Just a garden rant post.

 People are starting to scream about removing lawns and replacing them with meadows and weeds and such (I touched on this briefly before). I am in an ornery mood this morning and posted comments on two different other posts about plants.

First was an indoor planter with four upright tubes to plant your own veggies indoors. It costs $800. You will never have the quality and quantity you need and it is limited to smaller things like herbs and lettuces. Can't grow tomatoes, carrots or other root crops, just useless leafy things.

Needless to saymuch like other things found on facebook it is showing a photoshopped and unrealistic image that people will be greatly disappointed in their own results. My response in a nutshell was, patronize local small farms or community gardens instead. 

Yes you can grow things indoors but it is more time consuming and does not produce prime results unless you are very lucky.

The other post was about dandelions. It was a cute story about a girl in grade school who told her friends to bring zipolock baggies of danelion fluff and they would release them because (Catholic school) they were helping God spread the seeds. Wellllll chaos of course erupted  when they did that and there were more dandelions the next season on the property of the school.

Now that in itself makes anyone who fights weeds in their yard cringe but then someone added, 'Grow more dandelions and less lawns'. 

We've talked about this before.

I commented that dandelions do not make good lawn substitute but didn't go into details. That wasn't what the post was about.

I have talked about using native grasses and flowers as an acceptable replacement for finely manicured lawns for several reasons. The downside is people always have unrealistic expectations about a garden because of pictures in magazines and shows that present a garden in it's prime but no follow up photos.  

Having gone through two decades of watching plants in the nursery go through the seasons I can state for a fact that you need to do research to know what it's going to look like in the 'off' season (for perennials and bushes and such). 

A good example is on Japanese maple trees it says they have 'interest all year round'. Some people seem to think that means it has leaves in different colors all year round. No, that's not what it means. I explained that to a lady and she said, 'well I don't want something that drops the leaves in winter'. Very well then but she wasn't satisfied with any other choices because they didn't have the pretty red color the maples did.

The average person is inherently lazy about having to actually work in their yard. It runs about 60% lazy or fastidious and 40% actually want and like to work in the yard. It's that 60% that wears retail nursery people down due to sheer numbers. And if you ask any other person who works in a garden center of some sort, they will concur.

So for my rants today also includes the travesty of tree pruning. Landscape architects design areas around complexes, shopping malls and parking lots to include shrubs and trees for shade and appeal. You know what they do after that? Hack the trees into tiny balls that afford no shade whatsoever and most of them are deciduous trees to boot!

Case in point: Chinese Elms and Carrotwood trees.

 

Apparently there is an organization called ANSI, American National Standards Institute that in addition to other things they oversee, determine safety standards regarding walkways and streets. The second image there is one that is shown referencing ANSI. 

Well let me tell you from a pedestrian and plant geek perspective, safety is all well and good but if you've got a sidewalk and building within 8 feet of a tree and the tree is a variety that gets twenty feet wide and forty feet tall, that is the WRONG tree for that spot.

Sigh. My professor explained that the difference between a Landscape Architect and an Landscape Designer is the first one learns architecture first then plants, the second starts with plants and then learns design from the plants. THAT's the way to do it. You have to know what you're working with in order to design correctly for the space.

Okay I think my rant is over. Time to get a pineapple popsicle and relax for a bit.