Each succulent stands out in its own way — the variegated foliage of Aeonium, the size and grandeur of agave, the cold-hardiness and resilience of Sempervivum. Out-of-this-world color and year-round beauty belong to Echeveria.

Read the whole story at Houzz

People who participate in community gardening are more likely to be in a healthy weight range than people from comparable backgrounds who are not involved with community gardens, a study in the US has found. 

It’s worth noting though that the design of the study means it is capable only of showing an association between community gardening and having a healthy weight. It does not prove cause and effect, and one possibility is that the findings simply reflect that people who engage with community gardening are more likely to have a healthy lifestyle anyway.

However, the results do add to a body of evidence which support the health benefits of community gardens, and the US researchers suggest that randomised controlled trials should now evaluate the impact of community gardening upon participants’ weight.

In the latest edition of JournalWatch, Dr Melissa Stoneham, of the Public Health Advocacy Institute WA (PHAIWA), endorses the US researchers’ recommendation that new urban developments should “design in” community gardens. She also would like to see established suburbs redesigned to integrate health-promoting features like community gardens.

 ***

Community gardens: producing health

Dr Melissa Stoneham writes:

In recent times I have had a bit to do with community gardens, with most being funded under the Commonwealth’s Healthy Community Initiative with local governments, which aims to increase physical activity and healthy eating in certain adult populations.

One clear standout was the Greenough Pioneer Museum community garden, just outside Geraldton in Western Australia’s midwest, which was supported by the GO Gero! project.

In June 2013, the garden was awarded a nationally funded award sponsored by the Australian Open Garden Day organisation.

The Greenough garden uses organic synergistic and aquaponic methods to produce over 35 varieties of vegetables, herbs and fruit.

Clearly this garden provides locally grown and competitively priced produce to the local community, but a recent study in the US suggests that community gardening can help people achieve a healthy weight.

The study, conducted by Caethleen Zick and colleagues based at the University of Utah, examined the relationship between participation in community gardening and weight.

It found that people who participate in community gardening have a significantly lower body mass index—as well as lower odds of being overweight or obese—than do their non-gardening neighbours.

The article, Harvesting More Than Vegetables: The Potential Weight Control Benefits of Community Gardening, was published in the American Journal of Public Health. It acknowledges that previous research in community garden settings has provided a variety of social and nutritional benefits to neighbourhoods but states there was little evidence to demonstrate that working in a garden could show a measurable health benefit.

Researchers gathered 198 community gardeners both men and women, from Salt Lake City, Utah and measured their body-mass index, based on their height and weight. According to recent Centers for Disease Control and Prevention data, Utah is the 45th most obese state in the United States with 57 per cent of adults overweight (BMI 25) and 22.5 per cent of adults obese.

Research methods included comparing community gardeners’ BMIs, and odds of being overweight or obese, with three control groups, all based in Salt Lake City.

One control group was a mix of unrelated people from the same geographic neighbourhood as the garden.  This group shared similar physical environments, such as walkability and proximity to food shops and stores, as well as economic status.

The second control group was same sex siblings, where it was expected they shared genetic predispositions for weight and family influences on diet and physical activity. The third group was married spouses of the gardeners, as it was assumed they would be likely to share lifestyle and food choices, including food grown in the community garden.

Gardeners recruited for the study included 423 adults who had participated at one of the community plots facilitated by a not-for profit community gardening scheme for at least one year between 1995 and 2010.

Data for control groups were drawn from administrative records, using the Utah Population Database, a multi-faceted data resource used by health researchers. It includes a large set of Utah family histories, and links to publicly-available historical birth, marriage, and driver’s license records.

A total of 375 gardeners were linked to BMI information in the database.  Once linked, driver’s license records were used to build a sample of neighbours—individuals matched for age, gender and residential location, and Utah marriage, divorce and birth records to identify siblings and spouses.

Eventually, data on 198 gardeners and 67 spouses were included in the analyses, and height and weight information came from driver’s license records following the commencement of their community gardening.

Results showed that women community gardeners had an average BMI 1.84 lower than their neighbours, which translated to a 4.9 kilogram weight difference for a woman 165 cm tall. For men, the BMI was lower by 2.36 for gardeners, which is a difference of 7.25 kilograms for a man who is 178 cm tall when compared to the neighbourhood cohort.

Gardeners were also less likely to be overweight or obese, showing 46 per cent less for women gardeners, and 62 per cent less for men gardeners.

When the researchers looked at the BMIs of individuals related to the gardeners, including siblings and spouses, comparative data was found. Same sex siblings revealed a similar advantage to unrelated neighbours and women in the community gardening group had a BMI 1.88 lower than their sisters. For men, the difference was 1.33 lower for the gardeners compared to their brothers. Both differences were statistically significant.

For spouses of married gardeners, there was no difference in BMI or odds of being overweight or obese. That finding was not surprising, as researchers had expected that spouses would benefit from eating food produced in the garden, and perhaps from assisting with gardening activities.

The last few sentences of the article, and a focus I find particularly important, is the recommendation that new urban developments’ “design in” facilitates such as community gardens, and the more established suburbs be redesigned so they integrate features that promote healthy lifestyles.

It is a well-known fact that community gardens provide many benefits to active participants such as providing opportunities to relax, undertake physical activity, socialise and mix with neighbours, share across culturally different backgrounds and religions, learn about horticulture and sustainable environmental practices and be a source of low-cost fresh produce for a healthy diet.

When you add in the findings of this research, which has demonstrated a considerable difference in BMI of gardeners compared with other community groups, community garden integration in our local suburbs seems to be what one of my younger colleagues described as: “a no brainer”.

• Harvesting More Than Vegetables: The Potential Weight Control Benefits of Community Gardening. Cathleen D. Zick, PhD, Ken R. Smith, PhD, Lori Kowaleski-Jones, PhD, Claire Uno, MLIS, and Brittany J. Merrill, BS. June 2013, Vol 103, No. 6; pp 1110-1115.

***

About JournalWatch

The Public Health Advocacy Institute WA (PHAIWA) JournalWatch service reviews 10 key public health journals on a monthly basis, providing a précis of articles that highlight key public health and advocacy related findings, with an emphasis on findings that can be readily translated into policy or practice.

The Journals reviewed include:

• Australian New Zealand Journal of Public Health (ANZJPH)
• Journal of Public Health Policy (JPHP)
• Health Promotion Journal of Australia (HPJA)
• Medical Journal of Australia (MJA)
• The Lancet
• Journal for Water Sanitation and Hygiene Development
• Tobacco Control (TC)
• American Journal of Public Health (AMJPH)
• Health Promotion International (HPI)
• American Journal of Preventive Medicine (AJPM).

These reviews are then emailed to all JournalWatch subscribers and are placed on the PHAIWA website. To subscribe to Journal Watch go to http://www.phaiwa.org.au/index.php/other-projects-mainmenu-146/journalwatch

***

PHAIWA is an independent public health voice based within Curtin University, with a range of funding partners. The Institute aims to raise the public profile and understanding of public health, develop local networks and create a statewide umbrella organisation capable of influencing public health policy and political agendas. Visit our website at www.phaiwa.org.au

****

Previously at Journal Watch:

• Energy drinks: an unaddressed health hazard

• More vaccination advocacy is needed

• Bike share schemes boost public health

• On big food, unhealthy partnerships and the health benefits of regulation

• Investigating the health costs of car commuting

• Time for another Sid the Seagull?

• Tackling the unhealthy food supply in disadvantaged communities

• Smoking at the movies, a global public health concern

• Sports clubs are winners when alcohol sponsorship is dropped

• Call for more research and planning to deal with public health challenges of mega events

• Environmental factors that promote cycling

• A focus on the corporate practices that contribute to poor health

• How much healthy food is sold at fast food restaurants?

• Why the world needs a dengue day

• Germany’s role in undermining tobacco control

 

Ron Frantz, associate professor in the University of Oklahoma College of Architecture, grew up in a storybook ranch house in Rollingwood, and has turned his admiration for midcentury design styles into a career specialization.

Frantz said the emergence of so-called “Garden View” designs reflected key socio-economic changes taking place as the post-World War II building boom spun families farther and farther from traditional city centers to the suburbs.

As air conditioning became the norm in private homes, people no longer needed their front porches “for either comfort or for social needs,” Frantz said.

Frantz also pointed out that as television began to replace “neighborly conversations,” families became “more private” — eschewing formal living rooms and front parlors for carpeted family rooms arranged to feature the TV “and maybe the wet bar” — and that home design responded to these new proclivities.

Frantz spoke recently at the 25th annual Oklahoma Statewide Preservation Conference in Perry, discussing “Twentieth Century Living Spaces.” He cited a 1972 article by syndicated columnist Hiawatha T. Estes, who he called “a prolific promoter of ranch-style house plans.”

Estes, a Tishomingo native who in 1948 founded the Nationwide House Plan Book Co., syndicated his column from 1955 to 1986. In the article, Estes identified a trend: Americans were gravitating toward “Garden View” homes that shifted the more important rooms to the back of the house “to enjoy a garden view.”

Notice that “it didn’t say ‘sit in the garden,’ ” Frantz said. Ranch-style designs became popular because by the 1960s, “everyone wanted to sit inside, with the air conditioning and the television.”

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Wednesday, 14 August 2013

TK Maxx, the discount retailer, is to open a store on Long Acre in London’s Covent

Garden.

The new retail venture is the former Next space, and is likely to raise eyebrows amongst the Covent Garden committee who are trying to raise the profile of the shopping district by attracting more luxury brands and high-end consumers.

Next is choosing to exit the store to focus on its other units in central London.

By
• J.S. MARCUS

Marianne Majerus

Grass-Roots Effort: A walled garden near a home in Cheshire, England. Tom Stuart-Smith envisioned creating a secluded retreat amid an open landscape.

British garden designer Tom Stuart-Smith made his name close to home. The winner of eight gold medals and three Best in Show awards at London’s annual Chelsea Flower Show—the Oscars of the gardening world—he has counted among his clients Queen Elizabeth II, for whom he designed a garden at Windsor Castle.

Mr. Stuart-Smith, who works out of a studio in inner London’s Clerkenwell district, has just finished a spacious walled garden in Cheshire alongside a 19th-century brick house, and a pair of enclosed garden spaces in Norfolk, near the North Sea, complemented by a wild garden between a restored 18th-century farmhouse and fields leading to a beach.

Enlarge Image

Dylan Thomas for The Wall Street Journal

Mr. Stuart-Smith is shown.

Now, he is taking his sketchpad on the road. He is designing gardens as far afield as northern Wisconsin, where he is creating a landscape for a compound belonging to members of a Midwestern industrial dynasty, and southern India, where he is working with a team of Mumbai architects to create gardens around a cluster of residential buildings in Kerala state.

Each garden he creates is different, says Mr. Stuart-Smith, but his overall approach is marked by “a strong geometrical structure” and “planting in a natural way.” That sense of structure follows his investigation into the natural and demographic history of a site. He sometimes likes to create a wild effect with plants like American grasses.

Mr. Stuart-Smith says he wants the eye to notice space and overall shapes “not whether this a pink bush or white bush.” That means his gardens tend to have “quite a bit of complexity,” he says, not “a beginning, a middle and an end.” A word he disdains in garden design is “minimalism.”

Always, a garden begins with a sketch, says the 53-year-old. “If I don’t draw something, I haven’t connected with it in a proper way,” he says. People think of planting being “the thing,” he adds, “but ordering principles are what’s most important—how you go about making a place.”

He says his ideas don’t come from gardening traditions or looking at paintings—common sources of design ideas—but rather from looking at natural landscapes and natural patterns of vegetation. He also is inspired by classical music, he says.

His urban gardens can be small, but his projects also have covered dozens of acres. At the Connaught, a luxury hotel in London’s Mayfair district, he designed a 10-by-40-foot garden with a reflective serpentine pond. In Islington, in northeast London, he designed a small residential garden presided over by eight exotic tree ferns. He planted climbing hydrangeas in the walled space that flower in the summer; the ground is covered with a deciduous grass that becomes rusty brown in autumn.

His budgets start at about $300,000 and can reach $7.6 million. He has benefitted from the professionalization of garden design in the U.K, where amateur gardening otherwise is a national passion. Until recently, he says, the British were loath to hand over control to an outside garden designer. Knowing how to lay out a garden was thought of as “part of the equipment you’re born with,” he says, “like knowing the difference between burgundy and claret.”

Mr. Stuart-Smith grew up in Hertfordshire, outside London, on a 250-acre estate built around a Queen Anne house, where he picked up gardening early. “I realized that gardening was something I really loved,” he says of his teenage years.

He returned home in the 1990s after doing post-graduate work in landscape architecture in Manchester, and began to design a garden on land acquired from his family. “There was nothing there when we started,” he says, just “50 acres of wheat.”

The results were featured in an article in House Garden magazine, which led to a professional breakthrough in 1998 when German fashion designer Karl Lagerfeld, head designer at the Chanel fashion house, asked him to enter the Chelsea Flower Show with a Baroque garden design.

“It wasn’t the garden I would have designed myself,” he confesses, “but I had this amazing experience” of collaborating with Mr. Lagerfeld. It was a publicity-grabbing experience, he adds, that led to him “being pushed right out there onto the deck, as it were.”

Clients have varying expectations of Mr. Stuart-Smith, who oversees a staff of eight or nine architects and landscape architects, and shares an open-plan office with two other landscaping firms. Although clients rarely ask for departures from his designs, he has noticed that some security-conscious people “want to surround themselves with prickly plants” to ward off thieves.

“You have to talk them out of it,” he says.

The length of time spent on projects means there is often overlap. “In a typical month we might be working on 30 to 40 gardens,” he says. “I might be working on a garden for seven or eight years, or even 20 years. It’s completely up to client if they want to keep us involved.”

He thinks of his gardens as intimate creations, which are then handed to their owners to care for and perhaps to reinvent. “We’re like an adoption service,” he says of his business. “You’re giving somebody something, and you hope that they make it their own.”

• 

Naumkeag’s Fletcher Steele-Designed Blue Steps, Restored Celebrating their 75th Anniversary. Photo courtesy of Michael Lavin Flower.

Like our recent landscape restoration of the Grand Allée at Castle Hill on the Crane Estate in Ipswich, we take our responsibility as caretakers of these magnificent cultural resources very seriously, says Barbara Erickson, Trustees President and CEO.

Stockbridge, MA (PRWEB) August 14, 2013

The Trustees of Reservations (The Trustees) have announced the completion of Phase One of an extensive garden and landscape transformation happening at Naumkeag, a National Historic Landmark located in the picturesque Berkshires of Massachusetts. Designed by McKim, Mead White in 1885, Naumkeag is a rare, surviving example of a Gilded Age Berkshire cottage. The historic home and magnificent gardens are visited by thousands of garden, landscape and history enthusiasts from around the world each year.

The first phase of the three-year, five-phase project included the restoration of the renowned Blue Steps on the 75th anniversary of their creation, as well as several other important garden features. The Blue Steps were originally designed for Naumkeag’s former owner, Mabel Choate, by America’s first modern landscape architect, Fletcher Steele. One of the most famous and photographed garden features in 20th-century American landscape design, The Blue Steps are a true expression of Steele’s belief that garden design should be considered one of the fine arts.

Naumkeag’s gardens are a masterpiece of 30 years of collaborative, creative work by Choate and Steele. They are one of the nation’s finest examples of early American modern landscape architecture and a rare surviving example of Steele’s remaining work still open to the public.

The first phase of the $3-million restoration effort, supported initially by a generous anonymous donor who has pledged to match up to $1 million in donations, began this spring with the repointing, repainting and re-grouting of the Blue Steps, along with the removal and replanting of 48 new white birch trees that elegantly frame them. In addition, The Trustees, with the help of Mayer Tree Service, also removed damaged and overgrown trees located throughout several areas around the hillside estate, including along the Linden Allée, a once-verdant pathway modeled after the wooded walks of Germany, located a few yards away from the Blue Steps. More than 200 trees of various shapes and sizes have been planted amongst the gardens this spring, following Fletcher Steele’s original tactic of overplanting to create a fuller, richer garden scape. Other restoration accomplishments have included updating garden infrastructure, electrical and water systems, and fountains, as well as the extensive restoration the South Lawn stonework, plantings and Chinese Pagoda.

Mabel Choate bequeathed the Naumkeag property to The Trustees in 1958 to care for and keep open for the public to enjoy. Over the last 10 years, The Trustees have worked diligently to restore several of Naumkeag’s signature garden areas, including the Peony Terrace, Chinese Temple, and Evergreen Garden. Since then, additional aspects of the garden have suffered the effects of time as well as damage from harsh New England weather. Original plantings have aged or disappeared, trees have become unhealthy and overgrown resulting in obstructed views and certain structural and design features have deteriorated. As a result, The Trustees have increased the pace of their restoration efforts to bring all eight landscaped acres surrounding Naumkeag back to their former brilliance and original design.

Thanks to a carefully planned preservation effort being lead by Cindy Brockway, Trustees’ Cultural Resources Program Director and Mark Wilson, Statewide Curator and Western Regional Cultural Resources Manager and supported by a team of staff, volunteers, artisans and consultants, the Naumkeag gardens are undergoing a dramatic renaissance designed to ensure their beauty and vitality can be appreciated by all for many years to come.

“Like our recent landscape restoration of the Grand Allée at Castle Hill on the Crane Estate in Ipswich, we take our responsibility as caretakers of these magnificent cultural resources very seriously,” says Barbara Erickson, Trustees President and CEO. “Since the iconic gardens at Naumkeag are one of only a few Fletcher Steele–designed gardens viewable to the public, we want visitors to be able to experience them in their full and original brilliance. Mabel Choate chose to bequeath her family home to The Trustees knowing it would be lovingly maintained and shared with generations to come. It is part of our mission and true passion, as envisioned by our founder Charles Eliot, to ensure their exemplary care for everyone, forever.

“Few properties in the country reflect the American transition to French Modernism better than Naumkeag,” says Brockway. “But after more than 50 years, the gardens need a refresh and a rejuvenation of the intricate details of scale, furnishings and plantings that made Naumkeag a work of fine art. By the end of the project, few landscapes in the country will have seen such a detailed restoration.”

Many other important structural, cultural and natural garden and landscape features located throughout Naumkeag will also be restored, replicated and reinvigorated over the next two years through a total of 16 projects, most of which will include rebuilding, and in some cases reproducing, foundational elements such as fountains and waters systems, masonry, decorative arts and original plantings.

“We are excited to refresh some of the key planting and design elements that were so important to Mabel’s and Fletcher’s original intentions for this special property,” says Wilson. “Whether it is the variety of plant material lost over time, the overgrown secret pathways or the damaged decorative art objects, artifacts and garden sculptures, our goal is to document every step of the process so future caretakers will be able to use our preservation plan as a reference guide and model for authentic garden restoration.”

Conducting extensive behind-the-scenes research and planning over many months, Wilson, Brockway, and their team have carefully culled hundreds of original design plans, historic photos, notes, letters and documents from Fletcher Steele and Mabel Choate in order to create a thorough and authentic restoration plan that will bring back the “polish” and “shine” to Naumkeag’s gardens.

Support: The ongoing work at Naumkeag is supported by the Campaign to Restore Naumkeag, a 3-year, $3 million initiative that includes a $1million challenge grant. Contributions raised toward this Challenge now total $762,000 – with $238,000 to go by September 30, 2013. Additional, funds have recently been received by the Stockbridge Community Preservation Act ($35,000) and Massachusetts Cultural Council ($128,000). For more information on the restoration project and/or how to support the campaign, please visit: http://www.thetrustees.org/naumkeagrestoration

About the Leadership Team: Lucinda A. Brockway is the Cultural Resources Program Director for The Trustees. She oversees the care and interpretation of the cultural landscapes on the organization’s 111 properties, including five National Historic Landmarks. A summa cum laude graduate of the University of Rhode Island and Boston University, she ran her own firm, Past Designs (Kennebunk, ME) for 25 years before joining The Trustees. Her Past Designs work included such well-known public projects as Fort Ticonderoga’s garrison grounds and Le Jardin du Roi (Ticonderoga, NY), Newport’s public and private Bellevue Avenue estates, the Fells (Newbury, NH), the Battle Green (Lexington, MA), and several projects for the National Trust for Historic Preservation, including the opening of Philip Johnson’s Glass House (New Canaan, CT). Her private residential designs have won recognition throughout the country.

Mark Wilson is the Curator of Collections and West Region Cultural Resources Manager for The Trustees. He has 24 years of experience in the museum profession, including positions at The Trustees of Reservations, the Nantucket Historical Association, and The Clara Barton Birthplace Museum. Mr. Wilson has a Master’s Degree from Brown University in the History of Art and Architecture and a Bachelor of Arts in Archaeology from Connecticut College. He is experienced in the use of archival materials for project research and large-scale project development, budget and resource management, and on-time project completion.

About the Trustees of Reservations: The Trustees of Reservations (The Trustees) “hold in trust” and care for properties, or “reservations,” of scenic, cultural, and natural significance for the general public to enjoy. Founded by open space visionary Charles Eliot in 1891, The Trustees are the nation’s oldest, statewide land trust and one of Massachusetts’ largest conservation organizations. Supported by more than 100,000 members and donors and thousands of volunteers, The Trustees own and manage 111 spectacular reservations — including working farms with Community Supported Agriculture programs, historic homesteads and gardens, community parks, barrier beaches and mountain vistas — located on more than 26,000 acres throughout the Commonwealth. In addition, The Trustees work closely with permanent affiliates including Boston Natural Areas Network and the Hilltown Land Trust. The Trustees work to preserve and protect these special places for current and future generations and offer hundreds of outreach programs, workshops, and events annually, designed to engage all ages in their mission. Accredited by the Land Trust Accreditation Commission, The Trustees are an established leader in the conservation and preservation movement and model for other land trusts nationally and internationally. To find out more or to become a member or volunteer, please contact http://www.thetrustees.org..

Please also visit us at:

https://www.facebook.com/thetrustees

https://twitter.com/thetrustees

http://www.linkedin.com/groups?home=gid=1855196

http://www.flickr.com/groups/trustees/

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Wednesday, 14 August 2013

TX Maxx, the discount retailer, is to open a store on Long Acre in London’s Covent

Garden.

The new retail venture is the former Next space, and is likely to raise eyebrows amongst the Covent Garden committee who are trying to raise the profile of the shopping district by attracting more luxury brands and high-end consumers.

Next is choosing to exit the store to focus on its other units in central London.

By Sarah Cosgrove
13 August 2013

Several different planting concepts form the backbone of the plan,
characterised by Oudolf’s signature style, which he describes as “romantic,
nostalgic, not wild, organic, spontaneous”. A central walkway runs down the
space, defined by oval grassy plinths or mounds and surrounded by long,
amorphous beds featuring the tall perennials we associate with Oudolf –
veronicastrum, sanguisorba, filipendula, cimicifuga, thalictrum, rudbeckia,
eupatorium. What is notable about Oudolf’s design as it appears on plan is
the way he has chosen to clump plants together here as opposed to arraying
them in drifts, his usual habit. This will be a garden in which to stop and
stare.

At the bottom of the slope, an irregular rectangle of pond is to be created,
some 15 metres wide, fed by a “perched” spring further up the hillside. This
wetter area is to be planted with irises and Lobelia tupa. At the top of the
slope will be the sporobolus meadow, its basis the American prairie grass
which is to be interplanted with the likes of Achillea ‘Feuerland’,
Echinacea pallida ‘Hula Dancer’, Amsonia hubrichtii, Lythrum salicaria
‘Swift’ and the strawberries-and-cream Sedum ‘Coral Reeves’. The overall
plant choice indicates that Oudolf is adding more complexity and detail to
his designs, in tune with the general trajectory of planting design at the
moment.

The cloister garden – enclosed by the main gallery building – is interesting
as an example of small-scale Oudolf, given that his work is often criticised
for its lack of application in domestic gardens. The planned matrix provides
food for thought, with an underblanket of the molinia grass ‘Moorhexe’ and
islands of Sesleria autumnalis punctured by bursts of Clematis heracleifolia
‘China Purple’, Euphorbia griffithii ‘Dixter’, the astrantia ‘Venice’,
Actaea ‘Brunette’ and Deschampsia cespitosa ‘Goldtau’. Perhaps it’s a matter
of: do try this at home.

At the moment the field is bare and the cloister unbuilt. Planting commences
in spring, with the garden opening in June. In the meantime, Hauser Wirth
is objecting to a proposed 40-acre “solar farm” of black solar panels on
adjacent land. Welcome to the glories of the English countryside!

By Matthew Appleby
08 August 2013