"Got Inspiration?"

By Marcia Bloom

In-spi-ra-tion n. 1. The action or power of moving the intellect or emotions

It is a glorious thing to live in California with its Mediterranean climate, mild winters and possibilities for outdoor living almost year-round.  Compared with other regions of the country, our climate is what provides such wonderful opportunities for landscape designers to make a living year-round and helps explain why California represents almost 1/3 of the national APLD membership.  On the flip side though, it also means it is difficult for us to slow down and find time to take a break from work and recharge our batteries.  For California designers, winter is not necessarily 'a time to breathe, rest and dream' as it is for many in the colder states. 

In the book The Artist's Way, Julia Cameron states that "Art is an image-using system.  In order to create, we draw from our inner well, and filling the well involves the active pursuit of images to refresh our artistic reservoirs."  So, with little seasonal downtime, how do we refill our artistic well with new images and stay inspired to create our designs throughout the year?  One possibility is to look through magazines or books to find new images.  I know that each year when I renew my subscriptions to numerous garden design magazines, I have the best intentions of looking through them for inspirational design ideas and yet they just seem to get set aside for some more urgent task, only to end up in the three-foot high (and growing) stack of old magazines in my design studio. 

Another possibility - and one I highly recommend - is to attend the annual APLD Conference and spend some time with your peers touring gardens and hearing world-renowned speakers share their work, vision and personal journeys in the field of landscape design.  At the 2007 APLD Conference held just three weeks ago in Pasadena, the theme was 'Sustainable Design'. I was so proud of the leading role that California is playing in this area and of our members, Alma Hecht and Frank Niccoli, who spoke as experts on the topic. I was also proud of the amazing job that our local site committee did to secure motivating speakers, conference sponsors and garden sites to visit. These gardens clearly demonstrated the beauty that can be created by following sustainable design principles.  When you see the following individuals, please thank them personally for their tremendous behind-the-scenes efforts and time commitment to create an outstanding conference experience for our members:

Stephanie Bartron, Local Site Chair from So. Cal. District

Janet Bell, APLD from Peninsula District

Colleen Hamilton from Sacramento District

Ketti Kupper from So. Cal. District

Shelley Somersett from East Bay District

Patricia St. John, APLD  from East Bay District

For those of you who have never attended an APLD conference, I will briefly summarize the highlights of the main conference for you and attempt to share the essence of it from the perspective of a few members.  The conference began Monday night with a welcome reception and networking dine-around at local restaurants.  On Tuesday, we heard nationally acclaimed landscape designer Nancy Goslee Power speak about her career and her cutting edge work on both public and private spaces, and the thing I remember most from her talk was her opinion that most landscape architects have lost their souls and that "garden design" is something that cannot be licensed because of its very nature.  As a former interior designer with no formal landscape design training, she is clearly a huge proponent of landscape designers and entertained us all with her humor and wit about the profession and industry. 

We heard from garden designer Mayita Dinos who cautioned us about using "questionable words" with our clients: 'sustainability', 'xeriscape' and 'appropriate' which are clichés and may meet with resistance.  Instead, she encouraged us to just design beautiful sustainable regionally appropriate gardens that would serve as models and examples for neighbors to want to follow of their own accord as "people always like what they know, more than they know what they like".  Page Dickey, author of Gardens in the Spirit of Place, spoke about designing with a sense of place geographically and architecturally.  After lunch, we spent the afternoon touring several gardens, including landscape designer/architect/interior designer Heather Lenkin's garden, a hillside garden designed by John Greenlee, an artist's garden utilizing "urbanite" (recycled concrete) to create terraces and an outdoor amphitheatre, and Nancy Goslee Power's magnificent two-acre sculpture garden at the Norton Simon Museum.

Tuesday evening, we ate heavy appetizers and dessert while attending Alma and Frank's Breakout Sessions on Sustainability and the Exhibitors Showcase, which featured product demonstrations and giveaways from numerous vendors, including VectorWorks, Dynascape, GardenSoft, Monrovia, Himalayan Designs, and Precision Property Measurements (PPM).  PPM is a fairly new firm out of Long Beach offering site measurement services for landscape designers/architects and is looking to expand into the northern California market; we hope to have them attend the Tech Expo in September and you can visit their website at www.ppmco.net to learn more. 

Wednesday was a full day of lectures from some very notable speakers with contrasting styles, but inspiring and thought-provoking messages: Raymond Jungles, ASLA; Elizabeth Murray, Michael Glassman, John Greenlee and Bernard Trainor.  When asked, some shared how they structured and built their "firms", i.e. number of employees, roles, how much they charged, etc. and all shared their individual philosophy about landscape design, including creating/restoring habitat where it has been lost, creating sacred spaces, using native plants, and how to make meadows and "natural lawns" to replace our green outdoor rugs.  Each had a dynamic presentation and, when asked about the issues presented by bringing new plants back to the United States from other parts of the world for study and development, John Greenlee challenged the definition of what is truly native since many plants were introduced to America from Europe when the first settlers came over.  "We let the horse out of the barn a long time ago on that one, and we can't put it back now," was his response. 

Wednesday evening, there was an APLD Certification Workshop and a Student Networking Reception at the hotel, but most of the California members headed off to dinner at a quaint little restaurant nearby called the 'Firefly Bistro'.  Everyone tried to sit with someone they did not know, and it was a great time for the Northern and Southern California members to get acquainted with each other.  The Northern California Districts shared some of their program ideas and encouraged the Southern California members to form local Districts as we have done in Northern California to address the long travel distances between different cities.

Thursday was a full day of garden tours starting at the 120-acre Botanical Garden at the Huntington Library, then visiting Marilee Kuhlmann's divine Mediterranean garden creation with a succulent roof and an infinity edge pool overlooking the San Fernando Valley, Nancy Goslee Power's colorful personal home and garden in Santa Monica, a succulent garden entitled 'Modelo Shales', two very original lawn-less gardens with Australian and native plants designed and built by Chuck Stopherd of Hidden Garden, and a final garden retreat with multiple outdoor rooms on the west-side designed by landscape architect Rob Steiner.  After a long bus ride home, we freshened up for the final dinner banquet sponsored by Monrovia Growers at Castle Green, what remains of the old Hotel Green that played host to vacationing tycoons and presidents in the late 1890's and early 1900's and has since been converted into artist's lofts.

The official conference schedule was augmented each evening by informal late night wine and "cosmo sessions" in the hotel lobby bar with members from all over northern California which was a lot of fun.  As Rick Fath said, "I was completely surprised to find out even though we were going morning until night, I was energized by it all.  The speakers inspired me so much and have planted seeds in me that are now growing.  Being surrounded by so many creative people and meeting so many of my peers in the industry was just as much an inspiration."

Julia Cameron says, "The artist brain is the sensory brain: sight and sound, smell and taste, touch.  These are the elements of magic, and magic is the elemental stuff of art."  What better way to get inspiration than to actually walk through real gardens and utilize all five of our senses to experience them and fill our artistic well with images to draw on in the future?  Missed this year's conference?  Need inspiration?  Just plan on attending next year's conference in Connecticut August 2008!  Hope to see you there!