[GroundKprs]

One the rare occasion you get a client who appreciates a real landscape, how do you treat the lawn as part of your design?

Do you consider the lawn to be the frame of the picture (structure being the focus with ornamental plantings the highlighters)?

Or is turf simply to be the formal garden while ornamentals are to be the natural garden?

Or any other design purpose? I've never yet had a decent design purpose from a landscaper so I know how the whole palette is to be maintained.

[NC Lawnscapes]

Ive never thought of it like this but I suppose it would go on a case by case basis

Right now I am pricing a job for a customer that I will be starting in April and the lawn will be secondary but nice the real focus is going to be on the beds Im going to be putting in and belive it or not the focal point will be a privacy fence and the scaping around it

[agla]

Lawn is a lot more than an aesthetic. It is usable area. It is access to other places that the driveway does not go. It is play area. It is additional area for entertaining.

It is nice looking, noneroding, clean area where you want nothing else. It is separation between other things.

Most of the time I am designing new landscapes. a lot of the time a house has been razed (you'd be amazed how much this goes on in my area) to build a new trophy home where another once stood. Anyway, a certain amount of land is going to be cleared for construction, grading, etc,.. At least part of our job is to replace this cleared ground that is usually close to the house. Seldom do the homeowners that I work with want to make it one giant garden or restore a natural woodland all the way to the house. After designing driveway, walks, patios, retaining walls, pools, pergolas, fences, areas of lawn to serve for a specific use (access, play,etc,..), the remaining negative space will be planted with lawn. That is not a cop out, it simply is one of the best ways to maintain an area where you want nothing else. It is so versatile that it really sits there holding space that may be needed for anything that is not planned for.

Your daughter gets married. Boom, here is a place for a huge tent and overflow parking. Your mother in law needs a new place, there is access around the back for the construction guys to finish the walk out basement.

Where I am, views of the ocean are important and wetlands regulations make it difficult to maintain shrubs in a lot of these areas. You can mow your lawn, but can't prune a shrub (a long story - becareful how you vote).

The alternative to holding this space as usable is pavement, gravel or mulch. There is nothing uglier than an empty mulch area. Gravel is almost as ugly and is a maintenance problem in its own.

In short, mowing the grass is usually well worth the investment in what it gives back to you, let alone the aesthetics of the alternatives.

PS - I hate the new "no lawn" mentality that is coming out of the organic crowd. Lawn is a very good way to control sediment in runoff and blowing, a very effective erosion control, and slows runoff for recharging groundwater. Grass does not put excess nitrogen into surface and groundwater, people who use the wrong fertilizer and over fertilize do.

[GLAN]

Turf

Basicaly turf has no purpose...

Other than what "agla" mentions

For me when I get to design without restrictions I view the turf as if it were water. Imagine this.........The planting beds are designed for their specific site conditions.....as similar the flow of the beds are, there is subtle/considerable difference as one moves about the landscape. There fore the beds become my continents/islands.

It is not all that inpracticle to design a landscape displaying various influences.....Whether that be Chinese/ Japanese, European or Pacific Tropical and Woodland/Desert. Again, site conditions tend to lends one self in a direction.

As contrasting the concepts I have mentioned, they may not necessarily clash within one design. And the turf helps, as it takes you to various view points in the garden. Turf is an anchor source.

Lets take a painting.....A painting of a landscape....Most if not all make use of Sky........But for the landscape designer the turf is my Sky. It's the common denominator of my paintings

[agla]

To add to Glans water concept:

In order for you to have positive space you need negative space. Just what would an island bed look like if everything was mulched.

Like the guy that used to do oil painting on PBS said - "you have to have dark in order to have light.

[Hamons]

turf also gives the eyes somewhere to rest -- to anchor. Have you ever seena person landscape where you can tell they are trying to do to much in a tight space -- soon after looking at it you just feel tired -- its too jumbled. Turf gives the ying to the yang. Its the resting spot and the soft space to all the ornamentals and structures that also make up a landscape.

[GroundKprs]

I was actually looking for an artistic input. Too much of landscaping in the USA is just making money sticking plants in the ground - the more plants, the more money. But landscape design is taught usually in an architecture department - and architecture is considered the art stepsister of engineering. In very few colleges, architecture and allied landscape design division are where they really belong, in the school of art.

Landscapes in other countries are art with plants and nature. A topnotch Japanese LA will live in a client's house for at least a week to formulate ideas for a landscape design. This is extreme, but in Japan, space is very limited. The designer must use all the surrounding environment - a distant mountain, a tree a block away, adjacent buildings, etc - to provide a landscape design in a sliver of land that appeals to a client's natural instincts. Anyone ever seen the "fuzzy building" in Japan?

The ancient historical origin of landscaping is to bring nature into community living. Hunter-gatherer homo sapiens was a part of nature. Community with nature is still instinctive in man. Plants were brought into communities to provide the link with nature that we need.

More recent historical use of landscaping, in Middle Ages Europe, was to soften the harsh architectural lines of structures using plants. (And things like edgings and shearing just bring more harsh lines, LOL.) A formal garden, with high maintenance shapes and shearing, was never near the structure. (eg., Versailles, Dupont estate, even George Washington's Mt. Vernon).

As a strictly maintenance business, I have so often seen the pleasure of clients when I change their landscape from sheared to pruned to proper structure of individual plants. But I never get a decently designed (artistic) landscape to work with. Even the half dozen clients who have given me newly built properties to maintain are stuck with rumdum plantings, usually too densly planted to provide a decent picture in a few years.

So, all I wanted to know, if there are any real artists here, is how the turf fits into your real landscape design. Since turf areas are high maintenance, most often sheared areas, to me turf is a formal setting in the landscape. In most all landscapes today, turf just represents the space one can't fill with more ornamental plants. Does anyone actually use turf consciously in an overall site plan, to enhance the subconscious pleasure of the owner and viewers of the site?

I am a simple technician, an engineer. I need to know a design intent to engineer the living picture the artist painted. Can an artist reply to my original question?

[Hamons]

Jim, how about this -- I wil start another thread this evening at home -- I wills can in a design of a project I ma working on -- we can discuss the merits of the use of turf in the design.