Landscape eye
Developing your landscape eye is a critical skill. It takes time to develop but your landscape, bosses and clients will thank you for it. Basically, landscape eye refers to your ability to read a landscape and figure out what’s missing, totally wrong or just slightly off. This usually comes with experience once workers are fully proficient on all equipment.
I started landscaping at a prominent Lower Mainland landscape maintenance corporation we don’t need to name. There, the in-house seminar on “Developing your landscape eye” was delivered by the company owner. Not managers. The owner. That was no accident. Workers with good landscape eye can make corrections which leads to sharper and healthier landscapes. This seminar was a platform for the company owner to train his workers to see the landscape the way he does.
Some obvious examples are weeds, shrub spikes, walkway obstruction, flower deadheading, broken tree branches, tree branches touching buildings, missed blade edging, lawns that don’t look lush, dead plants, garbage, debris, cedar pruning lines, shoddy clean ups, etc.
Examples
Obvious weed problem
Ask yourself: how were these weeds allowed to get this big?
A broken Acer circinatum branch: remove ASAP
Pinus mugo half way across sidewalk: prune back
A broken branch on Liquidambar styraciflua in a high-profile location
Dead cedars
Yucca flower spike can be removed
Mulch volcano: we can’t cover with mulch anything above the root flare or the tree suffers
Very poor tree cuts: the cut below was correct
Hardscape hazards
Tree collisions: to stay on the curb, mowers collide with this tree weekly. Put up a tree guard and instruct workers to avoid all collisions. Repeated abuse kills trees.
The deep edge is fine (90 degrees!) but we can’t leave the chunks. Very poor clean up.
This is common: tree branches touch the building
Remove low branches on trees; we can’t have branches develop this low
Remove suckers off tree trunk (above) and ivy (Hedera helix) below
As you move and work through your gardens and landscapes, pause to take a good look. Does it all makes sense? Is it all healthy and beautiful? Work on developing your landscape eye.
