After the Fall...

It seems an appropriate title for today's musings. Leaves and the past few days' temperature have fallen as rapidly as the collective psyche's confidence in consumer spending.

Now that the depressing news has been dispatched, I'm moving on to proactive and positive news.

I'm going ahead full throttle with my foray into Web 2.0 marketing techniques. I don't have any expertise and there's a lot out there to learn. I'm a bit late to the party, but the party is still going strong. Like anything else, all of this takes time to set up, become fluent with and maximize for its full potential.

Here's a great tool for landscape designers and anyone else who loves gardens to discover, use and connect with each other:

Landscapedia is an online community, developed by fellow APLD member, Michael Franklin. It has plant databases, portfolio and project development, communication and management tools, a professional directory and lots of cool features for landscape designers to explore and use. It's one of the top 10 applications for the iPhone so you can take your projects with you...

Thoughts, ideas and Web 2.0

Like many others, I'm wondering what is next for my small design studio. Although we're successful, I wonder how many people will be wanting new or renovated landscapes next spring.

Well, I've never been one to wait for the other shoe to drop without doing something, I've decided to turn to social networking to promote my 'brand' through the winter months. Because of that decision I've spent the past day or two entering passwords, tags, info and posting photos. I've also reconnected with people--that's the fun part of it all.

So today, I have a Facebook profile page and my business has a separate page. I'll report back on this later when I've figured out how to link to my blog from that page.

So much cyberspace, so little time...

Project Updates...almost...

It's been a while again...actual 3D flesh and blood life takes precedence over blogging...

I've been working on the project I last blogged about. It will be the last one that gets built before the deep freeze. I've been lax about taking photos. Anyway that's not what I wanted to talk about today, but the subject is related.

Being a creative nutcase, I go through periods that force me to evaluate where I'm at and where I want to be. Anything can set off these re-evaluative creative but not necessarily productive moods, and this time it was the rapid fire changes in my personal and professional lives the past three months. Empty nest, empty wallet (related to empty nest by virtue of tuition), and empty retirement account. Add to that nasty stew exhaustion from a very busy season and I came to a semi-stop.

Well I'm back and inside so it's time to blog again and do all those other things that will help move me and my design studio forward.

Talk to you next week some time.

The Choices--Stone

Met w/client today to make some final decisions on the stonework for the project I've been blogging about. Here's the decisions for the walkways, patio floor and the seatwalls and garden wall. The details will be charcoal granite cobbles and treads.

Patio floor & Walks (that's Harry the dog's head)

Seat wall and garden wall

Bucking against the bluestone standard

The client for the project mentioned in my previous post hates bluestone. Bluestone and brick are the standard for patios in this area and I've not run into anyone who hates it before. This client wants an antique look for his patio and garden. I went to two stone yards yesterday with this in mind to photograph ideas for him to look at. Here are some wonderful solutions. All are locally sourced, very rustic/antique looking and relatively easy to work with. We are going to be using a 4" cobble detail similar to what is shown in the bottom detail through out the project to define lawn areas, stone 'carpets' and lawn markers in the 'playing field'.