All I'm saying is that pride will kill you in this business. You compare yourself to Sorates, Prince, and Andy Worhol. You designed a set of set of steps. It is design and it may be art, but a rendering of a set of steps seldom gets hung in the Louvre and is worth the price of admission. These must be one hell of a set of steps. I'd love to see them, but I have to feed my family so I guess I won't. Design is a service as well as an art. You can not sell things that you value more than those that you are trying to sell them to. The art world works this way. A few people get fame and fortune, but most are waiters (I guess the new term is "server"). They wait on tables and they wait for their fame and their fortune as life passes them by. I would not care if the table cloth was used by a restaurant owner who only used it because it was the cheapest one he could find. The important thing is not how many people who don't care and do not respect what we do see our work, but that some of those who might will have that opportunity. You keep going back to wanting everyone along the line respecting you. Some never will no matter who you are or what you do. Those people do not matter. What does matter is that those who do matter get the opportunity to know who you are. You passed that up. We have discussions all over about giving ideas away when we do initial meetings with potential clients. A lot of designers think that everything they say has the potential to be stolen and they will be be losing something of great value. This is a very immature and arrogant way of thinking. Imagine having the ability to design and communicate such great ideas that any homeowner can hear your words and "poof" be able to hire a toothless knuckle dragger to build it for short money without you. Its not going to happen. It can be tried, but it will fail. Imagine trying to hire a designer who will not inspire you with descriptions and demonstrations of what they can do for you that others can't. That isn't going to happen either. I used to be just like you. But I learned, over a long time, that holding on is holding out and that there are more peole who don't have the ability to respect you and you can't let them get in the way of those who will respect you. When I walk a property with a potential client, I'll tell them any ideas that I have. I add one extra quality with it that I could not add years ago. That is that they absolutely know that it really is not going to wreck my day if I don't get their job and I don't care what ideas I gave them. That lack of arrogance (that probably never comes across in these forums) comes across as a lot of confidence and is what gets me my respect and gets people sold on me. Not everyone hires me. Some don't have it in the budget and I don't mind that because their are those others. And sometimes people who did not hire me recommend me. To think otherwise would make me a maddog too. Instead I am content and busy doing what I like doing on my own terms. Relax. PS. These are described as renderings. So, to the folks that are worried about him getting burned because someone is using construction details and specifications, these are renderings.

Flower is fleeting! There are some great workhorse plants, but for the most part, blooms are a nice spice that come--then go. You can design different parts of a garden to have a peak season--a month to 6 weeks where they are glorious, then fade into the background. Or you can put a bunch of workhorses in a garden and get pretty constant solid bloom from late March until September or later--but then you're relying on some spring ephemerals plus some very, very familiar perennials and annuals. For someone who clearly wants a BLOOMING border, this is often the best solution. Or you can mix in a foundation of workhorses and a number of more seasonal plants, so that you don't a riot of bloom, necessarily, but there's always something going on. This is what I tend to do. In my personal gardens, flowers are the flourish, or the spice--not even the icing, really, because they just aren't that dominant. (Most of my house is in shade, so I don't really have a choice...) For the most part, I concentrate on the FOLIAGE. Sometimes, I don't even care what color things bloom, especially in my shade gardens, because the blooms will so often be so far apart and inconspicuous compared to the foliage! I like to concentrate on 1) COLOR of foliage, not bloom. The color of foliage plays an enormous role in the rhythm of a bed. I've found that most beds can support 3 major colors. The most common colors are green (obviously)--from almost black to a light true green, chartreuse, purple (only works in shade directly against another color), silver/white, peach/red/orange, and blue. One color will be green--the other two depend on the situation! I started with a Japanese painted fern under my tree bed that I'm starting this year. Purple heurchera looks GREAT, and so do the pale-edged hostas (which are more white than gold). But the true chartreuse citronelle heuchera that I tried looks HORRIFIC, and it's going to have to make room for a more silvery heurchera to set off the purple one (purple with nothing around it disappears in shade and just looks drab). 2) The FORM of the plants--are they spiky? Mounding? Flat-topped groundcovers? Climbing? You can get a LOT of mileage out of conscious repetition and contrast, both. 4) The TEXTURE of the leaves--not the whole plant, but the individual leaves. Big, fat round leaves can be echoed in big, fat strappy leaves and contrasted against ferny leaves, etc. If you pay attention to everything BUT the flowers, you can actually get some pretty awesome results. If you pay attention to just the flowers, the result usually disappoint. My front bed I started right after I moved here. I wasn't familiar with growing ANYTHING in this region (seriously, it was the first time I ever saw blooming azaleas and hydrangeas), so I took the "buy what's on clearance, throw it in the ground, see what the deer don't eat to the ground, and learn about the plants" approach. :-) For my main curb garden, which is only 35' wide (pie-shaped lot), I wanted an informal mixed shrub border to screen the house from all the cars--and headlights--that turn around in the cul-de-sac. I was completely unfamiliar with MOST of the shrubs here at that time, so I just bought stuff that looked nice and was under $5 and looked like it'd get the right size. My rules were about form and color. I got 1/2 green (with some with chartreuse accents), 1/4 chartreuse, and 1/4 purple. I put tiny leaves next to big leaves, blobs next to spikes, and I'm still in the process of figuring out what other workhorse perennials I can fill the bare spaces with (in amongst the shrubs). Sand cherries by themselves are boring and tend to get leggy--as an accent in front of a wall of green behind a chartreuse-tinged arb, they really look great. People keep asking me what they are, and no one believes me that they're the same plants as you see all the time next to the highway. Between the *yawn* spireas, the cliched knockout rose, and the altheas, I actually do have *something in bloom all the time, pretty much by accident, but it's the colors and shapes of the foliage that are arresting. I let it go for a few years, to see how it would fill out, and now I REALLY need to do some refining at various points, but I've had tons of people in the neighborhood tell me how much they love the garden and how happy it makes them to see it at the end of the street. I've had people ask me to design things for them, and a few people have said that I should be designing professionally. (Um, NO. Not up to that! I STILL don't have a good grasp on what really does and doesn't do well here--I've tried 5 different plants in one spot on the back, and they all die or get eaten within the year--and I can't quite think as clearly in all four dimensions as I'd want to be able to before setting out a shingle. And I'm terrified of pruning most bushes wrong. But it's flattering, nevertheless.)

"Far too many people seem to think rotation is to aid in preventing insect and disease proplems, today, rather than a means of building soil fertility." That's because on a gardening level, that is a reason many people should rotate. Many people think this because it's often suggested in books and magazines to reduce insect poplulations and soil borne diseases by not planting where they already have a year's foothold (sometimes two). It's even on a farming level. Corn isn't rotated with soy just for the nutrient replenishment (though there is no doubt soy is often the plant used because of it's nitrogen replenishment ability and the end product's usefulness, it's not the only plant used in rotation). It's also because if you grow corn too many times in one spot consecutively you will have a worm problem get so out of control you'll never grow good corn again. You will also get repeat infections of the soil borne diseases such as leaf spot and anthracnose. That's why it used to be so rare to see it grown more than a year (sometimes two) at max. Now there are breeds of corn and pesticides that are making the worms and diseases less of an issue and farmers are chancing the third year more lately because of the price of corn going up for ethanol. Anyway, though I'm not arguing the soil replenishment value, I am saying it's not the only reason and certainly not the reason mentioned in the Vegetable Gardener's Bible, which is one of the books many newer gardeners base decisions on. And Purdue University seems to think it's the best weapon against the corn rootworm because the genetically modified means (Bt Corn) might just make the rootworms evolve stronger. In certain climates, if you grow cucumber more than two or three years in a row you will find yourself having serious beetle problems as the larvae take residence in the soil and enjoy consecutive successful eating/breeding years. If you rob those little soil borne buggers of food a year or two (they won't feed on tomatoes, for example) then you won't have generations building up in your garden. I find a 6 row rotation to work for my garden. Actually it's 5 rows and one empty row. Not all rows are just one vege and I usually throw herbs in between. The empty changes each year and the rows each move to the next. I also rotate my raised beds. Yes, rotate veges in my opinion. There is more than one really good reason to do so. Several books even have a few recommendation on what crops are best to rotate as the same insects and diseases attack more than one crop sometimes.

Some time ago there was a pruning demo that was offered through Ashdown and I never really understood clearly the idea presented. I know you removed dead and diseased or bloomed/branched out canes. Somehow the growth on the outside was supposed to support growth coming up from inside. How does that work? I use a pruning method on my Bourbons that I learned from a book written by 2 gardeners from England. You decide how tall you want the rose to be. The first year, you cut it substantially lower and in following years, you keep raising the height of the initial cuts and this leads to a well branched top. The canes are staggered in height so that they are shorter at the outside edges and tallest in the center. This gives flowers all over the shrub and not just the top. I like this method better than just letting it go. I get many many more flowers and the plant looks like a big bouquet in the yard. If I let it go, I get a few at the tops of tall fishing rods unless I am pegging them. My bourbons have a big spring bloom and then maybe a bloom here and there later on but this method gives the best spring bloom. Some of the DAs do very well with this method as well. Forcing the branching makes all the difference.