ESIGNER - Association of Professional Landscape Designers

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12 SPRING 2004 • THE DESIGNER The Designer's Bookshelf: Don't Leave Home Without These! By Dennis J. Rydberg, APLD Our conference this summer in England is going to be wonderful! If you will be taking a few extra days or weeks before or after the conference to visit some of the over one thousand gardens normally opened during the summer months in England, Wales, Scotland, Northern Ireland and Ireland, here are two great guide books I can heartily recommend: • The DailY Telegraph Good Gardens Guide 2004, edited by Peter King and Katherine Lambert (ISBN #: 0711222622) • Hudson's Historic Houses and Gardens 2004 (ISBN #: 0762728620) There are numerous garden guidebooks which have been published over the years, and several may be available through your local bookstore or library. All, even dated ones, can give you an appreciation for the magnificent variety and unique beauty of British and Irish gardens. Even if you are only an armchair traveler, these books evoke vivid images and practical design inspiration. However, if intensive garden touring is your goal and you want to see the maximum number of outstanding gardens that will appeal the most to your vision of what great gardens are or can be, you will need this year's edition of these two books for two reasons - logistics Oocation, opening hours, etc.) and selection (type of garden, its history, season of bloom, outstanding characteristics, featured plants, and so forth). One fact about these gardens that must be mentioned is opening hours. Although most gardens will have extended visiting hours in the peak summer garden visiting season, it always comes as a surprise how many even famous gardens might only be open for several hours on just a few weekdays each week and perhaps only the second and/or fourth Saturday and/or Sunday. It can become very confuslng. Here is where logistics and selection come into play. If there are three gardens in one area that you would like to see, it may just be a Tuesday or a Thursday, for example, when all three are open on the same day, and to make matters worse, there might not be enough time available to catch all three on that day, even if they are fairly close to each other. Many gardens are also way off the beaten path. Prepare to be lost (and to lose time) on backcountry roads. Both books give concise logistics information. The Good Gardens Guide is much more thorough in the details of each garden, but does not have that many photographs in it. To help with your selection, the guide gives one and two star ratings to outstanding gardens in each region, but over the years I think its ratings reflect a higher appreciation for that famous term "plantsmanship" than over design however, that is just an impression - great design aspects are also discussed. Hudson:r Historic Houses and Gardens, on the other hand, feature historic houses, castles, heritage sites and cathedrals, in addition to gardens. There are many photographs of the properties, along with a listing of events, and detailed maps (although you will still need an atlas of some sort). My recommendations of these books come from years of carting the current year's edition of both books with me whenever I travel to Britain. I really will not leave home without them. On the rare occasion when I have not been able to get them before I left the USA, I have found them very easily in British bookstores - even in small towns. Both are available on the Internet and your local bookstore should be able to order them using the ISBN numbers. Denise Calabrese, APID's Executive Director, will try to have both books available for purchase at our conference. I wish you happy garden touring in Britain! HERMES LANDSCAPING HERMES, one of the top 100 firms in the green industry has an opening for a talented Landscape Designer in our Lenexa, KS location. The areas' award-winning schools and outdoor recreation make it a great place to raise a family, and Lenexa is only minutes away from the exciting variety offered by Kansas City, one of the best kept secrets in the nation! This opportunity requires creativity and a highly motivated individual with a proven track record of accomplishment. A bachelor's degree in Landscape Architecture or Landscape Design is required with 3-5 years of design/sales experience. We offer continuous professional development, competitive compensationlbenefits program and relocation assistance! Visit www hermelandscaping career links or send resume to jobs@hermeslandscaping com com
THEDESIGNER. SPRING 2004 13 Gardens of Britain and Ire/and Melissa Clark • The Gardens of Britain and Ireland: The Definitive &Jerence and Guide to Over 1700 Beautiful Gardens, by Patrick Taylor (D.K. Publishing 2003, $50.00) If you're going to London for APLD's summer conference this year, you may wonder whether there are some gardens a little off the beaten path that are worth visiting - and how you can find out about them. To answer that question, you can consult Patrick Taylor's new book, The Gardens of Britain and Ireland. Divided into chapters by geographic area (South-West England, South-Central England, and the like), this book is an invaluable guide both to new and returning visitors. Taylor devotes most of the book to the "Guide," which describes gardens regularly open to the public, both great and famous ones (such as Stourhead, Powis Castle, or Sissinghurst) and others less well known but equally captivating or distinguished (Great Comp, Cottesbrooke Hall, Heale House). In addition, a "Gazetteer" at the end of the book contains shorter descriptions of other gardens that are open less frequently o.r not at all, or that fall into categories such as hospital ~'unds or unusual collections. The Guide provides the most fertile ground for a gardener's roving eye and/or wanderlust. Each entry contains background information about the garden's history and strong points. Taylor's photographs are as captivating as usual, although most entries are accompanied by only one image. Details as to location, ownership, open hours, and contact information can be found at the end of each listing. Although I've visited only a limited number of the smaller gardens listed in the Guide, their descriptions struck me as evocative and accurate, down to Taylor's homage to the "ruinous towers and elegant arcades" constructed by the owner of Great Comp in Kent. Those man-made built elements are indeed some of the most wonderful aspects of a garden lovingly created by its owners over forty years, and Taylor makes you want to see them - along with the wonders of all the other places he describes. Be sure to have a look at The Gardens of Britain and Ire/and before you go, and take a few notes. You'll have a hard time narrowing your choices, but it will be hard to go wrong with such a well-written and informative reference at your disposal. Environmental Committee APLD's Environmental Committee is nearing completion of a new brochure, "Guidelines to Environmentally Responsible Lawns." The committee, which handled all the writing and editing of the piece, expects the brochure to be available for purchase within two months. The lawn has long been a symbol of public pride in the United States. The American lawn has also created a set of environmental problems we must begin to address. Plans New Brochure The goal of the brochure is to present options and alternatives for the lawn, as we balance our desire for the perfect lawn with the environmental issues we face today. The traditional turfgrass lawn is an unsustainable, input-hungry landscape element that defies the natural ecology of our planet. It requires multiple periodic applications of petrochemicals (fertilizers and pesticides), regular water applications and mowings to keep it to the standards we've set. If we stop tending to the lawn, nature takes over: fertility drops to normal levels, other plants move in and the untended lawn slowly diversifies toward a stable plant community. . The Environmental Committee is hoping the new brochure will help readers to redefine the lawn into a more friendly element of our everyday landscape. The brochure presents less environmentally costly alternatives to turf grass, including non-plant hardscapes, as well as a list of additional resources.
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