Don Davis is a retired Virginia Cooperative Extension agent. He
can be reached at dodavis2@vt.edu.

Posted: Tuesday, January 8, 2013 3:33 pm

Impact of deer is profound

Don Davis

newsadvance.com

Our abundance of whitetail deer was the subject of a recent article in The Washington Post called “To Get Along With Deer, We Need to Shoot a Few.”

It was written by Jim Sterba, a former reporter for the Wall Street Journal and the New York Times and the author of “Nature Wars: The Incredible Story of How Wildlife Comebacks Turned Backyards into Battlegrounds.”

It seems deer were almost gone a hundred years ago when game conservation programs began. The 30 million or so deer living in the eastern U.S. at the time of Columbus had been whittled down to about 350,000 in widely scattered locations.

What brought down their numbers was market hunting for hides. Native Americans sold hides to European traders to get things like cooking pots and guns. White people got into shooting deer for profit and in the time of Daniel Boone a hunter could kill 30 deer in a day.

Conservation programs worked well over many decades. Today’s whitetail population is 25 to 40 million.

Sprawling cities and suburbs are “deer nirvana.” They have a smorgasbord of tasty foods and there are no more wolves or mountain lions to bother the deer. Hunting has been banned in most residential areas, taking the other natural deer predator — humans — out of the equation.

However, people do kill deer by accident using their cars and the cost is $1.5 billion per year. There are 4,000 deer vs. vehicle collisions every day in the U.S., and 250 people die each year in these wrecks. The yearly deer deaths total 1.5 million.

Of course deer are impacting agriculture too. They browse on everything from lawns, gardens and landscaping to orchards and farm crops.

The impact of deer on forests is profound. Deer gobble up tree seedlings and other plants growing on the forest floor. Deer can threaten rare plants, not to mention animals and birds that depend on them in the forest under story environment. Sterba asserts “deer have become defacto forest managers.”

Deer easily exceed their food supply. In most places this happens when there are more than 20 deer per square mile, and in many residential areas their population is now 50 to 100 per square mile.

Hunters shoot 6 million whitetails a year and a similar number dies from disease and predators, but this is not enough to stabilize the herd. Stabilizing requires killing two-thirds of the deer each year, according to Sterba.

Birth control has been tried and it does work in places where the deer are contained by fences. It is costly and impractical for free roaming deer.

Deer have become demonized in some areas, with people calling them rats and mountain maggots. Sterba believes the whitetail deer “can resume its place in our lore, our communities and our hearts” if we can just control their numbers.

He says “Bambi doesn’t deserve this.”

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Tuesday, January 8, 2013 3:33 pm.

Words like “beautiful” and “favorite” were echoed by dozens of visitors walking by one landscaping display in particular at the Pennsylvania Farm Show on Tuesday.

The “Edible Landscaping” display created by students in the Horticulture Two class at Northern High School won the Best Overall Design award at the Farm Show.

The award qualifies the display for the Big E Competition in Springfield, Mass., in September. Organizers of the Big E Competition will select six displays from across the country to be entered in the contest.

Students also won first place in the plant material and non-living plant material categories for their display. The one category they did not place in was for blueprint design, which they won last year.

The landscape design contest included displays from 11 school districts in the state.

Northern High School teacher Carol Richwine had her students begin gathering plants from the school’s greenhouse and gardens in October to represent the school’s “Farm-to-School” effort. Students continued to work on the display over their holiday break, said Richwine. Their commitment to volunteering outside of class time is what brought them such success, and otherwise they would have been missing too many hours at school, she said.

It took two days to set everything up, and they finished by 3 p.m. on Friday, in time for the 4 p.m. deadline before the displays would be judged, said Richwine. They are judged by Black Landscaping, based in Cumberland County.

Swiss chard, curly kale, blueberries, huckleberries, and strawberries from the high school’s courtyard filled the display along with carrots, spinach, basil, and blooming spring shrubs transplanted from the school greenhouse.

Every student first had to come up with a design for the space, said Richwine. As a class they looked at the common factors in each design and brainstormed ways to put them together, she said.

“It’s best when everyone is a part of it,” Richwine said.

Two drafting students took the horticulture students’ hand-drawn design and created an autocad framed landscape print.

Brandon Seamans, a senior wood shop student, did the bulk of the work to create the wooden arbor at the center of the display.

“It’s real life experience,” said Richwine. “We will do most of the teaching afterward.”

The display will remain at the farm show until Richwine and her students tear it down on Saturday night.

This is Northern High School’s second year entering the contest, said Richwine. Schools must submit a plant list and final plan by Dec. 1 to enter, and must stick to that plan for their display.

– Reach Chelsea Shank at cshank@yorkdispatch.com.

Members of the Wicker Park Garden Club and landscaping enthusiasts from around the city gathered Monday at Wicker Park to learn how they can keep rain water in their soil and out of their storm drains.

Landscape architect Gary Lehman of G Studio Design gave a lecture on green landscaping and his work with the Milwaukee Avenue Green Development Corridor project in the park’s fieldhouse.

The Green Development Corridor project is a joint effort between the Metropolitan Planning Council and the Illinois Environmental Protection Agency to reduce flooding and improve water conservation in the Logan Square neighborhood.

The program involves $200,000 in grant money that the IEPA will use to reimburse homeowners for up to 75 percent of the costs involved in eligible property and landscape improvements. Designers like Lehman work with residents to fill out the applications, which are then reviewed by the MPC and the IEPA.

The program started as a way to address flooding problems along the Milwaukee Avenue corridor in Logan Square, specifically between California and Central Park avenues. The main idea is to reduce the amount of rain water running into the storm drains by implementing landscaping and architectural methods that redirect it away from the drains and back into the ground and water table.

“They went like two blocks back, or something like that, from Milwaukee Avenue and figured those are the residents that could have the greatest impact on any flooding that would go on Milwaukee Avenue,” Lehman said.

Lehman’s lecture included several examples of projects he’s currently working on through the grant program. He focused on showing the audience how he combines aesthetics and the needs of his clients with the IEPA’s guidelines and specifications about the changes required in order to qualify for a grant.

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While homeowners outside of the Milwaukee Corridor project’s boundaries aren’t eligible for IEPA grant money, the lecture was meant to educate interested members of the Wicker Park Garden Club about how they can improve their own water retention.

Some of the ways he suggested people could manage the flow of storm water on their property and keep it out of the drainage system included rooftop gardens, porous paving materials such as gravel and rain barrels to capture water to use for watering plants.

Lehman said the IEPA also recommends the use of native plants in a landscape in order to increase water conservation. However, Lehman said he thinks the guidelines should be broadened to allow for more of what he calls “high-performance plants” that help keep water in the ground and don’t require too much watering or maintenance.

“The EPA specifically said ‘native plants,’ which has specificity for a lot of lists out there,” he said. “And as soon as they say that, it narrows down my ability to create a design when it could be a little bit broader.”

Lehman’s lecture was part of the Wicker Park Garden Club’s ongoing Landscape Design series, which includes a series of lectures as well as a seven-week Saturday workshop series, according to garden club coordinator Doug Wood.

The lecture series is meant to give landscape and gardening enthusiasts from around the city ideas that they could implement in their own work, and the workshops are intended to teach them the practical skills to put those ideas to work at home. Lehman will also be involved in instructing the Jan. 12 workshop.

Despite the fact that the grant funds are only available to residents in a very specific part of the city, Wood said he wanted to bring Lehman in to give a lecture about it to get people thinking about the same kind of green initiatives in their own neighborhoods. He said he hopes that enough attention or public interest can be generated to get another grant program started in Wicker Park or other areas of the city.

“What you do is you get somebody excited,” Wood said. “And then they talk to the alderman and they talk to the SSA and they talk to historic groups, and you write a proposal for these groups to make your area that way. That’s the goal.”

Diversification best defence to ash borer, Markham says

URBANA, IL – Urban agriculture is promoted as a strategy for dealing with food insecurity, stimulating economic development, and combating diet-related health problems in cities. However, up to now, no one has known how much gardening is taking place in urban areas. Researchers at the University of Illinois have developed a methodology that they used to quantify the urban agriculture in Chicago.

John Taylor, a doctoral candidate working with crop sciences researcher Sarah Taylor Lovell, was skeptical about the lists of urban gardens provided to him by local non-governmental organizations (NGOs).

“Various lists were circulating,” he said. “One of them had almost 700 gardens on it.”

On closer inspection, however, many of these “gardens” turned out to be planter boxes or landscaping and were not producing food. On the other hand, Taylor suspected that there were unnoticed gardens in backyards or vacant lots.

“There’s been such a focus on community gardens and urban farms, but not a lot of interest in looking at backyard gardens as an area of research,” Lovell agreed. An accurate map of these sites would be helpful for advocacy groups and community planners.

Taylor uploaded the lists from the NGOs into Google Earth, which automatically geocoded the sites by street address. He used a set of reference images of community gardens, vacant lot gardens, urban farms, school gardens, and home food gardens to determine visual indicators of food gardens.

Using these indicators and Google Earth images, he examined the documented sites. Of the 1,236 “community gardens,” only 160, or 13 percent, were actually producing food.

Taylor then looked at Google Earth images of Chicago to locate food production sites. This work took more than 400 hours over an 8-month period. He identified 4493 possible sites, most of which were residential gardens of 50 square meters or less, and visited a representative sample of gardens on vacant land to confirm that they were really producing food.

All the large sites and a sample of the small sites were digitized as shapefiles (digital vector storage formats for storing geometric location and associated attribute information) in Google Earth. These shapefiles were imported into Arc Map 10, a geographic information system (GIS) mapping tool, to calculate the total area.

The final estimate was 4,648 urban agriculture sites with a production area of 264,181 square meters. Residential gardens and single-plot gardens on vacant lots accounted for almost three-fourths of the total.

To map the gardens onto community areas, the shapefiles were joined with 2010 Census tract shapefiles and shapefiles of 77 community areas and neighborhoods from Chicago’s GIS portal. The tract information was subsequently joined with the Census Bureau’s 2005-2009 American Community Survey (ACS) 5-year estimates of demographic and housing characteristics.

The maps showed that garden concentration varied by neighborhood. “Chinatown, Bridgeport was kind of a hot spot,” Taylor said. Both of these neighborhoods have large Chinese-origin populations. Even outside those areas, many of the larger gardens were associated with households headed by people of Chinese origin. Neighborhoods in the northwest with large numbers of Polish and Eastern and Southern European immigrants also had a high density of backyard gardens.

They were not all growing the same kind of food. “There are distinctions between these cultural groups because the crops they select are sometimes from their home areas in addition to the suite of crops we can all grow in our backyards,” Lovell explained.

As people move across borders, they often bring seeds with them. “In a Mexican neighborhood where we were working, a lot of people grow a tropical corn that is 12 to 16 feet high,” Taylor said. “It’s grown not for the ears of corn but for the leaves, which are used to make tamales.”

He noted that many older African-Americans in Chicago who came north during the Great Migration from the south from the early 1900s to the 1970s remember farming and growing up with gardens. “They are almost reproducing in miniature in their backyards the southern landscape and gardening practices that they associated with their youth,” he said.

Garden type varied by neighborhood as well. Home food gardens are concentrated in the northwest, where people tend to live in detached houses. Vacant lot gardens are concentrated in the economically disadvantaged neighborhoods in the south and west sides, as are the community gardens.

Lovell said that, in some communities, more than half of the lots are vacant, and making use of them could be a huge opportunity. Chicago has a program that allows people living next to a vacant lot to purchase it at a fraction of what it would normally cost.

The results of this study suggest that both backyard gardens and vacant lot gardens contribute substantially to Chicago’s total food production.

“Home gardens actually contribute to food security,” Taylor said. “They’re underappreciated and unsupported.” He noted that people grow not only for themselves but for their neighbors as well, which is particularly important in food deserts where fresh produce is in short supply.

“There is also potential for empowering people because they are using their own space to deal with their own food security concerns,” Lovell added.

The study, “Mapping public and private spaces of urban agriculture in Chicago through the analysis of high-resolution aerial images in Google Earth” by John R. Taylor and Sarah Taylor Lovell, published in Landscape and Urban Planning, is available online at http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S016920461200237X.

St. Cloud, FL — (SBWIRE) — 01/07/2013 — The economy may be well on its way back up, right along with employment numbers, but, unfortunately, so too are food costs at your local grocery outlet on the rise.

Fresh vegetables, in particular, are increasing in cost across the board, which in turn has heralded in a new and expanding trend in residential landscaping.

More people are turning under their front lawns and flower beds and replanting them with vegetable gardens, and finding that by doing so, they’re not only saving money, but are also enjoying the luxury of having fresh grown organic produce ready at hand right off the vine.

Check the Community Codes and Restrictions

It hasn’t come without controversy though, as more stories are making it into the news about homeowners who have ran afoul of planned neighborhood codes and standards governing what can and cannot be included into a landscaping scheme.

Rules that are all too often tucked away in the fine print of sales contracts of any home today built and sold in a planned community.

So to find out more about this new style of edible landscaping that has brought so many people a bountiful harvest of problems with local community governing boards, who better to talk to then a professional landscaper? In a recent phone interview, a customer representative for Greener-gardens.com of Orlando, Florida took some time out to give us his take on the matter.

What an Expert in Orlando Has to Say

He told us that, “We’re for sure hearing about it a lot more than we used to but we haven’t received any calls yet requesting that are services be employed for this type of landscaping design scheme. What it all boils down to though, is that when you sign a contract to purchase a home in a planned neighborhood you must be aware that you will also be signing an agreement to a set list of what are called CCR’s. What these are is a list of what you can and cannot do with your home, and it not only covers landscaping but also things like styles of roofing and paint colors as well.”

“Now they aren’t laws that you can be criminally charge for breaking but all CCR contracts include a clause regarding fines that will be levied against a homeowner if they violate them. They can be pretty stiff too, and these types of contracts are drawn up to be rock solid, so they’ve been challenge in court and the homeowners have always lost.”

He went on to say that CCRs stand for ‘Community Codes and Restrictions’, and they have their purpose. They keep homeowners from deviating from a preplanned general look, which the original designers of a housing community laid out during its inception. So they aren’t all bad, because they function to support resale values.

He simply advised anybody who’s looking at any home with an eye towards buying to ask the realtor about any CCR’s, which may exist before they sign on the bottom line. They vary from community and some may allow certain plants trees and bushes that are fruit bearing.

About Greener-Gardens.com
Greener-gardens.com, based out of Orlando, Florida is one of the area’s premier recognized name in landscape design, and installation.

Greener Gardens
service@greener-gardens.com
http://greener-gardens.com
5275 Rambling Rd
St. Cloud, FL 34771
Office: (407) 892-9795
Fax: (407) 892-3332

Del Aire residents got to enjoy the fruits of their labor Saturday with the unveiling of the state’s first public orchard.

Residents of this quiet, unincorporated slice of Los Angeles County had helped plant 27 fruit trees and eight grapevines in Del Aire Park and 60 additional fruit trees in the surrounding neighborhood. It was part of a larger renovation that included face lifts for a community center, basketball court and baseball field, all nestled in a green space just southwest of the juncture of the 105 and 405 freeways.

“Community gardens and farmers markets are truly the town centers of our communities,” County Supervisor Mark Ridley-Thomas told the crowd of about 200 at the event. “These are the places where people gather and get to know each other.”

The county paid $4 million for the improvements — and used a little creative financing. The fruit trees were paid for from funds designated for civic art. The purpose was to blend food and aesthetics into “edible art,” Ridley-Thomas said.

A group of three artists, known as Fallen Fruit, helped design the orchard. “Art can be something more than something tangible,” said David Burns, one of the artists. “It can actually be an idea. They really understood and embraced the fact that this art project was about the idea of share. This is about creating something that is abundant that has no ownership.”

Another of the artists, Austin Young, said Boston, New York and Madrid are among the cities experimenting with edible landscaping. But in agriculture-rich California, Del Aire is the first place to follow suit, said Karly Katona, deputy to Ridley-Thomas. The idea is to create an edible landscape that will give the residents ownership and a stake in their park, she said.

Before its makeover, the park was something of a paradox. On weekends it bustled with families and children, but many came from other communities. They considered Del Aire Park a haven from the poorly maintained parks that had become gang hangouts in their neighborhoods.

By comparison, many Del Aire residents regarded the park as run-down. They often complained that the baseball diamond looked like a swamp from constant flooding, said John Koppelman, president of the neighborhood association.

So last summer, as the renovations took shape, Ridley-Thomas’ office held events at the park to entice locals to enjoy the public space right in their backyard. Those included a “fruit jam” where residents were encouraged to bring food items that could go into a jam everybody shared. Residents also came to plant the trees, which include plums, pomegranates, limes, avocados and apricots.

Saturday morning, under a brilliant sun, the saplings were taking root in the freshly turned earth, wood stakes holding up the thin, bare trunks. The first edible fruit won’t be ready to harvest for three years.

For now, a wooden sign overlooking the trees describes their purpose: “The fruit trees in this park belong to the public,” it says. “They’re for everyone, including you. Please take care of the fruit trees and when the fruit is ripe, taste it and share it with others.”

After the dedication, Al Luna of Del Aire watched his two young daughters as they played on the jungle gym. The 42-year-old father said he loves having fruit trees across from his home.

“This is something we have never seen here,” he said. “I know the public parks are very against having fruit trees in the parks, but I think this is a good idea. It will bring more people around and at least get free fruit out of it.”

angel.jennings@latimes.com

ST. LOUIS COUNTY • Never mind that the first crocus won’t likely sprout until at least March, Rein Zeidler is already considering some major changes on the grounds of his Webster Groves home.

The options include replacing a portion of the turf grass with permeable vegetation, adding a berm or stone landscaping and digging. Lots of digging.

Should he proceed as planned, Zeidler could wind up with up a handsomely redone yard and extra money in his bank account.

Monday marks the opportunity for Zeidler and homeowners in 13 other St. Louis County municipalities to take the first step toward securing that incentive — up to $2,000 per household — in exchange for participation in a RainScape Rebate Program officials say will stem the flow of residential run-off into Deer Creek watershed tributaries.

“Rainscaping is landscaping with a function and a purpose,” says Stacy Arnold, outreach coordinator for the Deer Creek Watershed Alliance, the public/nonprofit environmental partnership sponsoring the program.

Composed of the Missouri Botanical Garden, the Metropolitan St. Louis Sewer District, Region 7 of the Environmental Protection Agency, the Missouri Department of Natural Resources and the Mabel Dorn Reeder Foundation, the consortium has budgeted $200,000 to fund the incentives.

Come planting season, residents of Brentwood, Clayton, Creve Coeur, Des Peres, Frontenac, Kirkwood, Ladue, Maplewood, Olivette, Richmond Heights, Rock Hill, University City, Warson Woods and Webster Groves will be eligible for payouts ranging from $500 to $2,000 by installing native vegetation and other modifications to limit rainwater seepage into nearby waterways.

The participating communities will begin distributing applications to interested homeowners on Monday. Applications can also be downloaded online.

Zeidler said he’d considered a rain garden in the past. The money sealed the deal.

“I think I’ll give it a shot,” said Zeidler. “Why not?”

Robert Broz, the director of the Water Quality Program at the University of Missouri, offers one reason:

“People need to be aware that a rain garden does require maintenance,” he said. “The upfront money figure might sound good. But you need to invest time and money to make sure it functions for a long time.”

A commitment to see the project through is among the criteria alliance officials will weigh in granting the incentives on a case-by-case basis.

The alliance estimates an average award will be $500.

Deborah Chollet Frank of the Missouri Botanical Garden believes it’s a worthwhile investment.

“When water runs into a stream, it carries fertilizer, dog poop and everything else with it,” said Frank, vice president for sustainability with the Botanical Garden.

Precipitation flowing from lawns can also cause major flooding – as has occurred five times in the last 55 years along “highly eroded” Deer Creek watershed streams, according to the alliance.

The short-rooted turf grass cultivating most lawns unfortunately does little or nothing to prevent or slow drainage, notes Karla Wilson, the Deer Creek Alliance project manager.

Better, environmentalists say, to plant vegetation with roots that can extend 10 to 15 feet such as Queen of the Prairie or Culver’s Root or Blue lobelia.

The roots of native grasses such as Big Bluestem and Switch grass also run deep.

The move toward a public and private response to property drainage was introduced two years ago with the installation of pilot rain gardens on six county properties.

Shared responsibility for storm run-off is becoming more common, said Broz.

An incentive program that ended three years ago brought rain gardens to nearly 100 homes, schools and parks in Columbia, Mo.

A similar initiative to reduce the nutrients and pesticides emptying into tributaries feeding the Lake of the Ozarks is gaining traction in south-central Missouri.

And in 2005, the Sustainable Cities Institute launched a project to encourage the installation of 10,000 rain gardens in greater Kansas City.

Controlling run-off can be as complex as a rain garden or as simple as installing a barrel to catch storm water seeping off a lawn.

“A single 50-gallon rain barrel may not seem like much,” said Broz. “But when you have barrels at 100 homes it can make a difference.”

Alliance officials hope the rain gardens appearing in yards across St. Louis County will spark the next phase of environmental awareness.

“We want it to become as common as recycling,” said Frank.

Photo by Ed Marcum // Buy this photo

The inside of the main entryway of the Candora Marble Co. office building makes use of many varieties of Tennessee marble. The board of directors of the South Knoxville Arts and Heritage Center, as the building is called, has secured a $25,000 challenge grant for further work on the building, which the board wants to turn into a marble museum. (Ed Marcum/ News sentinel)

Savage House and Gardens stands as a monument to architectural and landscaping creativity in North Knoxville.

The Airplane Filling Station is no longer a filling station, but it is on the National Register of Historic Places.

The restroom at the park off Cherokee Boulevard in Sequoyah Hills is a little beveled stone chapel with womenís facilities on the left and menís on the right.

Photo by Submitted

photos Special to the news sentinel
Completed in 1923, the office building of the Candora Marble Co. in South Knoxville was meant to showcase the quality of Tennessee marble.

The Candoro Marble Works off Maryville Pike is like a little slice of Renaissance Italy in South Knoxville. A masterwork of marble craftsmanship that harkens to florid Old World European design, with a wrought-iron door, hand-carved flourishes and Tuscan columns, it’s a bizarre anachronism in the middle of blue-collar Vestal, circa 2012.

“You’re in this scruffy little corner of town, and there’s this little Italian villa,” says Matt Edens, a longtime local real estate writer and former Knox Heritage board member.

According to Knox Heritage Executive Director Kim Trent, the building was a showroom for the Candoro Marble Company, designed by prominent Knoxville architect Charles Barber (1887-1962) of Barber McMurry. “It was basically a way for them to show off what they could do.” She laughs, “When I first moved here, I immediately wanted to move in.”

Today, the building serves as a museum and, occasionally, an events center of sorts for the Vestal community. But there’s a lesson in the fact of its unlikely existence. That being, while Knoxville may not be a major urban center, due to its singular clashing of rural and urban sensibilities and unique cultural heritage, it’s a good place to see some weird, wonderful architecture in some unexpected places. “There’s always been pretty interesting architecture here,” says Edens. “Some of it seems pretty unlikely. You turn a corner and say, ‘Whoa!'”

For instance: It’s a rare day that people walk out of a public restroom having had a memorable experience. But when you mention the public facilities at the park off Cherokee Boulevard in Sequoyah Hills, people usually know what you’re talking about.

Because the restroom there, a beautiful little beveled stone chapel with women’s facilities on the left and men’s on the right, is just that memorable. And according to city parks and recreation director Joe Walsh, the neighborhood residents wouldn’t have it any other way.

“We’d been trying to put in a permanent restroom in the park for a while, and we’d worked with the neighborhood association because those aren’t necessarily the nicest amenities,” Walsh says. “They asked us to make them as nice as possible. We had a budget, but they offered to chip in.”

As it happened, the total cost came in within the city’s budget of about $150,000 for the 600-square-foot facility, even with the perks. “It’s got nicer gutters, a more elaborate interior, better material on the outside,” Walsh says. “It’s closer to the architecture you’d find in Sequoyah Hills.”

Perhaps less graceful in character than other examples, the Airplane Filling Station at 6829 Clinton Highway is nonetheless a little slice of classic Americana, a bit of roadside bizarrerie that harkens to the popularity of both a hero of American aviation and mimetic architecture of the 1930s.

“Brothers Elmer and Henry Nickle built the filling station to look like the Charles Lindbergh airplane, the Spirit of St. Louis,” says Roch Bernard, who heads up the Airplane Filling Station Preservation Association, a non-profit committee that is working to preserve the site, which is listed on the National Register of Historic Places.

“This was the early 1930s, right around the time of Lindbergh’s flight, and it was kind of a gimmick to attract customers,” he continues. “There was a lot of mimetic architecture in those days — roadside buildings in the shape of pigs and planes and all kinds of stuff.”

The filling station remained in business until the mid-1960s, Bernard says. For several years after, it served various other purposes; it was a mobile home repair supply, a bait and tackle store, a car lot (more than once), even a head shop, Bernard says.

In 2003, a local antiques dealer came in and placed a down payment on the property. Bernard joined in, and the Preservation Association was born. The organization is a nonprofit, and the volunteer members hope to find a new permanent owner interested in preserving the character of the old station.

There is a prosaic area of North Knoxville, in Fountain City, where, on the journey past Central High School toward Broadway, one suddenly experiences a brief, beautiful ripple in time and space. Because on the right, the flow of suburban clutter is suddenly interrupted by a little slice of the orient, a beautifully-kept little garden with stone walls, trails, exotic plants, a century-old bungalow surrounded by a pagoda/pumphouse and other oriental flourishes.

The property is known as Savage House and Gardens; its construction began in 1914, and continued as a labor of love for Arthur and Hortense Savage.

“They were avid gardeners; it earned Arthur the title of ‘father of rock gardening’ in Knoxville,” Trent says. “For a time, they lived in the bungalow next to the garden, and continued to work.

The bungalow itself, where the Hortenses lived for a time, is a neat little cottage with a weatherboard frame and a hip roof, a gabled front porch, and a greenhouse the couple added on a few years later. Gradually, they built the elaborate gardens around it in stages and layers, heavily influenced by their extensive travels abroad. “A lot of oriental influence was common at the time it was constructed, all over the world,” says Trent.

Over the years, they added various pools, a couple of water towers, the pumphouse, a rose arch overlooking a horseshoe-shaped pool, a sundial pedestal. The property is no longer occupied; it’s owned by the proprietors of the nearby Montessori school. It’s listed now on the National Register of Historic Places.

“They weren’t architects; they were just a couple who wanted to create a beautiful place in East Tennessee,” Trent says.

A couple days later, another arrived. Undoubtedly, these went to gardeners throughout the country, and while the garden season is still far away for residents of northern climates, Floridians should be placing orders in the next few weeks if seeds are to arrive in time for vegetable gardens to be planted about March 1.

It is time for some family discussion about what to plant in the garden this year and also some thought about the garden layout. It is important to rotate crops so they are not in the same spot as last year.

I have found it helpful to make a list of items I hope to get done on my farm in the coming year, including the landscape and vegetable gardens.

The lists make an interesting collection for review and are useful to help recall when trees, hedges and ornamental shrubs were planted. These lists also help budget for items to be purchased, and they allow one to focus on sections of the landscape that need attention. A list of this nature results in a planned landscape and helps prevent spot purchases of plants that don’t fit landscape goals.

Time is another factor in all this planning, and a list of priorities not only assists with budgeting monetary resources, but also time allocations for projects that encompass more than a day or two.

After you have managed your property for several years, you probably will find recurring activities that always occur at certain times of the year. For example, I always try to plant my spring vegetable garden the first weekend in March. In order to prepare for this, I know the soil should be tilled the third Saturday in February. Potatoes usually are planted on the Martin Luther King holiday, and hedges are pruned Memorial Day and Labor Day weekends. A routine like this will make your annual calendar more manageable, and will ensure things get done and that they get done at the right time.

There are, of course, exceptions to planning, and this includes planned purchases. A few years ago, in the middle of the year, my wife purchased a Yellow Jasmine vine at one of the Master Gardener plant sales. It was a good, quality plant at a good price, and the plant was on the University of Florida’s recommended list of vines. It would be a good addition to our garden. When we arrived home, she wanted to know where we would plant it. Since this vine needs a trellis and we didn’t have one, the question really was not where the vine would be planted, but when we were going to get a trellis. It wasn’t on the wish list for that year, and so we purchased a small, inexpensive trellis. Without this vine purchase, I probably wouldn’t have thought about a trellis, but in the years since, it has become a nice addition to our landscape.

Annual color is another piece of the landscape puzzle that requires some planning. Last fall, I was in a local nursery and admired the colorful pansies that were on display. Thinking about how well they perform in cool weather, I spoke to the nursery owner about them. He told me they were already sold to a local landscape contractor. An Apopka nursery placed a special order, and the plants were being held until the owner could pick them up. “By the way,” he said, “this Apopka nursery has a new pansy color selection you’ll find interesting — orange and blue. You might think about getting some for the office.” It is my opinion that only a few annuals, planted en masse, make an affordable, yet colorful statement for the landscape. It is important to locate these in just the right spot for visibility and full enjoyment. Over the course of the year, it probably will be necessary to change these out two or three times, so they become another part of your annual planning list. The Extension Service has an old, but very good, publication on annuals — CIR569 — that will be useful in your planning. Of particular interest is the chart indicating planting and removal dates — a perfect item for your landscape-planning calendar. Call the Extension Service at 671-8400 if you would like to receive a copy.

In this season of reflection and planning, creating a list for your landscape and gardening efforts will help budget your time and money while giving you a schedule for getting things done. When it comes time to welcome in 2014, you’ll be able to pause and reflect over your list and take satisfaction in all you got done in a productive 2013, and you will have a foundation for planning your landscaping hobby for next year.

David Holmes is Marion County extension director. Contact him at david.holmes@ marioncountyfl.org.