Re: Sore Subject; was Street Plantings
- Subject: Re: Sore Subject; was Street Plantings
- From: T* a* M* R*
- Date: Fri, 01 Mar 2002 09:12:27 +1300
"LEE,ANGELA IUE-CHIH" wrote:
>
> hello,
>
> I think the problem is that most people set out to buy a house, not a
> garden. The garden just comes with the house and most times is viewed as
> a burden of home ownership. The garden has to be neat to maintain home
> values or the garden is part of the total status symbol, along with the
> designer interiors and the pricey car.
Indeed Angela
And I guess I begin in my old age to have some sympathy and undertanding
for a buyer of an NZ property full of the rarest plants, collected over
the former owner's lifetime, who I was told had the whole lot swept way
and replaced with just lawns and a few beds of geraniums. The real
sorrow is that it was not bought by another afficinado who would heve
cherished and appreciated it!
However, what some of the designers among us are griping about I think
is the person who has enough interest to actually _commission_ a
fully-designed garden, but then does not have the sense to protect their
investment by proper servicing - totally frustrating to the landscaper
and at the same time a poor way to treat an expensive investment. For
this sort of problem I fell an all-out education campaign on behalf of
the design indudtry is the only way to prevent a lot of heartbreak.
it is of course quite unreasonable (as any gardener already knows) to
expect that any design involving living things will not need some proper
tending from time to time, but people unfamilar with growing things may
not comprehend this intuitively, and it is up to the industry I think to
make this as clear as possible at the design stage and maybe to offer
alternative schemes requiring varying amounts of subsequent maintanance.
At the bottom end, for instance, in some cases one could imagine a very
simple and effective landscape with just lawns and self-shaping shrubs,
like some kinds of conifer for instance, which would need no more than
regular mowing and an occasional assessment of the trees, allowing
trimming to shape or replacement of any not doing well (equivalent
indoors to a yearly special cleaning for furniture and drapes and the
replacement of items showing wear)..
An ideal worth working towards, maybe.
Moira
--
Tony & Moira Ryan
Wainuiomata NZ,
where it's Summer in January and Winter in July.
