What do you think about reality TV landscape programs? Are those landscapes dreams come true or nightmares waiting to happen?
It’s amazing how in a matter of days an overgrown, weedy wasteland can become a beautiful new landscape. It’s nothing short of incredible. A brawny guy walks up with a plan, everyone squeals with pleasure, a crew arrives, the old stuff goes away, the new stuff arrives, and voila! Just like mushrooms in a lawn, there’s a new landscape out there, Wendy!
The question with these landscapes is that unlike Peter Pan, they will grow up. The closely spaced plants that look great and full on TV will develop, the untreated wood will age, snow and frost will act on footings and dry streams. Will that concrete filled with accelerating agents last as long as the stuff that takes time to cure?
From this…
… to this!
… virtually overnight!
For a landscape architect, watching these shows is like seeing the typical month long project compressed into a period of days. It’s not exactly reality. Still, if you can stand sitting through all those repeated commercials where the woman with the bad hairdo battles a giant green lizard with an accent it can become an intellectual exercise. What did they omit for speed? Are those plants appropriate for that area? How sustainable is the new installation? Will that design really work? What will fall apart first.
I’ll never know. There’s no “Yards Crashing” or “Lost Landscapes” program that returns to these sites at regular intervals to show how they evolved. I don’t think they’d want us to know.
As I watched, I took notes…
Somewhere deep in the Midwest
The designer struts up to the clients, plans in hand. With a flourish, he unrolls the drawings. They gasp, they jump up and shout, they’re in love. Never once do they ask a question. It seems that everyone on TV can instantly read a landscape plan.
Are these people even real? It’s good to ask questions. A common one is, “where are we now?” – just to orient themselves in the new plan. They give no comments. Not even “We want the structure color to somehow harmonize with the house, and it would be great if something matched the trim color of the house.” Just “Yippeee!”.
They scrape out a swale and dump in bags of river cobbles directly on the soil. First bad: there should be a layer of filter fabric (geotextile) laid down to prevent weeds from growing up through the rocks and to keep the rocks from mixing with the soil over time.
In goes the lawn (there’s always a lawn). No edging of any kind. Just lawn meets bark. Another bad: someone will have to constantly trim that edge if they want it to look neat.
There go the shrubs! Lots of variegated red twig dogwood – these things spread, so way over planted. What do you expect? It’s television. Another bad.
Illinois has wonderful native plants, but not in this design. Never even mentioned – but then the neighborhood shots didn’t have them, either.
There goes a Bald cypress? In Illinois? What are they doing, trying to harmonize with the bayou? It’s not a small tree, either…
Somewhere in the Northeast
Same thing with design, looks like it’s part of the format. This is not a collaboration with the owners: they’re getting on TV so once they’ve had a quick meeting to list what they want, away it goes. There’s the unveiling. Looks like Design 101: a gazebo, the artsy thing for the kid, patio, lawn, the usual gang of suspects.
Owners say, “It’s perfect!”, acting like they just won a new Chevy in a game show.
Design obviously isn’t the point. Flash, zing, rip this out, show that big truck, wow a giant balled & burlapped tree, look at that flagstone! Cut to bouncing bobcats, crawling dingos, ripping chainsaws…
There’s the gazebo. No time for real footings, just set the thing on concrete piers lightly dug into the soil. Did I see that right? My book says that the Northeast coast low temperatures range from -2°F to 18° F (-19°C to -9° C). The lows can drop almost to White Fang territory: -30° F (-28° C). In a freezing climate, we were taught never to install any kind of footing above the frost line, or soil movement will do interesting things to your structure over time. First bad.
Flap! The pond liner shoots into its hole, right on the ground. There’s nothing to protect it from anything sharp either below or above: no sand, no felt. Nothing. Grab those rocks and pile them in. Hopefully they won’t have any sharp edges, but then it may not start to leak until after the shoot wraps.
Like charging Ents, the plants gallop into the landscape. Nandina, azalea, Japanese maple, coneflowers (native), hydrangeas. Was that a Miscanthus? That’s an invasive weed in the Northeast if it’s the wrong variety!
Clack, clack, Dry stack retaining wall. Doesn’t seem to have anything to drain water behind the stones (we’d have geotextile over the soil, then washed aggregate, then the stones). If it falls over, it’s not a big deal since the wall is low. Unless it lands on someone’s pet turtle.
Lots and lots of turf. Nothing says green like lawn. In their climate it’s not a water issue, and it gives Dad something to do on weekends.
“It’s douglas fir, so it will stand up to the elements”. Yep, the book says it will. It will also get huge. What’s so bad about smaller trees?
The unveiling comes in a blur. The art thing is a built-in outdoor musical instrument that really doesn’t sound beautiful. There’s no sounding board or resonating chamber, so no surprise there. Instead of notes, it makes thunks. The kid gives it a few whacks and smiles for the camera. I thought to myself, “that’s probably the first and last time she plays with that thing.”. Anyone else think the same?
How come none of the wood structures’ colors match each other? They don’t match the house, either. One structure is almost attached to the house, but it’s raw wood. Huh? Adjacent pieces on the house are painted. What about that “seamless” look? Even the lanterns don’t match.
There’s the gazebo, right out of Design 101, right down to the narrow stairs – barely wide enough for one person. Since harmony and unity aren’t a goal here, the gazebo has a unique paint scheme.
Sploosh! There goes a bucketful of fat goldfish into the pond. What’s the freeze depth? Will these guys be fishcicles come January?
The camera pans across the back yard. A hodgepodge of differently colored and styled structures slog across the screen. If only, if only… one color would have tied them together. This looks like Structures R Us had a clearance sale, and the paint store didn’t.
Lost in Poison Ivy
There’s the design! It’s out! As soon as it’s out they squeal “Oh, my God!!!!”, “Aaaaah!”, etc. Repeatedly. Do they get extra prizes for this?
The owners understand every element of the plan instantly with a single glance. This time, they asked style questions, but only after the plans were done, not before. Hello? This should have been covered in the preliminary design meeting! The design is supposed to reflect the customer’s desire, isn’t it? Maybe not here, where it’s supposed to keep the audience tuned in long enough to sell them insurance and things they don’t need.
How to transplanting evergreen coniferous shrubs: rip them out with a skid steer and drop them in new holes where they want them. They’ll look good until the end of filming, at least. Probably not much of a root system, but it’s enough to hold them upright. Maybe this works in their climate. It didn’t work here with a carefully hand dug mugho pine, and it wasn’t recommended in the Pacific Northwest. True, it took that mugho pine a long time to die, way longer than the end of filming.
This design opts for a sea of sod. Lots and lots of sod with things floating in it. Activities will happen in each space. Right, you only get one activity per space. Nothing’s joined, the spaces just bob around in that turf, poorly linked. But that’s just my opinion.
Most construction books say to compact, wet and level the sand bed before laying pavers. In some climates and for pervious pavers, compacted aggregate goes down first to improve drainage, then geotextile, then sand, then the pavers. This usually involves setting boards at the levels you want and running another board over the sand to level it, using the set boards as guides. The board you run over the sand is called a screed, probably no relation to Dr. Seuss). As long as your pavers, bricks or whatever has a uniform thickness, this is the quick way to put them down level. These went in screedless.
The Big Day arrives, the owners emerge from their door like moles in the sun. They gasp, surprised, at the Wonderland that was their drab back yard. Amazed, they wander like sunstruck moles, touching the new structures, oohing and awing. If they understood the plan intuitively, instantly, deeply as they were moaning in ecstasy when it was presented, why are they surprised? Everything on the plan is pretty much there, in all it’s turf-enclosed glory.
What a great place for a party! Let’s have one tomorrow! You’re all invited! Invited or not, there were no shots of the festivities. As they say in TV Land, production values probably didn’t allow for them.
And that, dear readers, is that. I stepped into the garden. There were weeds to pull, plants to divide and sculptures to relocate. Then relax and enjoy the colors, fragrances and movement as the simply renovated garden grows in.