A Better Rainwater Harvesting Solution

I first heard about this solution about 10 years ago while trying to find a better solution to deal with the fact that we funnel all our rainwater off site one day, and then irrigate our gardens using municipal water the next day.

Arum lilies make great plants for rainwater gardens

If we are really forward thinking, we use green solutions such as water tanks, in which we try to catch as much water from our roofs as possible, store it, and then pump it out into our gardens. This really is a great solution. But I'd like to suggest an even better option.

Our soils were created to be natural water tanks. Depending on their composition, they (like sponges) have the ability to catch and hold water. They catch hundreds of thousands of litres of water, releasing it slowly over a period of time, either upward to the roots of plants, sideways into rivers, or downward into the groundwater below. Good soil is essentially a reservoir for plants to survive through periods of dryness. So why do we funnel it off into tanks, or even worse let it drain away into the stormwater system?

Normal rainwater could be funnelled into the soil where it belongs, and excess water overflows into the stormwater system.

The answer to this problem is actually an age old one, and it lies in using plants, and in shaping the soil to slow down and catch the water.

Instead of using the downpipes to carry water straight into our stormwater system or at least into tanks, the water would flow from the roof down the drainpipes and into a catchment area with plants that would naturally be found in wetlands. These plants can tolerate both waterlogged and dry conditions depending on the season. The water can then drain away naturally into the soil.

Vancouver's innovative stormwater solution

Another application is alongside large paved areas, like parking lots, driveways and roads. The water that comes off these areas usually has a mixture of oils, litter, and other pollutants that end up in our rivers and eventually the sea, creating huge long term problems. We should be creating filtration areas before the water runs into any kind of stormwater system.

This can be a beautiful way of bordering or softening hard areas like parking lots and roads, and in a water thirsty country like ours is an ideal way of conserving water in the place where it should be conserved.

Sex, Politics, Religion and...Budget

Sex, Politics and Religion. Three topics guaranteed to cause awkward subject changes, but I'd have to add the topic of budget to those classics...

I loved designing this penthouse garden - but a clear budget is essential when preparing any design

I've written about this subject before in 'How much does landscaping cost', but it still amazes me how uncomfortable people are about providing a budget for their landscaping. I know very often the problem comes more from clients not knowing how much is a realistic figure to set aside, but without at least a rough budget to work within, there is so much place for time-wasting.

I recently had two clients with two completely different approaches to the subject. The first fidgeted when the subject came up, and wouldn't give any guidelines. I worked on some ideas and presented the concept along with an estimate only to find that it was not within their budget. I went back to the drawing board to try to find a way of adapting the design to the budget, before eventually having to come up with a completely different design that would fit within the parameters. It seemed to me that the issue wasn't that they didn't know how much they could spend, because it turned out that they had a very clear budget - it seemed that they felt that disclosing how much they could spend would somehow disadvantage them.

My second client gave relatively clear guidelines. Knowing what the budget was, gave me a clear overall picture of what we could work with. When I presented the concept, which they loved, I was able to keep the costs within their budget so that they had enough left over for some garden furniture and some additional accessories.

The first project was fraught with frustrations from the start, while the second was a pleasure from start to finish.

Romead Business Park - an inspiring green approach

Romead Business Park is quite an exciting project that I've been working on over the last year.  A prominent developer was looking for a new home for their offices, and rather than finding a cookie-cutter building for their offices, they decided to create their own space, and hopefully attract others with their same ideals.

Common Areas Landscape Plan for Romead Business Park

Their approach to the entire project has been quite refreshing. They found a property that was nestled in the escarpment below Kloof which was ideal from so many perspectives - a beautiful piece of land right between the Umbilo river and a part of the Durban Metropolitan Open Space System (D'MOSS). Part of the trade-off of developing on a slightly degraded section of this site, was to give a large portion of the property to be used as Open Space.

Grassland above Romead - the landscaping should eventually return to this

Their ethos behind the development has been quite inspiring - they have been looking for any viable opportunities to approach the project from an environmental perspective, which in these tough economic times is quite a brave stance. But altogether necessary from a long-term point of view. It's been an ethos that has come at a cost - both emotional and financial!

The design code for the development has been quite comprehensive and pioneering, and - I believe - one of the best guides for development from an architectural and landscaping perspective in Durban.

Some of the ideas that have been looked at, and in some cases, written into the design codes are solutions like rainwater harvesting, wind-turbines, creating mulch and compost from the existing vegetation on site, the use of indigenous planting and an approach that places an emphasis on the balance between aesthetics and function.

As the Business Park begins to gain momentum, I'm looking forward to seeing how it all comes together.

Cleaning Up The Garden

Pope Gregory XIII must have lived in Durban at some point when he invented the modern day calendar and assigned only 28 days to February. In Durban its the hottest, most humid month and thankfully there are only 28 days to get through! Unfortunately, for obvious reasons its also the busiest time of the year for us gardeners - the combination of the heat and rain means that you can almost literally watch the plants grow. Its also the time of the year when I appreciate how important good garden maintenance is to the success of any landscape project.

Sometimes a little wildness is good - a garden we did about 12 years ago reflecting off the pool

Its quite demoralizing coming back to a garden years later to find that the basic garden care hasn't been done and even in some cases finding that weeds have totally usurped the planting. Often, branches have grown out further than they should have, and the grass below has died. Regular composting has been neglected. The real value of the garden has all but been lost.

Garden Care has been on my mind a lot lately because we are in the process of turning over a new leaf in our business (please excuse the lame but apt pun).
For years, my focus has been on the landscaping aspect of our business. Creating gardens has always been my real passion and unfortunately, like a garden that's been left untended, the Garden Care aspect of the business hasn't had the attention it deserves.

For the last few months, I've been trying to revitalize the Garden Care component of our business. Like a real garden though, its been a difficult process. There have been some things we have had to prune right back, and still other areas we've had to replant entirely. I've been confronted with my limitations and insecurities - all good but painful realisations.

I have finally appointed a Manager to oversee all the maintenance functions of the business - someone who has all the skills and abilities I don't. Who'd have thought cleaning up, and letting go of the things you don't do well would be such a hard thing to do? Or maybe I'm just dense...

Its amazing though, how much better you feel when you clean things up. I'm looking forward to being more focused on the things I do well, and letting go of the things I don't. It's time to wear less hats around here. Talking of which, I better put my hat on and get back into the heat...

Seven Hats That The Best Landscape Designers Wear

If you came looking for fashionable garden clothing tips, I'm afraid I may have misled you slightly. Maybe that'll be a post for another day - although I doubt that anyone would want to take my fashion advice.
It struck me the other day as I drove past an (expletives deleted) attempt at creating a garden by a "landscaping company", that a good landscape designer must wear many hats when planning a beautiful and functional garden.

A sheet of water begins the rill in a formal garden

A good landscape designer needs to have at least a part-time interest and respectable understanding of many fields and professions, and is at least one reason why I'll feel like I'm a student till the day I die. These are some of the professions that landscape designers should understand:

• Architect - you should have at least a basic understanding of architecture. The buildings are typically the most dominant aspects of a site and are usually the media through which people relate to the environment. It follows that for a garden to be harmonious with the buildings you should have a basic understanding of architecture.
• Botanist/Horticulturist - this is an obvious and essential aspect of the profession. But not only should you know the common and latin names of 1000's of plants that are suited to your region, but you should at least have a good knowledge of their individual characteristics (to the point of knowing how their characteristics differ depending on their environment).
• Business-person - this was the least emphasised aspect during my studies, and the area I've since felt the most out of my depth. A healthy business means you can focus on being creative. A lack of good business sense probably accounts for the biggest reason why so few of my colleagues are still in the industry.
• Marketer/Communicator - it isn't good enough just being good at making beautiful gardens. If you can't market yourself well, it makes your job so much harder. Once you have a prospective client, you have to be able to communicate your vision clearly, either visually or verbally. Add to this the need to use on and offline business networks and web 2.0/social media.
• Psychologist - Our clients are almost entirely people. (Tell that to the hare I spotted munching on a client's Wild Iris) We need to understand people, what moves them, motivates them and stirs them. Creating something for our own tastes and preferences will leave your clients short changed.
• Scientist - to create sustainable gardens, a passable knowledge of what is happening on a chemical level is definitely an asset. Knowing the effects and inter-relationships between soil, water, minerals, light, flora and fauna can't be overlooked.

Those are some of the many hats worn by the best landscape designers. Not all of the above are absolutely essential, because specialists can help take up the slack in those areas where we're weak. But these should be the basic traits of a landscape designer to be able to create truly beautiful gardens. This final skill on the list is the most important:

• Designer - I think an intuitive design sense is the most important skill of a landscape designer. You could probably scrape by with little understanding of any of the previous professions, but if you lack in this area, you should pack your pencil and shovel away. There are several principles of design that can be learnt, but they need to built on a foundation of intuitive design. I'll be following this post up in the next few weeks with an outline of some of the less understood principles of design. Even though they may be the least understood, I believe they are the tools every good designer should understand and employ.

Dealing with White Ants, or How To Control The Universe

Our gardens tell us a lot about ourselves - they often are a reflection of our personality - they reveal our tastes, needs, likes, passions, etc. - but they also sometimes show what we obsess about, what irritates us, and our crazy need to control everything around us.

My guess is that the state of our gardens are probably a good measure of our fragile grip on reality!

Lawns are a perfect example of this - if our lawn is perfect, we console ourselves with the fantasy that we at least have control over some small corner of the universe. And maybe in the uneasy state that is the world's economy, we need to believe we have some control over the universe - as deluded as that may be.

So now that white ant season has hit Durban again, I have a lot more sympathy for the "perfect lawn obsession" that results in the flurry of calls from panicking garden owners asking what can be done to save their lawns from these little "evil" creatures.

There are several ways to deal with termites eating your grass or plants - some more effective than others, but the first step (as in the financial world) is not to panic.

But to deal with them properly its best to understand why they are there...

Most often, they are looking for food. If your lawn has just been laid or recently composted, you may notice an increase in the occurrence of termites. They are present because they have found a new source of food.

They generally also become more noticeable around this time of year, because they are preparing for reproduction and swarming.

I am not a big fan of chemicals, unless the situation is incredibly serious. In most cases applying insecticides is an all-round bad idea - it kills most of the beneficial creatures that live in your soil, and the effects are extremely short-term. They may also make the situation worse in the long term.

The presence of termites is usually easily seen by the fact that the grass starts to look sparse, and small sandy tunnels form above the surface of the soil, or on plants or trees. Make sure that you don't leave anything lying flat on the grass over-night, as the next morning you will usually find the area underneath completely eaten.

I've found that the best way to deal with them, is to disturb these tunnels whenever they are visible, by using the back of a rake, or better yet, give the areas a good spray with water. They usually don't like too much disturbance, and often will move on.

Gardening - as in life, is all about cycles. Sometimes the only control that we can exert is by being patient, doing the basics, and waiting these negative cycles out. Every now and then though, if we look carefully enough, we can find something positive that can be taken out of these crises. Termites are an essential part of the ecosystem - they create habitats, provide food, and make certain nutrients available. The nests also often help the soils absorption of water.

Mongoose or Mongeese?

Actually, they're Mongooses... While dropping my wife off at work, we spotted a band of mongooses warming themselves in the sun. There are usually about 20 of them seen playing in the indigenous plants around the office development that she works at.

As part of the development plan for the area (using DMOSS as an example), there are quite strict guidelines for the planning of the spaces around the offices. The landscaping has been planned in such a way that there are corridors of indigenous vegetation throughout each of the office parks, through which small animals like mongoose, monkeys, birds and in some parks small buck can move.

As the natural habitat for these small creatures gets reduced through development, it will become more and more essential to plan the landscaping of the open spaces extremely carefully. In some cases where this has not been done, some animals that are found only in very small pockets have become quite threatened.
Fortunately though, as in the case of the black-headed dwarf chameleon, developers are becoming more aware of their responsibility to the environment (if sometimes only by the impact on their pockets.)

With half a dozen little babies following the adults around, at least these mongooses seem to be happy with the extra thought that has been put into their environment.

Trash Talk

Sean from Bamboo Geek has a great website on all things green (including bamboo). But he has just started a website called TrashWatch, which is attempting to make companies which generate large amounts of trash take responsibility for their trash that gets spread around the countryside.

This is an American based site, and obviously aiming at American companies, but we in South Africa could take a leaf out of his book, by taking a stand against companies that generate litter and make no attempt to clean it up.

We also have a responsibility to make sure that we don't litter ourselves. I can't tell you how often I see people throwing rubbish out of their car windows as they drive along. Is it that they don't understand, or maybe they just don't care?
How do you educate people? The perception is that government has neither the capacity or will to really focus on this issue.
The companies that generate the rubbish themselves need to take responsibility for education, or better yet - reduce the amount of plastic and non-recyclable materials that they generate.

SA can be proud - Woolworths has just been awarded "Responsible Retailer of the Year" at the World Retail Awards. This is a great achievement, as they stood out from other retailers internationally in their efforts to do 'good business'. Other businesses in SA need to step up and begin to take responsibility for their footprint too. We need to look at how we do business, and how we can do it better from an environmental point of view.

Hug Your Gardener...

In South Africa gardening as a vocation is something that is not esteemed highly enough and is generally done by people with little or no training.

Unfortunately the result of this, is that gardening as a skill is not valued. There is even a stigma associated with gardening as menial. This becomes a catch 22 in that little investment is made into development of skills, which results in a continuation of the mis-perception. This in turn means that people look for jobs in other industries with better financial benefits instead of making careers in gardening.

There are also an abundance of people with no real skills offering landscaping and garden maintenance services which is giving the industry as a whole a negative image. Often these businesses pay their staff a pittance, plant gardens that don't last, and have no idea how to look after and nurture a garden properly.

There is a definite need to change peoples perceptions about gardening as an industry. Landscaping is an art-form that should be the equal of the more traditional arts. And the skill of not only maintaining a garden but nurturing and guiding it into something of incredible beauty should be valued and respected.

10 Simple Ways To (not) Make An Impact On The Environment

I have been looking at my business lately, trying to figure out how we can reduce our impact on the environment. Being in the green industry, we should really be setting an example to our clients and other businesses.

There are some simple things that I believe we can do, and are doing, but at first glance it seems as if this shift in mindset doesn't come without some cost - whether time, energy or money.

Some of the solutions should have long term benefits, but what are the short term costs?

These are the questions I'm asking us as a business, and should probably be asking my suppliers as well:

1. Are we using sustainable resources?
2. Are we being efficient with our resources?
3. Is there any way of recycling materials (waste or other)?
4. Are our staff being paid a fair wage that can sustain them and their family?

Sustainability is a word that is being over-used in so many contexts, that it's in danger of losing its meaning in the near future. There is also a lot of debate over how to define sustainability anyway.
Broadly speaking, sustainability is defined as :

"Meeting the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their needs."

But I think we are all guilty at some point of looking for the shortcut, or the lower price, without asking some difficult questions.
For example, do I know whether my suppliers are paying a decent wage to their staff?
When I am buying materials, what guarantees do I have that they've been sourced from a sustainable supply?

Simply put, are people or the environment getting ripped off for my benefit?

Some simple things everyone can do to lessen their impact:

1. Visit Ecofoot.org and do the quiz. Also check out Breathing Earth
   
2. Recycle glass, paper etc. as much as possible. Glass is one of the few things that can be re-re-recycled.
   
3. Replace normal light bulbs with Fluorescent - the use a fraction of the electricity, and last much longer.
4. Support local businesses, farmers, trades-people and products
5. Buy organic foods
   
6. Walk, or cycle where possible
7. Buy re-cycled products
8. Turn off lights and appliances when you're not using them
9. Try to avoid products with excessive packaging
10. My favourite - Plant a tree (Preferably indigenous!)