscape conference is invaluable since it’s the fastest way to get face time with your potential partners or customers – before you start working together. However, an average plantscaping conference or tradeshow may see you meeting hundreds of new people, and it’s the same for them. Leaving a memorable business card or promotional material is the best way to keep yourself top-of-mind to everyone you meet. Try putting your picture or a funny doodle on your cards to distinguish your business. Remember to plan any printing and design work ahead of time. Keeping it for the last minute can not only be expensive, but also leave room for errors.

Delegate Sourcing Needs to Focus on Business Growth at Landscape Conferences

Two pairs of hands are better than one, whether it’s planting a shade tree or growing your business. You can maximize and focus on growth if you’re not simultaneously trying to strengthen your procurement by finding new suppliers. You can always rely on sourcing partners like GoMaterials to free up your time at a landscape conference. With our extensive nursery network and constant push to rate their quality, you’re assured of sourcing from the best suppliers for any job.

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Are you planning on attending plantscaping conferences in 2023 to meet nursery partners? Catch up with our team to learn how we source from the best suppliers from North America!

The post The Ultimate Checklist for a Landscape Conference & Trade Show appeared first on GoMaterials.

Landscaping has always been a labor-intensive industry, boasting one of the longest workweeks across all sectors. Being a landscape business owner is hardly any easier. In fact, many landscape business owners frequently multitask and tend to involve themselves in everything from estimation to material delivery. However, there is often a hidden cost in not detaching yourself from the day-to-day operations: how can you focus on growing your business while being ensnared in repetitive yet seemingly critical tasks? The key to achieving landscaping business growth may lie in deciphering how to organize with the intention of eliminating day-to-day tasks from your plate.

Read on to discover effective strategies to grow your landscaping business. You will learn about:

• Establishing landscaping business growth through a strategic growth plan
• Analyzing areas of your business needing assistance
• Landscaping business growth around key performers
• Landscaping business growth through delegating to experts

Let’s delve right into it!

Establishing landscaping business growth through a strategic growth plan

Clearly, the last few years have been a mixed bag for the landscape industry. It is natural to wonder how to effectively run a landscaping business when each year brings unexpected challenges. From COVID-related aftershocks to soaring fuel prices, macroeconomic trends are evolving rapidly, demanding that landscaping business owners establish a strategic plan to navigate growth.

For example, an Axiom survey has revealed that over 80% of younger generations may continue spending more time on gardening in 2023. If you are a smaller landscape business owner, this could translate to fewer new residential maintenance contracts. Try implementing a strategic business plan by looking at new growth opportunities and revenue streams, such as snow removal or pivoting to more installation projects. This approach brings landscaping business growth by allowing owners to allocate their budgets to purchase necessary equipment for specific services, hire experts in those areas, and promote the services to existing and new customers.

By doing so, business owners can stay ahead of trends instead of suddenly encountering revenue gaps throughout the year.

Analyzing areas of your business needing assistance

A strategic business plan also aids in analyzing underperforming areas of your business. This step is crucial in understanding how to organize your landscaping business without the need for day-to-day involvement from the owner. Collecting this data can be challenging, but it is usually well worth the effort to identify what disrupts your weekly routine. Is it bidding last-minute on RFPs that are suddenly brought to your attention? Or perhaps following up on payments for a substantial job crucial for clearing dues?

Identifying trigger points that derail your well-laid plans allows you to seek assistance in these specific areas. For instance, if bidding and estimating materials consistently consume your time, you can consider relying on professional services like GoMaterials and Takeoff Monkey to take on that workload. After training your staff to utilize these services, you can review the final output without getting bogged down in project details.

Landscaping business growth around key performers

Most landscaping business owners are well aware of, and deeply concerned by, labor shortages. This concern remains consistent in consecutive State of Landscaping reports over the past few years, and for good reason. The quality of your labor force significantly influences your success. Business owners often involve themselves in day-to-day operations when the labor force lacks skills or the ability to make tough decisions. Cultivating a culture of independent action can be a rewarding strategy to reduce involvement in every task.

The Pareto Principle, or the 80/20 rule, states that 80% of the consequences come from 20% of the causes. In this context, 80% of the work completed comes from 20% vital few team members. This serves as an excellent starting point for identifying individuals who truly contribute value to your business. Once these high performers are identified, it is essential to acknowledge their contributions by assigning tasks that you often find yourself pulled into. Recognizing their value increases the likelihood that newly promoted employees will be motivated to learn quickly and alleviate at least one day-to-day task from your workload. By continually organizing your landscaping business around key performers, you not only free up time to focus on long-term goals but also establish redundancies in case you become too occupied to handle specific tasks.

Landscaping business growth through delegating to experts

The world is entering an era of specialization. Involving yourself in activities where you lack expertise often leads to an ever-increasing list of day-to-day responsibilities. Insufficient resources and expertise can encroach on your workday, even affecting tasks at which landscaping business owners excel. Consider estimating plant material, for instance. Even seemingly unrelated events can trigger a series of unforeseen price increases or expenses without insights from professional estimators. Delegating estimation to a team of professionals, such as GoMaterials, can help you avoid rectifying estimation errors down the road and shield you from potentially profit-diminishing losses.

Fortunately, modern landscaping business owners can leverage numerous online and mobile-based services tailored to their needs. From estimation and takeoffs to design and accounting, delegating to field professionals can spare you the troubles and hassles of attempting to handle everything on your own. In the process, you not only sidestep potential profit pitfalls but also safeguard yourself from burnout.

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Need more tips on how to jumpstart how to organize your landscaping business growth? Consult our experts on social media!

The post How to Achieve Landscaping Business Growth by Removing Yourself From the Day-to-Day appeared first on GoMaterials.

One thing is certain about maintaining landscaping profit margins in 2023 – the need to stay on top of unpredictable plant material prices! As we mentioned in our June post about Q1 prices, fluctuations in the prices of landscaping plants and trees can negatively impact profit margins. If you have an upcoming installation contract, it’s always a good idea to double-check pricing to avoid any surprises. The good news for Q2, however, is that plant shortages seem to be leveling out, reducing the prices of multiple plant categories such as shrubs and trees in Canada and all plant and tree categories in the Southeast USA. As such, the key to ensuring healthy landscaping profit margins is always in the details!

Check out our analysis below to make better estimates for the next quarter. You can click on the links below to jump between countries and categories.

Canada Trends

• Perennials
• Conifers
• Trees
• Shrubs

Southeast USA Trends

• Palms
• Perennials
• Shrubs
• Trees

Canada Plant Cost Trends and Impact on Landscaping Profit Margin

In our Q1 review, we explained how the slowdown in landscaping activity meant lower order volumes and slightly lower prices for most categories in Canada. This trend has remained steady going into Q2 apart from conifers reporting a marginal increase of 4% driven mostly by the demand for larger sizes in the category. While the negative trend in pricing can be disappointing for nurseries, it’s a great opportunity to boost landscaping profit margins. Check out our analysis for each category to learn more.

Landscaping Perennials Q2 2023 Pricing Trends

Q1 2023 was a turning point for the top-selling perennials in Canada, with a significant drop in prices. In Q2, we see this trend consolidating with even more significant price drops as plant inventory recovers and the housing sector cools down. While the overall category pricing may be up by 1% compared to 2022, the rise is largely driven by the pricier units of Achillea Millefolium that were not quoted in the previous year.

Have you found it difficult to source any particular varieties of Achillea Millefolium this year? Let us know on social media. As a reminder, you can always reach out to your friendly plant sourcing crew at GoMaterials for the best prices for perennials. 😎 

**Note: All pricing changes tracked YoY for each quarter. (Q1 2022 vs. Q1 2023, and Q2 2022 vs. Q2 2023)

For a more detailed breakdown, see below for pricing changes by most popular sizes in Q2 2023 vs Q2 2022:

Landscaping Conifers Q2 2023 Pricing Trends

The top-selling conifers for Q2 are nearly identical to our Q1 list, with the new addition of Thuja Occidentalis. Interestingly, Thujas are selling at less than half the price compared to 2022 – a result of inventory rebounding post the massive shortages exacerbated by COVID. For other top-selling conifers, the prices have dropped marginally, perhaps driven by substitution with smaller sizes to retain positive landscaping profit margin. For most of the larger sizes, ranging between 150 to 250 centimeters, the prices remain higher compared to 2022.

**Note: All pricing changes tracked YoY for each quarter. (Q1 2022 vs. Q1 2023, and Q2 2022 vs. Q2 2023)

For a more detailed breakdown, see below for pricing changes by most popular sizes in Q2 2023 vs Q2 2022:

 Landscaping Trees Q2 2023 Pricing Trends

As we enter the second half of the year, tree prices continue to fall compared to 2022, a reversal of the trend in recent years. The only exception is Amelanchier Canadensis with a 5% YoY increase in overall pricing, which is hardly surprising given their severe shortage this year. On closer inspection, the drop in prices for the rest of the top-selling trees seems to be stabilizing in Q2 compared to the last quarter. It can be beneficial for your landscaping profit margins to move up some of your tree plantations to an earlier date or to put down deposits to secure your pricing to benefit from this drop.

**Note: All pricing changes tracked YoY for each quarter. (Q1 2022 vs. Q1 2023, and Q2 2022 vs. Q2 2023)

For a more detailed breakdown, see below for pricing changes by most popular sizes in Q2 2023 vs Q2 2022:

Landscaping Shrubs Q2 2023 Pricing Trends

Shrub prices continue to experience a maintained and moderated drop of 14% overall. Stay tuned for our end-of-year analysis for a deep dive into this trend!  For now, reduced prices and order volumes can be a great opportunity to maximize landscaping profit margins for shrub installations.

**Note: All pricing changes tracked YoY for each quarter. (Q1 2022 vs. Q1 2023, and Q2 2022 vs. Q2 2023)

Southeast USA Plant Cost Trends and Impact on Landscaping Profit Margin

Consistent with our results from Q1, all plant material categories in the Southeast USA continue to see a decline in their prices. Interestingly, shrubs have also seen a drop in pricing of 28% across the category as a whole. Read on for our detailed analysis for each category and to learn more about what it means for landscaping profit margins.

Landscaping Palms Q2 2023 Pricing Trends

When compared to other categories, the decline in prices is less pronounced in Q2 for top-selling palms. In fact, prices of Sabal Palmetto – the leading contributor to the drop in the prices for palms in Q1 – seem to have rebounded with a 9% YoY increase in Q2. Another caveat in this analysis are the inflated overall prices of Serenoa Repens, led by their expensive, rare varieties.

Have you noticed a recent uptick in the demand for palms? Let us know on social media! As always, you know where to get the best prices. 😊

**Note: All pricing changes tracked YoY for each quarter. (Q1 2022 vs. Q1 2023, and Q2 2022 vs. Q2 2023)

Important to note is that the pricing for the most popular sizes of the palms listed above have all decreased! This indicates that there are likely certain sizes still in shortage that are skewing the overall price trend:

Landscaping Perennials Q2 2023 Pricing Trends

The noticeable change in the prices of top-selling perennials in the Southeast USA is the correction in prices of Dianella Tasmanica ‘Variegata’. The perennial was selling at 18% higher prices compared to 2022 in Q1 but has seen a significant drop in pricing as inventory improved and finding them became easier throughout the year. Overall, the prices are down by 6% for the top-selling perennials in 2023, opening opportunities to boost landscaping profit margins for perennial installations.

**Note: All pricing changes tracked YoY for each quarter. (Q1 2022 vs. Q1 2023, and Q2 2022 vs. Q2 2023)

For a more detailed breakdown, see below for pricing changes by most popular sizes in Q2 2023 vs Q2 2022:

Landscaping Shrubs Q2 2023 Pricing Trends

While the last quarter saw a 15% YoY increase in the prices of top-selling shrubs, our data for Q2 highlights a significant correction; the cost of 3- and 7-gallon shrubs has increased for all top-selling varieties but the prices for the category have fallen by 28% in Q2. The only notable exception of Myrica Cerifera with YoY increase can be attributed to the increase in demand and prices for the shrub in Texas.

**Note: All pricing changes tracked YoY for each quarter. (Q1 2022 vs. Q1 2023, and Q2 2022 vs. Q2 2023) 

For a more detailed breakdown, see below for pricing changes by most popular sizes in Q2 2023 vs Q2 2022: 

Landscaping Trees Q2 2023 Pricing Trends

The big comeback of Acer Rubrum as a top-selling tree is the highlight for Q2 pricing trends. While the Acer Rubrum remains hard to source, its distinct appeal makes it irresistible. Quercus Shumardii is another new entry in our 2023 top-selling tree lists that seems to be popular despite being hard to find. On the other hand, rest of the top-selling trees have seen a drop in their prices as tree selection trends keep fluctuating. Have you experienced any challenges in maintaining your landscaping profit margins due to ever-changing tree prices? Let us know on social media!

**Note: All pricing changes tracked YoY for each quarter. (Q1 2022 vs. Q1 2023, and Q2 2022 vs. Q2 2023)

For a more detailed breakdown, see below for pricing changes by most popular sizes in Q2 2023 vs Q2 2022:

Making the Most of the Decline in Plant Prices

While the macroeconomic factors may seem a bit gloomy at the moment due to high inflation, they also bring growth opportunities for the industry. For instance, as homeowners or homeowners’ associations spruce up their properties in a buyer’s market, the demand for landscaping installations may rise in the months to come. The recent fall in prices can also be a great advantage to start outreach programs for your old customers with discounts. And if you’re worried about a change in the tides and your landscaping profit margins, you can always rely on your GoMaterials sourcing crew to get you the best rates!

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Are you trying to fill your plant list for an upcoming job? Get end-to-end support on estimation, delivery coordination, quality inspection, and more!

The post Q2 2023 Plant Pricing Trends to Boost Landscaping Profit Margins appeared first on GoMaterials.

Canada’s Top Growing Companies awarded GoMaterials this ranking due to its 298% three-year revenue growth.

GoMaterials is pleased to announce it placed No. 162 on the 2023 Report on Business ranking of Canada’s Top Growing Companies.

Canada’s Top Growing Companies ranks Canadian companies on three-year revenue growth. GoMaterials earned its spot with three-year growth of 298%.

GoMaterials started in Montréal seven years ago and is now operational in the provinces of Québec and Ontario, as well as the American Eastern seaboard and across the US South.  “We’re thrilled to be named one of Canada’s Top Growing Companies by The Globe and Mail! It’s a testament to our incredible team and the trust our customers and suppliers place in us. At GoMaterials, we’re all about growth and innovation – and this recognition fuels our excitement to keep pushing the boundaries in the landscape construction industry,” says GoMaterials CEO Michael Bellows. “We’re just getting started!”

Canada’s Top Growing Companies is an editorial ranking that was launched in 2019. It aims to bring the accomplishments of innovative businesses in Canada to the forefront. In order to qualify for this voluntary program; companies had to complete an in-depth application process and fulfill requirements. In total, 425 companies earned a spot on this year’s ranking.

The full list of 2023 winners along with editorial coverage is published in the October issue of Report on Business magazine. The list is out now and online here.

“Canada’s Top Growing Companies acknowledges the drive and ingenuity displayed by Canadian business,” says Dawn Calleja, Editor of Report on Business magazine. “This year’s ranking serves as an inspiration for future business owners.”

“This year’s Report on Business magazine’s list of Top Growing Companies shows how innovative ideas always rise to the top, perhaps even more so in times of uncertainty,” says Andrew Saunders, CEO of The Globe and Mail. “The Globe and Mail congratulates this year’s winners for meeting and surpassing those economic challenges.”

About The Globe and Mail

The Globe and Mail is Canada’s foremost news media company, leading the national discussion and causing policy change through brave and independent journalism since 1844. With our award-winning coverage of business, politics and national affairs, The Globe and Mail newspaper reaches 6.2 million readers every week in our print or digital formats, and Report on Business magazine reaches 2.7 million readers in print and digital every issue. Our investment in innovative data science means that as the world continues to change, so does The Globe. The Globe and Mail is owned by Woodbridge, the investment arm of the Thomson family.

About GoMaterials

Founded in 2016, GoMaterials is a hassle-free B2B marketplace for landscape materials. Landscape contractors use GoMaterials to source wholesale plant and tree materials from hundreds of verified wholesale nurseries across the US and Canada.

The end-to-end service helps landscaping businesses with all aspects of procurement such as search, price comparison, quality assurance and logistics organization. Landscaping businesses can easily access the service without any upfront costs or membership fees.

Today, GoMaterials is used to source millions of dollars in annual landscape material volume and is operational in Canada and the USA.

Visit the company website here.

The post GoMaterials places No. 162 on The Globe and Mail’s fifth-annual ranking of Canada’s Top Growing Companies appeared first on GoMaterials.

Attributes 298% Revenue Growth to a continued drive towards improvement, product innovation, and customer satisfaction.

Montreal, QC, 08 November 2023 — GoMaterials today announced it ranked No. 409 on the Deloitte Technology Fast 500™, a ranking of the fastest-growing technology, media, telecommunications, life sciences, fintech, and energy tech companies in North America, now in its 29^th year. GoMaterials grew 298% during this period.

GoMaterials’ chief executive officer, Michael Bellows, credits product innovation and customer satisfaction with the company’s 298% revenue growth. He said, “We’re delighted to be recognized as one of the Fastest-Growing Companies in North America on the 2023 Deloitte Technology Fast 500^tm! This achievement reflects the dedication of our exceptional team and the strong faith our customers and partners have in us. At GoMaterials, our core values revolve around fostering growth and driving innovation, and this prestigious acknowledgement only ignites our passion to continue breaking new ground in the landscape construction industry. We are truly at the beginning of an exciting journey!”

“Each year we look forward to reviewing the progress and innovations of our Technology Fast 500 winners. This year is especially celebratory as we expand the number of winners to better represent just how many companies are developing new ideas to progress our society and the world, especially during a slow economy,” said Paul Silverglate, vice chair, Deloitte LLP and U.S. technology sector leader. “While software and services and life sciences continue to dominate the top 10, we are encouraged to see other categories making their mark. Congratulations to all the winners who show us how creativity, hard work and perseverance can lead to success.”

“As for growing companies, it’s always rewarding to be recognized for the ongoing commitment it takes to navigate obstacles, transform when necessary and ultimately create a thriving business,” said Christie Simons, partner, Deloitte & Touche LLP and industry leader for technology, media and telecommunications within Deloitte’s audit and assurance practice. “Over the nearly 30 years we’ve been compiling the Technology Fast 500, we’ve seen new categories emerge, growth rates explode, and certain regional markets shine from the bright talent they attract. We are proud of all the winners for achieving this well-deserved honor.”

Overall, the 2023 Technology Fast 500 companies achieved revenue growth ranging from 201% to 222,189% over the three-year time frame from 2019 to 2022, with an average growth rate of 1,934% and a median growth rate of 497%.

About the 2023 Deloitte Technology Fast 500

Now in its 29^th year, the Deloitte Technology Fast 500 provides a ranking of the fastest-growing technology, media, telecommunications, life sciences, fintech, and energy tech companies — both public and private — in North America. Technology Fast 500 award winners are selected based on percentage fiscal year revenue growth from 2019 to 2022.

In order to be eligible for Technology Fast 500 recognition, companies must own proprietary intellectual property or technology that is sold to customers in products that contribute to a majority of the company’s operating revenues. Companies must have base-year operating revenues of at least US$50,000, and current-year operating revenues of at least US$5 million. Additionally, companies must be in business for a minimum of four years and be headquartered within North America.

About GoMaterials

Founded in 2016, GoMaterials is a hassle-free B2B marketplace for landscape materials. Landscape contractors use GoMaterials to source wholesale plant and tree materials from hundreds of verified wholesale nurseries across the US and Canada.

The end-to-end service helps landscaping businesses with all aspects of procurement such as search, price comparison, quality assurance and logistics organization. Landscaping businesses can easily access the service without any upfront costs or membership fees.

Today, GoMaterials is used to source millions of dollars in annual landscape material volume and is operational in Canada and the USA.

Visit the company website here.

About Deloitte

Deloitte provides industry-leading audit, consulting, tax and advisory services to many of the world’s most admired brands, including nearly 90% of the Fortune 500® and more than 8,500 U.S.-based private companies. At Deloitte, we strive to live our purpose of making an impact that matters by creating trust and confidence in a more equitable society. We leverage our unique blend of business acumen, command of technology, and strategic technology alliances to advise our clients across industries as they build their future. Deloitte is proud to be part of the largest global professional services network serving our clients in the markets that are most important to them. Bringing more than 175 years of service, our network of member firms spans more than 150 countries and territories. Learn how Deloitte’s approximately 457,000 people worldwide connect for impact at www.deloitte.com.

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Deloitte refers to one or more of Deloitte Touche Tohmatsu Limited, a UK private company limited by guarantee (“DTTL”), its network of member firms, and their related entities. DTTL and each of its member firms are legally separate and independent entities. DTTL (also referred to as “Deloitte Global”) does not provide services to clients. In the United States, Deloitte refers to one or more of the US member firms of DTTL, their related entities that operate using the “Deloitte” name in the United States and their respective affiliates. Certain services may not be available to attest clients under the rules and regulations of public accounting. Please see www.deloitte.com/about to learn more about our global network of member firms.

The post GoMaterials Ranked Number 409 Fastest-Growing Company in North America on the 2023 Deloitte Technology Fast 500™ appeared first on GoMaterials.