Garden Style
Sunny southern California; beaches, palm trees, where all late model cars are perfectly shiny, it never rains or snows, they don’t get dirty. The population is tanned and muscular. Image is important, the car you drive, the place you live, the way your body looks. People spend tens of thousands of dollars on image. Women sweat over stairmasters. Men lift heavy things just to put them back down again. Eyebrows are plucked, privates are waxed, cars detailed, housekeepers set to dusting obscure corners of houses. Folks go to great expense for furniture, rugs, windows, kitchen accessories and all the trappings that reflect taste and style.. But why do people settle for landscapes that have more in common with a supermarket parking lot than a garden refuge? Why spend top dollar for a quality exterior paint job then consider a weekly mow and blow by the low budget landscape crew an adequate complement to the house?
Perhaps folks haven’t been introduced to the wonderful diversity and character of the plant world. Landscapes come in a diversity of different styles and levels of quality. There is a correlation between price and quality, but in landscape somehow the calculation gets skewed. Very often a landscape can be very inexpensive to install, but due to poor planning, bad design and zonal denial, actually cost more over the long term. The costs of water, fertilizer and ongoing maintenance are often discounted in the budget for landscape modifications. The time and money spent in planning, design, plant selection, and soil preparation are investments that actually bring down the overall long term cost of landscape improvements.
