Posts about urban or rural landscaping
I have been lucky enough to have designed and built a lot of water gardens in my time; I’ve been looking back over some of my pictures, and thought I’d share them here. Working with water is like nothing else; it is enigmatic, frustrating, contrary, exciting and absolutely rewarding in a way that few other
Last winter I did some interesting work in Abu Dhabi, concerning the care of trees. I can’t name one of the projects (a royal palace), but one was Mushrif Central Park undergoing a major redevelopment (and now reopened – March 2015). In both places I undertook a survey of 100+ broadleaf trees (as opposed to palms),
I am working as a consulting arborist in the UAE for a couple of large projects. Whilst there, I have been observing the broad state of the art and there is a long way to go in bringing across current best practice to the Middle-East, and I suspect that is so for many parts of
Here are some pics from my garden; they tell of Nature’s rhythms and how they effect our lives…
This article was written in 2013 and updated in April 2019. I’ve written before on the subject of adaptive landscapes and trans-migrational landscapes but I’ve been reading recently of a real-life ecology that was created by man in the last 150 years, and is thriving. This is on Ascension Island in the South Atlantic Ocean, a
This ASLA (American Society of Landscape Architects) animation does a great job of explaining the need for trees. One minor criticism: the part which shows the trees’ underground root structure shows it way too small; should be at least twice the radius, if not three times. Never mind, worth a watch:
I was chatting to the local farm manager the other day, out on the snow-lined track. “There’s nothing in the hedgerows for the birds” he told me. It made me glad that there was in my garden, which borders the track and fields. It also brought home such a startling truth: the birds need us
I’ve been doing a lot of research since writing my blog post on trans-migrational landscapes, my theory on how we have to adapt our natural environments – or rather, help them adapt – to combat the rapidly increasing effects of climate change. It’s not going to be easy; right now I’m not sure if we
With the climate shifting now so rapidly that we cannot foresee what the future may bring – or rather, with an ever increasing certainty of life as we know it struggling to survive – do we need a new approach to our understanding and management of our natural landscapes? I think this will become inevitable
I gave a talk last week on Internal Bio-Systems for buildings, to eFIG, the European Federation of Interiors Group (http://www.efig.eu.com/) which was reported on swiftly by Horticulture Week . They picked up on my use of the phrase “war-footing” for the kind of response levels needed to deal with the issues at hand. Why? Well,
