Do design competitions truly choose the best design for a site? Do the judging criteria give us sustainable, livable, enjoyable spaces or bold, echoing spaces short on comfort?
Author Archives: mike
Got birds?
Many species of birds enjoy the wildlife garden in winter, moving through the garden’s different habitats in their daily routine.
Iced cactus
Cold weather hit hard this year in Sacramento, reducing a once magnificent cactus to a frozen stump surrounded by shattered branches.
Wow. Hit by an infinite redirect loop error!
We’re back online again, after a tiny file in a server somewhere hundreds of miles away somehow became an infinite loop. If this ever happens to you in WordPress, all you have to do is log in to your server and inactivate the htaccess file by renaming it. Then just log into WordPress and makeContinue reading “Wow. Hit by an infinite redirect loop error!”
Cat-Friendly Gardens
A landscape’s design can make it cat paradise or just a ho-hum place to go when you’re not inside. Cats like choices, since they prefer some areas by season, others by time of day and everything else seems to be according to their mood.
Le deluge!
A big atmospheric river storm series soaks the garden
Where are the Monarchs?
Where have our local monarch butterflies gone? They seem to have almost disappeared from the Sacramento region.
When design goes bad… very bad
An alternate design for a difficult concept, an exercise in what could have been.
Looks like lawn, doesn’t it?
I was reading about herbivores. Large animals that graze in meadows. They typically chomp everything down, then move on. The meadow regrows; it’s adapted to that kind of treatment. In fact, grazing is supposed to stimulate side growth, otherwise known as vegetative reproduction, since it does tend to eliminate flowering parts that stick up. IContinue reading “Looks like lawn, doesn’t it?”
Transforming outdoor spaces with lighting
One of the best things about landscapes is that with a bit of lighting, you can have two for the price of a bit more than one. All it takes is lighting. This applies to interiors, too – but that’s another subject. The niches shown below are darker than the wall during the day. It’sContinue reading “Transforming outdoor spaces with lighting”