Revolutionary Gardens is experiencing rapid growth and I am looking to hire a part-time (contract) landscape design assistant. We do design and consulting for homeowners, builders, and contractors throughout the DC metro area.

Responsibilities:
- draft revisions to drawings in AutoCAD
- detail drawings and prep for printing
- compile material quantities and takeoffs from drawings
- create layout and construction plans for field crews
- depending on your ability, creating planting plans and landscape plans
- create presentation materials using Photoshop
- site analysis/measuring of new jobs (desired, but not essential)

Requirements:
- this is a contract, work from home position so you MUST have your own computer and software
- Proficient in AutoCAD, and you must own 2002 (LT or full version) or newer. Everything in my firm is on AutoCAD so this point is non-negotiable.
- Proficient in Photoshop or PS Elements.
- you MUST be able to meet once a week in the northern Virginia area, either in the Manassas Park area or the Tysons area. You will be compensated for meeting time.

If you have landscape industry experience, that’s great. If not, that can be learned. What I need is an AutoCAD pro with a good eye for design and attention to detail. You also have to be able to hit the deadlines we agree upon. Beyond that, we do interesting projects for awesome clients and I’m looking to build a team focused on those clients. Use the email above to send your resume and a portfolio link, if applicable.

Please, no calls. I’m hiring because I’m slammed with work. It may take a few days but I will respond to everyone who emails me.

If you or someone you know fits this description, I’d love a resume and portfolio!

Professional home stagers deserve all the respect in the world. It is a LOT of work to try and make something look casual and effortless.

Garden tour people are fanatical. As of just after lunchtime over 500 people had been through the home. On a Tuesday. Not only that, but we spoke to people who had driven in from as far away as Texas, Louisiana, New York, and even Canada. For real.

Garden tour people are a ton of fun. I’m insanely busy right now, so my plan was to show up, make sure nothing needed fine tuning, take pictures of people ogling my plantings, and go back to work. Three hours later I was still walking people through the gardens and telling stories. This is why I end up working till midnight.

If you missed a detail, someone will find it and maybe even call you out. We did a big mixed planting of oakleaf and mophead hydrangeas, and someone called me over and said “what’s the deal with these? They look like they should be oakleafs but the leaves are wrong.” Apparently the guys from the nursery grabbed some hydrangea paniculata by mistake and none of us caught. Oops. Oh well, they’re gorgeous too.

The members of the Rappahannock Valley Garden Club are pretty awesome. I had loads of fun talking with the members who were stationed at the house, and they put together some amazing floral arrangements in all the homes.

As I was driving down from Northern Virginia, it occurred to me that what I was feeling was probably akin to what a parent feels en route to his kid’s first school play. Luckily, there were no flubbed lines this day.

I should also say thanks to architect Sabina Weitzman, who designed the addition and garage and arrived at the general location of the pool with the homeowners. And, of course, a tremendous thanks goes to the homeowners, Jack and Marilyn, for being so much fun to work with!

Fairfax Virginia fireplace

An outdoor fireplace is a sizable undertaking. Even the kits typically require a footer at frost depth, and a good mason is important for making the finished product look good. A fireplace tends to set up a more formal outdoor living or dining space, and you’re limited as to how many people can group around the firebox. Because of their size and mass, fireplaces are usually the dominant focal point of an outdoor space. However, their location next to the patio means that  you still have flexibility of layout and function on your patio.

Firepits are simpler to construct, making them less expensive than fireplaces. Firepits are also generally less formal than fireplaces. If you have visions of a garden dinner party on a summer’s evening in front of the fireplace, you probably have visions of incendiary marshmallows with the kids around a firepit.

Northern Virginia rectangular firepit with fire brick liner

MJ and I have a small portable firepit and we love it. However, it works for our small patio because it’s not built in. We  can drag it into the grass while we’re prepping and eating dinner, then shift the table to the grass and use the firepit when the sun goes down. A permanent, built in firepit means that that’s all you’re going to use that section of patio for. I think they’re great if you have the space, but if space or money (or both) are tight, a firepit may not be the best choice.

Space planning is a critical part of ensuring your northern Virginia landscape design performs as needed, especially when introducing large items like firepits and fireplaces. If you’re interested in learning the best way to introduce a fire feature into your landscape, contact me at 703-679-8550 to set up a meeting.

I was meeting with a client this weekend and I asked if they had plans to add landscape lighting to the backyard. She replied “oh yes, and we already had the wire installed.”

People, don’t do this.

Pre-wiring makes a lot of sense inside the home to prevent the alarm installer or cable guy from having to knock holes in the drywall. The thing is, those wires are pretty safe once they’re installed behind the drywall. That little strand of direct burial cable 6-12″ down in your beds? It’s not safe at all. If your beds are “prewired”, I’m going to look at that and wonder how many times that line has been severed and spliced when your beds were edged. I’ll ponder how many times a trowel or shovel nicked the insulation on that wire, setting you up for a shirt circuit. Besides, is the wire sized appropriately for voltage drop? Is it going where we need it?

In short, prewiring for landscape lighting doesn’t help. Most installers aren’t going to be interested in using it, because if they’re standing behind their system they’ll want control over all the components. Instead, save your money and buy yourself a garden gnome. I highly recommend one decked out in Red Sox gear.

Tickets are $25 in advance and there are 9 gardens total to visit. I’ll be at the Farrington residence most of the day and I would love to meet any of you who can make it. Sure, it’s a Tuesday, but if it will get you there I will happily call your boss for you and pretend to be a doctor, magistrate, or any other authority figure who can get you a day off. Revolutionary Gardens is a full service landscape design firm that way.

I hope to see you there!

These are really cool because they’re an inch thick and are laid just like a concrete paver. You build up with a base layer of compacted gravel (21A or crusher run), then use a one inch layer of sand as your bedding layer. Once the pavers are in place they’re compacted and polymeric sand is swept into the joints. That’s it. It’s a beautiful finished product that has the ability to flex and move like a traditional concrete paver patio in Virginia. From the test data I’ve seen online, travertine pavers have a compressive strength similar to concrete pavers and can even be used for driveways!

The biggest challenge I’ve found with designing travertine paver patios in Virginia is making the materials make sense. Travertine in California or Arizona doesn’t look out of place. It can look a little foreign here, though. I recently designed a fireplace, seat wall, and travertine paver patio as part of a winery landscape design project. I used a plum-colored flagstone to tie in with the warm tones of the travertine and the rich reddish colors in the fireplace stone, and I’m quite pleased with how it turned out. All those color theory classes have finally paid off.

I’m starting my next travertine paver patio project this week, and I may have one more in the pipeline as part of a swimming pool project. The travertine pavers are a great product that (unlike concrete pavers and flagstone) aren’t in every other backyard. Making it work requires someone who can integrate this new material in the landscape design while blending all the colors harmoniously. In other words, you need a landscape designer. Contact me to set up a consultation if you’re looking to build a travertine paver patio in Virginia, Maryland, or DC and I’ll be happy to talk with you about it!

Garden product pitchmen (pitchpersons?) love landscape designers. We’re often the most trusted advisors our clients have for their beloved plants, and this is seen as an easy opportunity to recruit us as salespeople. I can’t tell you how many Dr. Mama Earth’s Happy Fluffy Kitty Mega Awesome Somewhat Organic-ish Plant Food vendors have offered to make me a distributor. Sadly I’ve turned them all down because I use the same criteria for every product I consider recommending to my clients:

1. Is the claim reasonable? This is an easy first step. If it sounds too good to be true, it usually is. There’s no magical elixir that will make fescue grow among the roots of a 100-year old oak. Or even if you believed something could give you a 35 pound tomato – good lord, would really want to eat Baby Frankenstein?

2. Are they at least claiming it’s based on science? If the label tells me the product works because it gives Mother Earth a hug, I’m not interested. If it’s a fertilizer but I’m given zero information about what it’s made from and there’s no nutrient analysis – we’re done here. Understanding plants is eighth grade science, people. If you think we’re too dumb to understand, we need to be insulted.

3. Does the science back up their claims? To the journals! College is for more than learning how to balance, inverted, on a keg. I learned how to read and understand scientific journals. It’s sad, but I’ve seen product claims that list journal articles as citations. You would assume that the article referenced would support their claims, but in too many cases I’ve pulled up the article abstract online and it contradicts their claims. Oops. Guess they were hoping I wouldn’t check. Similarly, make sure that the studies they reference are in peer-reviewed journals. Articles in these journals are reviewed by other scientists who look to see if the experiments were properly designed, the data analyzed correctly, and reasonable conclusions were drawn. If it’s not peer-reviewed it’s no more reputable than Uncle Morty saying that Schlitz and bubble gum applied to cabbage kills aphids.

There’s a reason why I don’t sell products to my clients. Most of the big brands require a huge buy-in and I could never compete with the garden centers. Of the ones I could afford to do, none of them have impressed me. If you pay attention to the right things and utilize some gardening resources, you can make some good decisions. Now go outside and play!

Over the last few winters we saw plant health problems from extreme cold zapping the plants. It’s why this year I made the decision that we weren’t doing many planting jobs after the first of the year. I think it’s safe to say that I blew that call. Seriously, this state has the wackiest weather of any place I’ve lived.  This year what has me worried is the quantity of plants that are already waking up and thinking spring. If we get a hard frost now, spring blooms could be pretty lackluster and we could actually see significant damage, especially on the more tender plants.

What’s the answer? We just need to wait and see what happens. If all goes well, we’ll have a short winter and a long spring. If not, we’ll just have to monitor and evaluate our plants and take steps to help any that sustain damage.

Not so fast.

Landscape design is a service. I view a product as something a client purchases with little or no customization and really, with little input into the finished product. More importantly, once the client purchases the product, all the decisions are final. Any actions that follow are dictated by the product, not the other way around. Let me give an example to explain.

This is my favorite quote ever, from Hugh MacLeod (click to visit his site)

We’re breaking ground tomorrow on a patio installation in Alexandria. Naturally the design consultation involved lots of conversation about personal style, likes and dislikes, and all that sort of thing. I include some revision time in my contract so we decided to make some changes, and we really dialed in on what would work for how they wanted to use the space. The design has been completed for several months, and in that time there has been a lot of back and forth with the homeowners before we finally selected materials, phases to complete, and the contractors (in my opinion, this is one more x in the “service” column). At one point I showed the homeowners a travertine paver catalog and Mrs. X loved one of the blends. Well, as it turned out, that distributor had gone belly up so we went with a different material palette. They inked the deal but she seemed really lukewarm about it. I hate lukewarm. This is supposed to be fun.

Thus began my quest, and as luck would have it I was able to find a very similar travertine style through another stoneyard. Even better, I got a great price on it, discussed it with the contractor, and was able to swap materials at no additional cost to the client.

Landscape design is a very involved process that requires we not only understand the site, but the homeowner. My goal is to take the homeowner all the way through the process from conceptual design to deciding where to put the chaise lounge on the finished patio. Anyone selling design as a just a product is missing the entire point.

At times, they can be really cute.

They don’t do cute things to plants, though. Deer are a persistent problem in the landscapes and gardens of the DC metro area. I’ve heard from biologists that because this winter was so mild, we’re probably going to see an upswing in the deer population. Given that a deer recently smashed through the windows of a library in SW DC, there is nowhere in the region your hostas can hide.

Woody trees and shrubs are susceptible to deer damage, as the little buggers have been known to shred the bark from the trees. For this reason at least one nursery in the region, Stadler Nurseries, is recommending the use of  tree bark protectors on all new plantings. This is what they look like:

It’s an inexpensive way to try and minimize the damage caused by roving gangs of deer. Not sure if the plants you like will withstand deer? Call me to set up a consultation!