You are here: Home / Search for "Latest updated CDCP Test Topics Pdf Spend Your Little Time and Energy to Clear CDCP exam 🌗 Open 【 www.pdfvce.com 】 enter ➤ CDCP ⮘ and obtain a free download 🔊Test CDCP Assessment"

Search Results for: Latest updated CDCP Test Topics Pdf Spend Your Little Time and Energy to Clear CDCP exam 🌗 Open 【 www.pdfvce.com 】 enter ➤ CDCP ⮘ and obtain a free download 🔊Test CDCP Assessment

The Jackie Box

Who knows why I have never posted about my subsidiary company, the Branch Studio, but I will now. Five years ago or better I created a division of Deborah Silver and Company devoted to the creation and manufacture of fine objects for gardens.  A thirteen thousand square foot building houses a wood shop, a kiln, sophisticated welding equipment and all that goes with. a fabrication  studio. It has long been been a dream of mine-to design and manufacture great objects for gardens in a variety of materials.  Designing beautiful and functional objects is not easy.  Each object has a beginning, CAD drawings, a series of prototypes, a tuneup, and a number of revisions; there is an entire evolutionary process that goes on longer than I thought.  And longer still. Most everything can be improved upon, can it not?       

Not surprisingly, the first item on my design agenda-a box.  I have a long standing love affair with the garden box.  Some call them orangery boxes; the first image that comes to my mind are the boxes at Versailles, used to house an enormous collection of citrus trees.  I doubt most people feel their glass of lemonade is a luxury; sophisticated growing and shipping make it possible to buy a lemon for not so much money every day of the year.  But there was a time in northern climates when having oranges available to eat meant growing orange trees and wintering them under glass.  Giant boxes housing citrus trees were a feature at Versailles.  The Versailles box still made by Les Jardins du Roi Soleil-they made my heart pound 20 years ago and still do.  Manufactured of hinged wood panels, and cast iron frames, a fruit tree destined for a winter in the orangery could easily be slid out and moved indoors, while the boxes stayed put outdoors.  I imported and sold plenty of them over the past 15 years.  All my gardening life I have wanted to make beautiful boxes.  For boxwood topiaries, for trees, for citrus, for flowers, for tomatoes.  A well donebox can provide an elegant and generously sized home for a garden.

My first box design-the Jackie box.  This classic box with an X detail celebrated by a button of note-inspired by Jackie Kennedy. Her fabulous Oleg Cassini suits featured big buttons I will never forget. I am not the only one who admired her great style. Her suit buttons are so much a part of my history, and so much a part of what I admire about design. These buttons were jewelry integral to the overall design of the suit.  Though I have not one bit of interest in clothes myself, I admired Mr. Cassini’s design work, and the iconic Jackie Kennedy.   My first Jackie boxes had extira board panels-a favorite of sign companies; these panels do not absorb water.  They could be left to weather, be varnished like the panels of a Brownie camera, or painted. 

Though weatherproof, each Jackie box has its own galvanized metal liner, and a removeable steel frame sitting on top that provides the illusion of thickness, and finishes the top edge with a wide band of steel.  Welded to the bottom, bun feet know in the metal industry as squashed ball feet. A citrus tree could be lifted out of the box in its galvanized liner, and wintered in a conservatory.


The first variation on the Jackie box-a tall box with a rectangluar panel at the bottom. We also made a series with the panel at the top-but I like this version best. The tall box has a much different feeling than the square. It is no surprise that geometry has visual cache, but shapes have an emotional component as well.  Some squares are pleasingly solid and formal-others can be stodgy-funny that.  Part of the design process was selecting sizes and proportions that are heartstopping, not sleepy.   

I grew up designing objects at the same pace that the Jackie boxes evolved. The brown extira board was certainly durable, but this brown is better on a UPS truck than a planter box.  These painted extira board panels were a reference to the shutter color on the house.  This was the decision of the client, and her interior designer Lucy Earl-it would not have been my call. But I was surprised how much I liked the end result-the colors of the flowers I have chosen have everything to do with the blue of this box; it was much too strong to ignore.  

I did however take a cue from those blue extira board panels.  We now paint our boxes for the shop with Porter exterior acrylic paint.  It is amazingly durable.  This color, a darker blue grey than the steel.  The painted extira panel has finally come into its own.    

This small Jackie box was made with steel in smaller widths, and a smaller buttom. Scaling a design up or down requires looking at the dimension and thickness of every component.  Lots of things seem obvious now that were not so obvious at the beginning.    

A beautiful box-I have been after that design a good many years.  We are now making the Jackie box with solid steel panels.  I think it is a good looking box.  Given the currently astronomical price of lead, I think this steel and its finish provides a viable and handsome alternative to that classic material.  Judging from the orders we have filled this season for Jackie boxes in a number of sizes and panel options, other people are starting to think so too.  I have a pair of Jackie boxes very close to finish-38″ by 38″ by 30″ tall made with 1/4 inch thick steel-to be planted with flowers.  I cannot wait.

Posted on: June 27, 2010 4 Comments
Filed Under: Garden Ornament, The Branch Studio Tagged With: , , , , ,

Precisely Pruned

My favorite day of the gardening season is pruning day.  I would not dream of taking on the job of pruning my evergreens-M and M Flowers has charge of this job. This very moment I am looking out my window past my computer to my hedge of Hicks yews-pruned perfectly level with the horizon.  In front of those yews, my grasses waving in the breeze, and my coneflowers, and the branches of my kousa dogwood.  This is a very good looking picture, believe me.  They do the best pruning it has ever been my pleasure to witness. They come three or four times a season, and doll things up. I work seven days a week, and in return, all I want is a garden that enchants me when I get home. Their formal pruning is remarkably precise and thoughtful-I look forward to it every year.  

Every block of boxwood, every hedge, every shape is detailed with lines set with a level, on pruning day.  They leave nothing to the eye.  My ground swoops and drops and rises again-not so their pruning. Their trimming is exactly level with the horizon.  Formal, and very precise. The look of it lowers my blood pressure.  Pruning a hedgerow of viburnums, lilacs and miscellaneous flowering shrubs takes an eye with a gift for providing air and sun for each individual branch- and a gift for working in concert with the natural growth habit of the shrub in question.  Formal hedges, on the other hand,  demand the idea of level, level lines to go with, and a patient and persistent hand.  They prune nothing with gasoline powered hedge clippers.  This group clips by hand. 

Mindy and her crew pruned these arborvitae, and their skirt of boxwood. What a gorgeous job.  She assesses each plant-she never prunes too hard, if a hedge is not ready. She understands about the long haul.   Properly and expertly pruned hedges can make a formal landscape shine.  Invest in stakes, level lines, and hand shears-should it be your idea to maintain a formal landscape on your own.  Trim carefully-some pruning ideas take years to finish.  Trim slowly, regularly, and patiently.      

The boxwood in this photograph tells all.  Short on the house side-taller on the path side.  The horizon line exists independent of the grade of any given property. Formal landscapes do not repeat the up and down of the ground.   They are all about level. Though pruning to level is a skill, it is easy to spot when a hedge is out of level. It takes great patience to let plants grow up to the height they need to be.  I planted 100 Hicks yews on my property 10 years ago.  The shortest plant on the south side is probably 4 feet tall.  My tallest yew is close to 8 feet tall.  There were more than a few years when none of them were tall enough to prune.         

Whatever landscape element repeats the horizon line rests the eye.  I like the idea of a landscape that is restful. I like quiet, order, santuary, organization, clean and simple, not necessarily in this order, when I come home. My work life is always a big, fluid, and sometimes messy situation.  I like orderly when I get home. For clients, I favor a formal presentation on the street side, so the landscape looks beautiful in every season. The perennial garden, and the vegetables I invariably place in the back.  I do not see the need to place any plant material that has the potential for poor performance in the front.  Designing within the limits of one’s ability to maintain is important.  It is of much interest to me-if the client is a gardener. I try to tailor design to a specific set of circumstances-human circumstances.  Horticulture is not everything; people’s lives are everything. A formal landscape I find easier to maintain than an informal planting. Whenever I see an exuberant and lush perennial garden, I know a lot of committment and work is going on behind the scenes.

 Vertical growing yews handle this type of trimming quite well; there are a number of good cultivars available beyond the trasitional Hicks yew.  Boxwood tolerates shearing the best of all the evergreen plants.  No plant loves to be sheared.  Some evergreens tolerate this treatment better than others.   

This landscape is but a few years old, though the boxwood have been here quite some time.  We moved a lot of what was here into its current configuration. The square footage of this landscape is not so large, but its impact is considerable.   This year, a pruning on the boxwood some two years in the planning, transforms the space. These boxwood spheres-beautiful. I was so delighted to see this space.    


A gorgeous landscape is very much about an idea of the natural world that gets strongly expressed. No small amount of this expression has to do with how that landscape is cared for.  It is one thing to choose plants that compliment one another, in forms that please the eye.  But once that is done, the landscape is only beginning to grow.  I tell clients to not let what they have worked so hard to achieve get away from the them.  It is so important to stay ahead of what a garden needs.

I like having this to come home to.

Posted on: July 15, 2010 2 Comments
Filed Under: Landscape Design Tagged With: , , ,

Sunday Opinion: Good Sportsmanship

Though there were no computers then from which to print and pocket an outline of acceptable human behavior, I none the less grew up with a check list.  I am quite sure I had reluctantly memorized every page by the time I was five.  From God’s heart to my Mom’s lips; this vivid metaphor stopped me in my tracks from committing any number of rude, thoughtless, and unkind acts.  This is not to say I was not exactly like any other kid-that is to say, not very grown up.  That gawky 6th grade girl from St Clair Shores named Sharon Barber-who blew by me in the final round of the county spelling bee-she infuriated me.  I of course thought I should have had a generous handicap, given that I was a mere 4th grader. Lacking a leg up endorsed by the committee, I already had a baby faced chip on my shoulder that would make any adult laugh.  I think “so not fair” were the only three words I knew how to string together.    I distinctly remember her spelling her word incorrectly under her breath, before she blared forth with the correct spelling.  The second place awarded to me was the equivalent of utter failure.  I had no sooner thrown my trophy to the ground when my Mom scooped it up, and planted it firmly in my hands.  She stepped back, sure in her expectation that I would do the right thing.  In spite of my fury at such an injustice, I shook the girl’s hand, and congratulated her heartily on her win. This in spite of the fact that I really wanted to knock her to the ground, and pummel her.  My checklist went with me wherever I went.  Those occasions when I was so foolish not to consult and adhere to that list-there she would be.  She had the ability to materialize out of no where.  My Mom was beautiful.  She had thick wavy hair, gorgeous eyebrows, and wore red lipstick every day.  She was a scientist many respected.  I knew her in a way much different than this. She was the guardian of the gate. I knew she would never turn loose of me until I could be trusted to let good sportsmanship be my guide.

Good sportsmanship applies to much more than a pickup basketball game.  Games are games, but those principles by which people live a life are a serious business.  50 years later I am still pulling out that checklist.  The top ten, dating back to 1955:  Be a good sport (acknowledge those who do well).   Do no harm (be nice to your brother).  Tell the truth (even if the truth could get you in a lot of trouble).  Mind your manners (acknowledge the efforts of others-never forget to say thank you).  Respect others (every person comes entitled to respect, standard issue).   Reward excellence (even though it might not be your own); extend a hand to those in need (this includes that 6th grade girl who won the contest, but had not one friend in the world).  Don’t cheat, lie, hate, or steal (the annotated version of the ten commandments).  Be slow to blame, and quick to welcome. All of this in addition to brushing my teeth, doing my homework, and looking both ways before I crossed the street.  I was busy, but she was busier. 

My Mom’s list of do’s and don’t’s had 4 times the ones listed above, butI will spare you the rest.  She may not have been an award winning Mom,  but she was a Mom who took her job seriously.  She had a big list ready for me the second I attained consciousness. We would go over it as many times as it took until I got it.  As a consequence, I know how to win graciously, loose even more graciously.  Would I win any awards for consistently playing by her book-probably not.  But at least I give it serious thought before I stray.   

A serious point of view is not all bad.  I am not at all casual about a job that is not done right, or a wrong that needs redressing.  A job I did in 2002, which I recently visited, has problems; I feel compelled to try to sort out the trouble. Other things thrown my way really don’t belong to me-letting that go is good sportsmanship.  Few issues are solely about right and wrong, or good and bad.  Most everything depends on all the parties having similar lists from which they conduct themselves.    

This being said, I am anything but a good sport about the garden.  I have had many disappointments-just as every other gardener has.  Nature could not be further removed from any idea that I have about fair play.  Nature cooks my plants, blasts them with thunderstorms, coats them with ice, knocks them to the ground, chews them up and spits them out like so much compost.  The worst of it-it’s not even personal; you might as well compost your exasperation as well as your poorly performing or dead plants.  Growing a great garden requires the chess player’s ability to think ahead ten moves.  It requires the brute force of a tackle, the strong arms of a basketball player, the strategic skills of a golfer and the persistence of a long distance runner.  Should you possess all of the above, I still doubt there is any gold medal in your future.  Sooner or later nature will pitch the rule book out the window, and overrule all of your efforts.  The rows of white cosmos I have faithfully watered and deadheaded all summer have turned white overnight from mildew.  I am anything but a good sport about the fact that all of them are going down too early-in spite of my care.  I watered for four hours yesterday.  Just as I finished, the sky let loose of at least an inch of rain; how completely and utterly irritating. I eventually let go of all the unwarranted and unfair insults regularly sent my way via the garden, and keep gardening.  But I do reserve the right to be a not so good sport about it.

Posted on: August 16, 2010 2 Comments
Filed Under: Strictly Opinion

Making Everything Work

There is a stage in the design and development of any project where it seems like a good idea to take the lines, shapes and descriptive words off the page of a drawing, and see what those lines look like-standing up. This idea is on my mind, as I saw a scale model today of a house a client will build this coming spring.  Even the elevation changes of the property were represented by stacked sheets of thin balsa wood, cut into the curves that represent the actual existing grade. Given how pleased I was to see this 3-D representation, I  can appreciate how a client may need something from me that transforms lines on a page into volumes and shapes.   What will this look like-a completely legitimate question. It is simply human nature to want a window that reveals what is to come before we get there.

 

Smaller projects do not have a budget that includes the time it takes to build a scale model.  Frankly, few projects call for that.  Any client who does not mind my sharpee marker sketches drawn against a panoramic view of their house and property gets virtually the same thing as a model-just a rough version. I am not interested in the elegance and polish of a presentation-I am interested in understanding. But certain issues cannot be dealt with on paper, or with a model.  An outdoor space could not be less like a drawing on a page.  A real space can shred a drawing and demand what never crossed your mind. 

These old street paver bricks made in Ohio circa 1920 are anything but uniform.  Laying brick in a herringbone pattern requires great skill and planning, so the pattern does not drift.  Albaugh Masonry is known for their ability to beautifully handle a difficult installation-but these irregular bricks were proving next to impossible.  This kind of trouble you might anticipate on paper, but reality is all about standing in a space, trying to make everything work.

My cliennt-she is committed gardener.  She stood in this space for days, plan in hand,  working with Albaugh  to work things out. Understanding between a designer, a client and a tradesperson makes for a great outcome.  The suggestion from Albaugh that the terrace be configured in 9 smaller herringbone blocks of equal size, separated by a soldier course, was a good one.  They felt they could keep the herringbone dead on given this design.  God knows they tried to get those hand made bricks to work out every direction over 900 square feet. Who knows how many times this group sorted and resorted these old bricks, in order to get a surface that was true and square.   

The late day sun slanted across the terrace reveals the beauty of the brick-and the installation.  As this home was built in the 1920’s, this final choice of a terrace material makes a great run at convincing a viewer that it had always been there.  Choosing materials on this basis has been of interest to this client in every phase of the landscape renovation.  Many plants original to the house were kept, or heeled in until a spot could be made for them.  Any passionate gardener understands what a whomping lot of work this is.   

Changes made on site have a way of turning the rest of the world up side down.  There is a part of me that so admires the math.  Change a floorplan or terrace so much as 6 inches, the entire space is affected.  My love of the math aside, making everything work is my idea of successful design.   

We began the landscape installation today.  How everyone involved would make everything work was the order of the day.  That moment when an installation begins is the most intense work for the lot of us.  A client, a masonry contractor, an irrigation specialist, a designer, a landscape company-there are lots of voices that need to tune up, and figure out how to be in harmony with one another.     

The art of communication-in my opinion, the most difficult art.  Paintings, sculpture, crafts, decorative arts-they are all about the vision of a particular and singular artist.  Landscape design is all about a successful and fluid relationship between a client, designer, and tradesperson. I thrive on this.

Posted on: August 20, 2010 2 Comments
Filed Under: Landscape Design