badlandscaping

And I just wonder what sort of soul looks for blogs that are vulnerable and then posts stuff about having a bigger penis?

Apparently there’s a huge bug in Wordpress, accounting for the enormous numbers of spam postings I am getting. I won’t get to update until next week so for now, comments are off.

I´m completing a very large and comprehensive re-planting project here in southwest Florida at Wildcat Run. Part of the work is the provision of maintenance specifications to be used by the homeowners to obtain competitive bids for maintenance services.

The green industry suffers mightily from lack of transparency; much of the time, buyers of maintenance services cannot discern quality among maintenance providers. This, even after investing, perhaps, a million dollars in plant material, maintenance contractors are allowed to write their own specifications and are judged solely on price. There are many unfortunate results from this approach.

So, for years, we have been slowly improving a set of specifications that can create a level playing field. The problem is two-fold, really; the specifications can be divided into a ‘performance’ section and a ‘product’ section.

Of course the product section is the easiest to define but the most often abused. We now specify precise quantities of fertilizers, for example, including timings and application rates. We also quantify the types and quantities of mulch, and we show the total area of sod. Without these provisions, a proposal might specify ‘provide adequate fertilizers’, which is difficult to assess.

But the other portion of these specifications- the performance side- is much more difficult to manage. It is easy to say how often you want the grass cut. And we can- and do- list every single shrub and tree and detail the care of each- but still, it’s a fact that one person’s ‘lush landscaping’ is another person’s desert.

We’ve determined that while the specifications are essential, equally essential is a list of current projects provided by each contender, and then a site visit by an experienced person, [that would be me], to assess each. And that’s what we did.

In this case, WLM of Lee, Inc., was far and away the most qualified. Have a look, for example, at the West Bay Club, where the level of landscape maintenance is just plain excellent.

And how much extra do you pay for this level of service? That’s hard to say, but I would estimate about 15% annually. Worth it? Sure.

The internet world has, in some sense, exposed the ‘other’ side buried in all of us as writers.

Take email, as an example. I’ll routinely receive email from clients worded so directly that I shudder, knowing very well that the same person would never say such a thing to me directly.

Does this mean that the email is the ‘true’ person? and that in public you get a filtered view? I leave that as an exercise to the student but suggest it doesn’t make much difference.

There’s a better way to disagree, of course. Paul Graham takes us all to task, explaining a more civilized approach.

Thanks, www.daringfireball.net

Worthy of a repost, for sure. Ed’s having a fabulous career and keeps us all up to date with his interesting blog.

In the NY Times, Benjamin Anastas writes about the landscape in a global way, a way that folks not given to retrospection may not admit defines ‘landscape’.

No, Mr. Anastas writes of the natural landscape

Every traveler has a landscape that, for him, contains the wonder and mystery behind all travel

It’s a lovely piece, not without parallels to a thoughtful garden, reminding me once again of the ultimate design source.

Samual Johnson famously defined, back in the 18th century and in his famous ‘A Dictionary of the English Language‘, a ‘lexicographer’ as a ‘harmless drudge’. I’ve remembered this piece of self-depracation with fondness.

I am a word snob without apology. I’m the annoying person correcting the usage of ‘was’ in place of ‘were’ when subjunctive is required. I abhor misplaced apostrophes, and yes, I DO understand the difference between ‘lay’ and ‘lie’.

It’s a sickness, in some ways, come upon honestly, at least by me. Before I discovered design, I was a constant writer of stories and novels [a sickness retained even today], and would spend passionate hours seeking the exact word or phrase to move the action forward.

I became addicted in the summer of 1975. By that point in my undergraduate work I was 4 semesters from graduating. And at LSU, four coincidently was the number of language semesters required for graduation in the College of Arts and Sciences.

[By 1975, transferring back to a science curriculum wasn't an option. I'd taken the math– through differential equations. And I had the science, including Biochem. I was completely enthralled by the magic of calculus, to be sure; the very idea that our universe is written in mathematics is magic and unexplained. But a scientific or engineering future simply wasn't in the future for me].

In the Spring of 1975 I was enrolled in a course studying epic poetry in english [Faerie Queen, Paradise Lost, etc]. And as part of that work, we were required to read Virgil and Homer. Looking for a suitable translation was part of the work, of course, and as I looked at countless translations from Latin and Greek, a couple of things became apparent.

First, the translations of The Iliad, and The Odyssey, said much about the time inhabited by the translator. And second, if these translations varied so much, what would a reading in Greek reveal to me?

As it happened, Greek 101 was offered that summer of ‘75, and I took the plunge. As a 5-credit course [LSU being semester oriented], the class met for 2 hours a day, every day, during the summer session. I was immediately hooked, and for lots of reasons. Greek and Latin became my passion. My major became Classics; I was one of about a dozen students. I spent hours in the basement of the library with my own, treasured copy of Liddell and Scott’s ‘Lexicon’.

I saw my future as a classics professor, leading the academic life, and reveled in the idea. These were glorious years, since eclipsed by events, but happy nonetheless.

A few days ago, I happened on a blog entry on the Oxford Unitversity Press site called by ‘Absurd Entries in the OED’, and the title got me thinking back to Liddell and Scott. Both the OED and the Greek Lexicon are enormous books, not easily reviewed.

The OUP entry tells of one Ammon Shea, who

recently spent a year of his life reading the OED from start to finish. Over the next few months he will be posting weekly blogs about the insights, gems, and thoughts on language that came from this experience. His book, Reading the OED, will be published by Perigee in July.

Now this is a remarkable thing, finding a person who actually read the OED, taking progressive notes. It’s prodigious and worth investigation. And what notes he makes! Shea quotes many of these happy nuggets. Here are two:

trondhjemite is defined as ‘Any leucocratic tonalite, esp. one in which the plagioclase is oligoclase’

self-feeling is defined as ‘used to render coenaethesis’, and occupatio is simply ‘preterition’

Sam Johnson would be delighted.

I’ve been on my own for more than 20 years. Oh, sure, I started out with a j-o-b, working my way through the office of a small practitioner in Boca Raton, to a larger office in Miami, to a major developer, who eventually down-sized my job.

I went back to Lafayette, Louisiana, thinking I’d open my own office. By then, my MLA was about 7 years old, and I figured I was ready.

I was not. Turns out that Landscape Architecture requires a long apprenticeship in many specialities if one hopes to offer general services.

So, back to Florida and another series of jobs, culminating in John Simonds’ old firm.

Finally ready I moved to Naples, and have not looked back. And I found out something unsavory about myself: in all of those job situations I was not doing my best. I wasn’t ‘into’ the work the way that I have been since I have been on my own.

I’ve thought a lot about why this is the case and while it’s a subject for a different time, I know that I’m not cut out to have a boss. I’m incapable of accepting someone else’s goals as my own.

This isn’t to say that serving real estate developers all these years hasn’t had a share of goal swapping. It has.

Recently I came across an interesting post by Paul Graham, observing that animals at a zoo and animals in the wild are incredibly different creatures. It’s my experience as well.

-thanks daringfireball.net

The ‘form follows function’ mantra is so powerful– and leads to so much clean, simple design– that it is sometimes hard to remember a simpler time.

A time when decoration was done simply for the beauty of it. When decoration on something as simple as a screwdriver could add elegance to a mundane project.

Thanks Toolmonger.

Arthur Clarke is dead.

There are times when I simply cannot write about a subject, and this is one of them.

Clarke was asked once to name his favorite story: “The Songs of Distant Earth”. Mine, too.

Sir Arthur was asked what he wants on his epitaph. Paraphrasing: that I never grew up and never stopped learning.

My heart is heavy.

Adios.