The other day I was on Beacon Hill and spotted this mostly dead hemlock tree, completely swathed in Boston ivy: Perhaps the owners were simply neglecting their courtyard garden, but I like to think that they saw the mature tree’s size as an asset to the place, and decided to use the deadwood as an [...]
Posts Tagged ‘engage with landscape’
Boston hemlock
Posted in Biodiversity and Biophilia, Gristmill, Landscape architecture, Plant management, What we're thinking, tagged engage with landscape, landscape, landscape architecture, Plant management, Plants, spatial design, trees, vines on July 2, 2011 | Leave a Comment »
Renaissance view
Posted in Deb's posts, Gristmill, Landscape architecture, Places, Plant management, tagged Crane Reservation, engage with landscape, landscape architecture, Plant management, spatial design, The Trustees of Reservations on June 18, 2010 | 1 Comment »
Don’t you love that new header? Toby took the photo at the Crane Reservation in Ipswich, a property of The Trustees of Reservations. He said that for him it has the quality of an oil painting; I agree completely. It has that same dark/light/dark sequence, that same frame/focal point/background flavor as a painting by an [...]
Memorial
Posted in Deb's posts, Landscape architecture, Places, What we're thinking, tagged commemoration, engage with landscape, landscape architecture, memorial design, sensory experience of landscape on May 31, 2010 | 3 Comments »
Downtown Boston teemed with people this past holiday weekend. Stroller brigades patrolled the streets, the scent of sunscreen wafted through the breeze, and a general air of well-being rested like a pleasantly warm blanket over the city. Friday, I had walked through Boston Common and seen the simple and remarkable memorial to Massachusetts’ fallen military [...]
Herbie
Posted in Deb's posts, Plant management, Plants, What we're thinking, tagged engage with landscape, tree planting, trees on January 25, 2010 | 4 Comments »
I just wrote a post on Herbie, the champion American elm in Yarmouth, Maine, that was taken down last week after a life that spanned more than two centuries. The post, at Taking Place In The Trees, included several photos I took the day before Herbie came down. In his prime, Herbie was the largest [...]
Massachusetts Arbor Day of Service
Posted in Deb's posts, Gristmill, Miscellaneous, Plants, tagged engage with landscape, trees on December 30, 2009 | Leave a Comment »
The Massachusetts Arborists Association has a new volunteer initiative starting in 2010. They aim to build on the traditional Arbor Day celebration by instituting a statewide volunteer service day on that day, which falls on April 30, 2010. To get the ball rolling, the MAA is inviting anyone to identify potential tree care projects in [...]
Small-space gardening
Posted in Deb's posts, Miscellaneous, Places, Plant management, Plants, What we're thinking, tagged engage with landscape, hedge alternatives, landscape, landscape architecture, Plant management, Plants, pruning practices, small-space gardening on November 3, 2009 | 2 Comments »
We’ve all seen photos of grand mixed and perennials borders on old country estates (Gertrude Jekyll, Vita Sackville-West, Beatrix Farrand), and of sweeps of perennials, grasses and shrubs by the contemporary designer Piet Oudolf and landscape architects Wolfgang Oehme and James van Sweden. They’re dramatic and luxurious-looking, and it’s easy to envision being right there, [...]
How we see and how we say it
Posted in Deb's posts, Education, Miscellaneous, What we're thinking, Working Landscape, tagged engage with landscape, landscape, landscape architecture, Site Engineering, slope, spatial design on September 25, 2009 | Leave a Comment »
Toby’s latest post in his site engineering series reminded me that there’s yet another consideration in how we define slope — the audience to whom we’re communicating. When I’m discussing the pitch of a walk with another landscape architect, I’ll talk about it as a percentage (“From the wall to the driveway the walk slopes [...]
Site Engineering 1
Posted in Teaching, tagged BAC, boston architectural college, Contours, engage with landscape, landscape architecture, Landscape Design, Site Engineering, Teaching, Tobias Wolf on September 11, 2009 | 4 Comments »
In most design schools, Site Engineering is the most dreaded course in the landscape curriculum. It requires students to visualize three-dimensional landforms graphically and mathematically and to address multiple technical and environmental goals, all without sacrificing a larger sense of design. Even for the best-prepared students, it’s heavy lifting. So a teacher is obliged to make the [...]
Crowding the bed
Posted in Deb's posts, Places, Plant management, Plants, What we're thinking, tagged engage with landscape, fothergilla, landscape architecture, plant habits, planting closely, Plants, shrub planting on September 11, 2009 | 3 Comments »
Harvard University has recently been building on Memorial Drive, along the Charles River. The site that had held a garden center (most recently, Mahoney’s, and before that, the Grower’s Market, where I sold Christmas trees one year) is now becoming a park and a graduate student dormitory. The dorm is done; the park (originally slated [...]
Greenery en masse
Posted in Deb's posts, Miscellaneous, Plant management, Plants, What we're thinking, tagged engage with landscape, landscape, landscape architecture, Plant management, Plants, pruning practices on September 1, 2009 | 2 Comments »
The Hamamelis planting in the last post raises the issue of mass plantings, which have long been a favorite of many landscape architects. I remember a mass rose planting, no longer extant, in a very public location in downtown Boston. One time I went out to do a little guerilla pruning in it with an [...]
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Deborah Howe
Toby Wolf
