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January 25, 2013

More on Gardening and landscaping

Mark Cullen’s ultimate…

“If you would create something, you must be something.”

Mark Cullen: The plant…

Mark Cullen: The plant…

Mark Cullen: The plant…

Mark Cullen: The plant…

“If you would create something, you must be something.”

— Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

While some people claim to be “the authority,” others do not have to because the status is assigned to them by virtue of their work.

In the United Kingdom, where gardening is a greater obsession than hockey is here in Canada, there are many authorities on the subject of horticulture. The monthly magazine that is published by the Royal Horticultural Society is called The Garden. What other country could make such a simple and bold statement? If a magazine of similar quality and depth were published here, it might be called The Canadian Garden, not to be confused with The American Garden or The Australian Garden.

With a history that goes back to the earliest “plant expeditions” about 400 years ago, the pastime and the vocation of gardening stands out in the U.K. as a trademark. Others have tried to catch up, but none ever will. Not in our lifetime, anyway.

With this background in mind, there is no surprise at the title of a new, hardcover coffee table book from the U.K. called, you guessed it, Garden, by Randle Siddeley, the Lord Kenilworth. He was in Toronto recently for a book launch at Teatro Verde’s Yorkville location, where he took some time to sit and discuss his new book with my daughter Heather, a graduate in landscape architecture at the University of Guelph.

The book is a compendium of his work over the last 37 years. As an international garden designer for clients “with means,” he has definitely made a significant mark in his field. He is, for instance, the only garden designer that I am aware of who was flown by helicopter over a client’s property just to get a bird’s-eye view of it. All the better to create an outstanding design, one assumes.

In her interview with Siddeley, Heather discovered a passionate man with a deep love for his work. After working for his father, an interior designer, while in his youth, he migrated to exterior design through his love for plants. The main difference between the two disciplines, he points out, is the scale of the outdoor canvas. “With gardens you have to wait months — sometimes years — to see whether the effect you planned has been achieved.” He explains in the introduction to the book: “The other problem is that a garden is always changing.”

Asked what changes he sees taking place in the field of garden design, Siddeley says that “the public is more willing to pay someone for a design than before. There are more retired people that are taking landscape design up as a fun second career, which increases the popularity of it.”

I have no doubt that he is a professional who does not need to advertise. When your work is this good you ride from contract to contract on the coattails of your reputation. The pictures in Garden attest to the standards of his work.

RESPECTS NATURE

While the scale and value of the work he displays in his book are in a stratosphere that most of us can only dream about, the book does a good job of assisting us in having those dreams. You don’t need millions of dollars to create a garden paradise when the book provides pictures and text that will take you there for $65.

Siddeley may have been in the business for over a generation but that does not mean that he is set in his ways. Every design assignment that he takes on provides an opportunity to create a landscape that suits the desires and lifestyles of his client. More accurately, he states that each design incorporates the people who use them and the natural landscape that surrounds them.

This is the nut of his success, in my estimation: a determined effort to control nature while respecting it. There is a delicate balance between the ambitions of a garden designer to create something that suits the client with the appropriate nod to the natural surroundings of the place. Too often I have seen a beautiful country property overwhelmed by urban sensibilities. The perfect weedless lawn is manageable and fitting on a city lot, but completely out of place when spread over acres. Likewise, the use of synthetic stone and interlocking brick can spoil a rural setting when used in excess. It’s far better to incorporate natural flagstone or pea gravel from the local area.

The author gets this. And he understands the need to match the right plant species to its surroundings. A gorgeous Quebec property featured in the book provides good examples of this.

According to Heather, Siddeley means it when he says that his designs are about the client. The 26 gardens featured in Garden illustrate this as each stands out as different from all of the others. If there is a trademark Siddeley look, it is the variation of his design techniques. Heather observes that the designs are actually quite simple, using easy to source plant palettes. “There is nothing too exotic.”

BIG PICTURE

He does, Heather points out, always look for “the view.” There should never be more than 70 per cent of the garden visible from any one vantage point. This creates mystery and excitement for the visitor and encourages exploring: this is one of the goals of a garden designer regardless of the size of property they are working with.

Lord Kenilworth is a hereditary title. While there is no doubt that he inherited a considerable measure of creative talent from his parents, he can take full credit for putting a team of professionals together who have helped him fulfill his ambition as one of the great garden designers of our time.

Last word to Heather’s grandfather, the late John Farintosh, a “design builder” in Toronto for a few decades after the Second World War, who was fond of saying that “money does not buy good taste.”

Garden, the book, is evidence that the opposite can also be true, when the design process is in the hands of great talent.

QUESTION OF THE WEEK

Q: The warm weather caused my daffodil bulbs to start growing in the garden. Should I be worried?

A: Once the bulbs experience colder temperatures they will stop growing and remain dormant until the mild weather returns. The new growth you see will experience some damage due to the winter weather but this should not affect future blooms.

Mark Cullen is an expert gardener, author, broadcaster and garden editor of Reno Decor magazine. You can sign up for his free monthly newsletter at markcullen.com, and watch him on CTV Canada AM every Wednesday at 8:45 a.m. You can reach Mark through the “contact” button on his website and follow him on Twitter @MarkCullen4 and Facebook. Mark’s latest book, Canadian Lawn Garden Secrets, is available at Home Hardware and all major bookstores.

Editor’s picks

The London College of Garden Design has launched a new website to join all its venues and courses together into one place.

Director Andrew Fisher Tomlin said “we were conscious that our previous website whilst ideal for when we first launched five years ago needed to be improved to bring together the different strands of courses, venues and people into one place.”
He added “we also wanted to better display the talents and achievements of our students and graduates and our new website allows them to have direct control of personal pages that they can use to generate commissions once they graduate.”

The College’s graduates have chalked up a series of awards over the past two years including sweeping up the majority of student awards made by the Society of Garden Designers, the UK’s professional body for garden design, and winning medals awarded by the Royal Horticultural Society for gardens.

Fisher Tomlin said “this is a great time to be studying for a career in garden and landscape design and the London College of Garden Design has fast become the preferred place to study for those looking for a serious career in the profession.” The message is certainly spreading with a third of enquiries for the one year Garden Design Diploma coming from overseas, making competition for places strong and the College one of Europe’s leading specialist design colleges.

-ENDS-

About the London College of Garden Design

The London College of Garden Design aims to offer the best professional garden design courses available in the UK. The College is one of Europe’s leading specialist design colleges and offers professional level courses including the one year Garden Design Diploma which is taught from the Orangery Conference facilities at the world famous Royal Botanical Gardens, Kew and Regents College in central London. The college also has a partnership with the Royal Horticultural Society offering short courses at RHS Garden Wisley.

The London College of Garden Design’s short course programme is available at a number of locations. Click here for more information about the LCGD.

Or For further information please contact Andrew Fisher Tomlin at andrewfishertomlin@lcgd.org.uk or Tel: 01276 855977 or 07957 855457

This press release was distributed by SourceWire News Distribution on behalf of e-Zone UK in the following categories:
Education Human Resources, Construction Property, Men’s Interest, Entertainment Arts, Leisure Hobbies, Home Garden, Women’s Interest, Environment Nature.
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Andrew Tarantola

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It’s safe to say that the future will be here any day now, specifically the future from Back to the Future Part II. We’re still working on our hoverboard and levitating DeLorean technologies. Now, Toronto-based designer Ryan Taylor has developed the forerunner of the Garden Center fruit dispenser.

As Taylor explains,

The Babylon Light is a plantable light fixture. Made of aluminum with a powder coated finish, it can be used as an organic centre piece or a working herb garden over the kitchen counter. No matter where it’s situated – Babylon will become your very own hanging garden

Today, it’s hanging herb gardens; tomorrow, it’s hanging vegetable gardens; and the day after that, it will be “Fruit Please.”

Granted, the kitchen housing this concept fixture will need to be either West or South-facing to provide sufficient ambient sunlight for the plants, and the unit itself would need to employ cool-burning LED bulbs to prevent the fixture itself from overheating the soil in its rim, but it’s still an awesome design.

[ONI Projects via Contemporist]

A mega-star in the world of floral design – one of only seven recipients of the American Institute of Floral Designers’ prestigious Design Influence Awards – is coming to Gasparilla Island.

Canadian floral designer Hitomi Gilliam will be the featured speaker at the Boca Grande Garden Club regular meeting at 1 p.m. Wednesday, Feb. 6, at the Boca Grande Community Center.

Hitomi’s friendship with popular 2012 speaker, Els Teunissen led her to accept the invitation to Boca Grande for her presentation “ARTflor: What’s New In Floral Design?”

Article Photos

Canadian floral designer Hitomi Gilliam

Hitomi advocates “thinking to create” design with flower attributes providing the inspiration to showcase the wonder of nature.

Hitomi will show exciting uses of new varieties of flowers and foliages and the latest supplies and accessories.

She will also explain and demonstrate “the newest generation of mechanics and techniques in the field of Floral Design.”

Fact Box

To Go

Who: Canadian floral designer Hitomi Gilliam

What: Boca Grande Garden Club

When: 1 p.m. Feb. 6

Where: Boca Grande Community Center

Why: What’s New In Floral Design?

Cost: $30 for members, RSVPs required

Contact: Kay Ferland at (941) 924-7328

To Go

Who: Canadian floral designer Hitomi Gilliam

What: Boca Grande Garden Club

When: 1 p.m. Feb. 7

Where: Boca Grande Community Center

Why: in-depth workshop on floral design

Cost: $30 for members, RSVPs required

Contact: Gay Darsie at 964-0976

Hitomi, author of six books, founder of the annual New Mexico conference called “Survival of the Creative Minds,” is one of the top floral designers in the world.

She also founded the Design 358 Floral Collective, a group of individuals she selected to focus on sharing knowledge to inspire, educate and grow floral design awareness within the industry and the public. Their conclusions are published in an annual Flower Trend Summit Report.

Her program is free to members and open to the public on a space-available basis for $30. Reservations for non-members can be made by calling Kay Ferland at (941) 924-7328, then mailing check to the club at P.O. Box 1246, Boca Grande FL 33921, or bringing a check to the meeting. Advance reservations for non-members required.

Hitomi will also conduct an in-depth workshop at 1 p.m. Thursday, Feb 7, at the Boca Bay Power House: “Essential Mechanics and Techniques for ARTFlor.” Space is limited. Call Gay Darsie at 964-0976.

Nardozzi plants container garden ideas

Humorous horticulturalist Charlie Nardozzi’s fertile mind offered many ideas on planting and nurturing plants in recycled containers during a Jan. 9 talk with the Boca Grande Garden Club at the Community Center.

He described how flowers and vegetables can be combined, and identified new products for container gardens. He uses edibles in all his containers. One used rosemary, rainbow chard and edible pansies.

Other tips from Nardozzie:

To keep slugs and snails out of containers, put copper strips around the top.

Use earthworm juice as a pesticide.

Mix coconut fibers in potting soil to keep it moist, then fill the bottom of large containers with plastic water bottles with their caps on to create a foundation for water to flow through.

n Use Captain Jack’s Dead Bug Spray, an organic Spinosaid, as a pesticide.

He also demonstrated how to recycle a truck, a bicycle and an old washtub to create unique container gardens and distributed lists of salt-tolerant flowers and vegetables and heat-tolerant flowers and vegetables.

At the tea after the meeting, he took book orders while Linn Berousek of Pomello Park Nursery sold orchids. She donated a large unusual orchid for a raffle won by Maribeth Cunningham.

Vice President Diane Johnson, filling in for absentee President Nora Lea Reefe, appointed a nominating committee to search for new club leaders.

Jean Dobachesky, Judy Tessin, Linda Souza and Pat Parker of the Plymouth Garden Club recently attended a floral design class hosted by the Wareham Garden Club.

Dolores Ahern of the Hyannis Garden Club and Robin Murphy of the Wareham Garden Club, both master judges, were the instructors for the class, which taught the basics of a mass arrangement. Each student completed a floral arrangement to take home.

The Wareham Garden Club and the Plymouth Garden Club are both part of the South East District of the Garden Club Federation of MA.

By DEAN FOSDICK

Gardens can be great training grounds for fitness buffs.

Add trails for jogging. Build benches for workouts. Use trees and fence posts for stretching. Lose even more calories by squatting or lifting while weeding, planting, hauling and digging.

You can personalize your garden to fit your energy level. Equipment such as exercise beams and conditioning ladders are inexpensive and simple to make, while portable gear like weighted rollers, jump ropes, dumbbells and Swiss balls can be eased into the routines.

“If you have children’s play equipment, it is easy to add a pull-up bar or climbing frame for adults to a tree house,” said Bunny Guinness, a landscape architect who runs a garden design business near Peterborough in central England.

Gardening in and of itself can be a formidable calorie burner, said Guinness, who with physiotherapist Jacqueline Knox wrote “Garden Your Way to Health and Fitness.”

Regular physical activity reduces the risk of many illnesses, and gardening can provide it, said Margaret Hagen, an educator with University of New Hampshire Cooperative Extension.

“Raking is like using a rowing machine,” Hagen said. “Turning a compost pile is similar to lifting weights. Carry a gallon sprinkling can of water in each hand and you’ve got 8-pound dumbbells. Pushing a lawnmower is like walking on a treadmill, only much more interesting.”

Even more calories are burned when calisthenics are included in the mix. Add push-ups, chin-ups, bridging, power lunges and dips to the workouts.

Warm up before you begin to avoid cramping and joint pain. Pace yourself. Hydrate, especially if you’re gardening out in the sun. Avoid bending by using telescoping pruners, edgers and weeders. Opt for lightweight and easy-to-grip hand tools.

Work ergonomically. Stress good posture and balance.

“As someone who has had a back issue, I do try to follow my physical therapist’s advice and be careful to kneel instead of stooping while gardening, and to lift with bent knees and a straight back,” Hagen said. “One of the things I like most about gardening is that because you stretch and move in so many directions, it works all your muscle groups, releasing tension everywhere in your body.”

Don’t forget to include mental health in your landscape design. Add tranquil herb gardens, soothing fountains and small sitting areas for meditation, relaxing and cooling off.

“Any gardener can tell you that there is nothing like spending time outdoors gardening to refresh the soul,” Hagen said. “Psychologically, I’m sure it provides the same benefits to gardeners that recent research says recess provides to schoolchildren.”

Good nutrition also is an important part of any fitness package, and few things taste better than food served fresh from the garden.

“If you can boost your health and avoid stresses and strains in the process, it becomes all the more

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Richard Schipul’s job, one might say, is to bestow upon his clients the gift of beauty.

“I think what I do is giving more pride in home ownership to my customers,” the 47-year-old New Milford resident and owner of Designing Eden said recently as he sat in his home on a 10-acre farm in the rural Merryall section of town. “I want them to enjoy their homes, and I believe they can do that more by having beautiful gardens and landscaping. I know they feel this way after our work is done because I hear from them and we exchange Christmas cards with many of our clients.”

Since he was a young man, Mr. Schipul has had his hands in the good earth, making land come alive with his landscape and garden designs … his life’s work, really. He grew up in Trumbull and loved the outdoors so much that he headed off to the State University of New York in Farmingdale to acquire a degree in horticulture in 1989.

“I was going to get a two-year degree and return home and cut lawns for a living. But during college I took a trip with a friend to The Bayberry nursery on the eastern tip of Long Island and saw the amazing beauty of this property and knew this was what I wanted to do for the rest of my life—making properties beautiful.” So, Mr. Schipul’s dreams turned from cutting lawns to designing the gardens that surround the green oasis. He enrolled in the College of Environmental Science and Forestry at Syracuse University and received a Bachelor’s Degree in Landscape Architecture in 1992.

He shortly thereafter founded Designing Eden, which began as a landscape maintenance business in Trumbull, Conn. As the company developed, Mr. Schipul saw a need for a landscape company that could create memorable outdoor environments by combining creative design solutions with fine craftsmanship. Armed with his training and skills as a horticulturist and landscape architect, he moved Designing Eden into the planning and construction part of the industry, specializing in landscapes for historic houses. His business has been based in New Milford for the past eight years.

“My parents have a summer home on Candlewood Lake and I kept seeing this piece of property being advertised in New Milford,” he recalled. “I kept thinking that I should buy it with an eye on living there someday. So, three months later I did. When my wife (Christine) and I were married we moved to the property and lived in a small house that was on the land. It was 550 square feet and I had all my clothes in a three-drawer dresser,” he adds with laugh.” Along came two children, and the Schipuls built a large home on the property that also serves as a nursery for many of the company’s plantings.

“This is a perfect place for us. It is quiet and beautiful and much of the land around us is preserved as open space.” The property has a renovated barn and carriage house, and the Schipuls are in the process of clearing the land with a plan of building a horticultural showplace to include a design office, growing fields and display gardens to excite the senses.

As Designing Eden’s name indicates, Mr. Schipul’s overriding passion is to create unique and stunning gardens and landscapes for his clients, many of whom live in Litchfield County. He shows his visitor photos of a three-acre wildflower field he created for a client in Kent, as well as a garden for a historic home in Ridgefield center.

“The wildflower field is alive with color throughout the year and works, even though it butts up against the modern design of the home. The Ridgefield project is one of my favorites. The property was without much landscaping when we were hired and we were able to create a small, yet beautiful garden by mixing about 70 percent perennials into the landscape surrounding the house with 30 percent annuals; the latter we replace three times a year. It’s a historic home right on the town’s main street and the owners say they constantly have people coming up to the door and asking about the gardens.”

Although the firm undertakes projects on all types of properties, its specialty and affinity is renovating gardens of period homes, as well as creating old style gardens for new homes meant to look old. Mr. Schipul says his landscape designs are well thought out, environmentally sensitive and highly personalized. The landscape designs are created to complement the architectural style of a home, while also meeting a homeowner’s needs. The designs provide year-round interest by creating plant combinations with contrasting forms, leaf textures, colors and varying bloom times. Designing Eden installs and maintains gardens. Continued…

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Gardens can be great training grounds for fitness buffs.

Add trails for jogging. Build benches for workouts. Use trees and fence posts for stretching. Lose even more calories by squatting or lifting while weeding, planting, hauling and digging.

You can personalize your garden to fit your energy level. Equipment such as exercise beams and conditioning ladders are inexpensive and simple to make, while portable gear like weighted rollers, jump ropes, dumbbells and Swiss balls can be eased into the routines.

“If you have children’s play equipment, it is easy to add a pull-up bar or climbing frame for adults to a tree house,” said Bunny Guinness, a landscape architect who runs a garden design business near Peterborough in central England.

Gardening in and of itself can be a formidable calorie burner, said Guinness, who with physiotherapist Jacqueline Knox wrote “Garden Your Way to Health and Fitness” (Timber Press. 2008).

Regular physical activity reduces the risk of many illnesses, and gardening can provide it, said Margaret Hagen, an educator with University of New Hampshire Cooperative Extension.

“Raking is like using a rowing machine,” Hagen said. “Turning a compost pile is similar to lifting weights. Carry a gallon sprinkling can of water in each hand and you’ve got 8-pound dumbbells. Pushing a lawnmower is like walking on a treadmill, only much more interesting.”

Even more calories are burned when calisthenics are included in the mix. Add push-ups, chin-ups, bridging, power lunges and dips to the workouts.

Warm up before you begin to avoid cramping and joint pain. Pace yourself. Hydrate, especially if you’re gardening out in the sun. Avoid bending by using telescoping pruners, edgers and weeders. Opt for lightweight and easy-to-grip hand tools.

Work ergonomically. Stress good posture and balance.

“As someone who has had a back issue, I do try to follow my physical therapist’s advice and be careful to kneel instead of stooping while gardening, and to lift with bent knees and a straight back,” Hagen said. “One of the things I like most about gardening is that because you stretch and move in so many directions, it works all your muscle groups, releasing tension everywhere in your body.”

Don’t forget to include mental health in your landscape design. Add tranquil herb gardens, soothing fountains and small sitting areas for meditation, relaxing and cooling off.

“Any gardener can tell you that there is nothing like spending time outdoors gardening to refresh the soul,” Hagen said. “Psychologically, I’m sure it provides the same benefits to gardeners that recent research says recess provides to schoolchildren.”

Good nutrition also is an important part of any fitness package, and few things taste better than food served fresh from the garden.

“If you can boost your health and avoid stresses and strains in the process, it becomes all the more satisfying,” Guinness said.

Two recent developments, however, suggest a détente between nature and domestic culture.

This month, Pantone, a company best known for its color-matching system, announced that the color of the year for 2013 is emerald green. Never before, in 14 years of these selections, has a true green been named, possibly because it is also the color of mold, lobster liver and brussels sprouts.

Pantone was not put off. “No other color conveys regeneration more,” the company’s news release noted about the “vivid, verdant” hue known as Pantone 17-5641. It seems that as we become more environmentally considerate (and possibly also more susceptible to the color of money), we’re ready to ignore the ick factor and welcome green into our homes.

The idea that nature might be an honored houseguest and not just something that slithers in under the refrigerator is also behind “Bio Design: Nature, Science, Creativity,” a book published last month by the Museum of Modern Art.

Written by William Myers, a New York-based writer and teacher, “Bio Design” focuses on the growing movement to integrate organic processes in the creation of buildings and household objects so that resources are conserved and waste is limited. Some astonishing visual effects are produced as well. The book’s 73 projects, culled from laboratories and design studios around the world, show, for example, how living trees can be coaxed into becoming houses and bridges; how lamps can be powered by firefly luminescence; how human DNA can change the color of petunias; and how concrete can heal itself when damaged, like skin.

Mr. Myers said his interest in the redemptive power of small, creepy things started years ago when he began making his own bread and beer, and developed a familiarity with yeast. We have been conditioned to fear micro-organisms, he said, “but in fact they can be useful and have been for millenniums, if you think about baking and brewing.”

Also influential on Mr. Myers was “Design and the Elastic Mind,” a 2008 exhibition organized by Paola Antonelli at the Museum of Modern Art, which presented a number of visionary collaborations between designers and scientists. (One of the show’s most memorable projects, “Victimless Leather,” a tiny jacket cultured from living mouse cells, appears in Mr. Myers’s book.)

Designers habitually copy nature. The examples pile up faster than beetle species and include things like Antonio Gaudí’s soaring architecture, William Morris’s floral wallpaper and George Nakashima’s rough wood tables. Cutting-edge technology takes away nothing from nature-inspired designs, but instead enhances them. In 2006, the Dutch designer Joris Laarman introduced a chair modeled by computer along the principles of bone tissue development, so that the parts of the chair subjected to the greatest stress were thickest, while those subjected to the least amount of stress were carved away. The result was an efficient use of material and a spectacular form.

But bio design is not about merely taking cues from organic structures and operations. It’s about harnessing the machinery of the natural world to perform as nature does: storing and converting energy, producing oxygen, neutralizing poisons and disposing wastes in life-sustaining ways.

Mr. Laarman’s 2010 Halflife lamp is a good example. A prototype for a lampshade coated with hamster ovary cells modified with firefly DNA, it generates an enzymatic reaction that causes the lamp to light up, after a fashion, batteries not required.

What the Halflife lamp does require is a continuous supply of nutrients to keep the cells alive. As designers explore new ways to make and dispose of household goods, they gesture at new relationships between owners and possessions. “We’re used to thinking we can throw away objects,” Mr. Laarman said by phone from Amsterdam. “We’re not used to objects you can care for or treat well, or that renew themselves.”

Hamster ovary cells as pets? In the wonderland of biotechnology, bacteria is beautiful, moss is electric and decorative tiles are animated.

Consider Bacterioptica, a chandelier designed by Petia Morozov of Montclair, N.J., with petri dishes loaded with bacterial cultures nesting in a tangle of fiber optics. The pattern and color of the blooming bacteria (ideally supplied by individual family members, including pets) changes the quality of the light.

Or Moss Table, a collaboration between the scientists Carlos Peralta and Alex Driver of Britain and Paolo Bombelli of Italy, which exploits the small electrical current produced when certain bacteria consume organic compounds released by moss during photosynthesis. Using carbon fiber to absorb the charge, the scientists produced enough electricity with their table to power an attached lamp.

How thrilled am I to be working with Clayton Morgan  and CEM Design and Construction once again. I wrote up a little profile on him awhile back and you may have seen our photo when I attended his wedding two summers ago. He’s been a very busy guy and now he’s even busier having been married and, now, he’s also A DAD!!  Congrats to Clayton, Jamie and their precious daughter, Hope.

Clayton and I informally discussed maybe doing a show garden together at the Northwest Flower and Garden Show many years ago. Having just taken the plunge on my own, I wanted to him to have some part of the show to gain the experience and get his work out there. Business has picked up for him considerably, but he was gracious enough to help out with the rock work involved for “The Lost Gardener”. That meant my very first visit to the infamous Marenakos Rock Center in Issaquah, WA. They are one of the main sponsors for the show and graciously provide the awesome rocks for almost all of the show gardens being created.

Being sort of new to the world of selecting landscape rock, Clayton was on hand when I met with Mr. Bill Hyde who was so informative and helpful throughout the process. Knowing that Clayton was on a tight schedule, I did my best to be as efficient and direct as I can. This whole process has been a true practice in taking control of a project and trusting those around you to guide and support your thoughts and decisions and overall vision.

I think we got a few useful pieces to be placed strategically by Mr. Morgan’s crew come show time and about three pieces that are in the running as the main focal point of the display.

This was too small, but still intriguing

Will we figure it out and make it work??   We’ll find out February 16 when Marenako’s bring these rocks to the Washington State Convention and Trade Center.
R