Lomandra longifolia

This hardy dune colonizer is a valuable tool in dune rehabilitation. The images here were taken on a visit to the dunes area around Jervis Bay on the south coast of New South Wales, January 2012.

Click here for an excellent guide and for information on coastal dune management.

The seeds of the plant provided a valuable resource for Aboriginal people as did the leaves that were woven in different ways. Note the spines surrounding the inflorescence.

The horticultural industry has developed a number of variants of this species including ones with narrower and softer leaves.

We suggest making sure that your nursery person sources a narrow soft-leaf form.

Here is a link to a commercial source of Lomandras. In our view, too many Lomandras with very tough knife edge leaves are sold. This makes subsequent maintenance very difficult.

Keep to a simple palette of materials

This interesting screen fence is located in Vincentia, New South Wales. A simple material palette is in use – just stone and steel that is allowed to weather.

Landscape design principles

Clients employ landscape designers to provide them with a landscape plan that leads to the construction of a special garden.

It is often difficult for designers to constantly generate new ideas. It is easy to fall into the trap of simply reproducing ideas implemented in other designs. A technique that we find useful to overcome this straight jacket approach is to adopt a standard way of developing a design. We first establish with the client the style(s) of garden they warm to and think might work for them.  That is most easily done by showing a portfolio of past work. We arrange a meeting on site and take with us an A1 size album containing shots of gardens that we have constructed (and some designs by others) and flip those through with the client. Once the style is established, it is time to lay out the ‘bones’ of the design – the hard elements in the available outdoor space. This is where it can get difficult to find inspiration.

The strategy we employ is to find some element in the building and reflect it in the design. Here, the curving wall of a dining room in a modern house has been reflected in the positioning of ‘chunky’ poles supporting the Wisteria arbor and the curved edge of the paving.

To accentuate the curve even more, the paving edge has been planted with dwarf Mono grass which further accentuates this design element. Massed planting of Dietes spp fills the rear of the space. This is a very small garden and we used horizontal boards and mirrors to create the illusion of space.

The next image shows a different site.  Here the front garden of a house is in an early stage of construction. The main feature of the front of the house is a complex shallow curve.  These curves have been picked up in the letterbox and newly constructed raised garden beds. This ties the design together.

Note the restricted palette of materials in use. Rendered walls and thin ornamental sheet iron glued to the tallest feature wall that is allowed to weather to a rust colour. The same material is used on the letterbox as on the wall.

You may be able see more clearly from the layout of the footings (that will contain raised garden beds and ornamental steel work) that the rather shallow complex arc of the front of the building has been reflected in the garden plan. These footings are substantial as they will support a wall some 2 meters high that will create a private outdoor space.

Of course curves are not found in buildings on every site. Inspiration can be gained from many features and the link need not be as obvious as in the examples above. For example, the building may have an interesting long narrow window or facade feature. The proportions from any such feature you pick up, can be used in laying out the design. A subtle trick is to lay out the design on a grid matching (say) the width and height of that ‘special’ window. If the site is large, use a larger grid with the same proportions as the design moves further away from the building.

Adopting the approach outlined here ensures that every design is unique and that the design integrates building into the landscape.

Carex spp

In our opinion, the genus Carex (a large group of > 100 sedge species) is a group often under utilized by landscape designers. In general, they tolerate quite a wide variety of conditions and do not all require bog conditions to thrive. Species are well suited to modern courtyard plantings and they can even be used in designs for sustainable gardens to replace traditional lawns and other ground covers. The horticultural industry has done a good job of encouraging landscapers to use members of the genus. Check them out when next visiting your local nursery.

For more information, visit Wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carex

New release of GardenCAD

We are close to releasing GardenCAD Pro. It is a new version of GardenCAD and designed for users of the standard version of GardenCAD who feel that they want to drive the software much harder and aim for even greater productivity.

  If you are just starting out learning about CAD software for landscape use, we recommend (free) GardenCAD Lite, graduate to GardenCAD and then move to GardenCAD Pro. Jumping straight to GardenCAD Pro is quite a step.

Main features

Unlike GardenCAD standard, which has a very simple user interface and works with one drawing at a time, GardenCAD Pro designers can work on several drawings at once, cutting and pasting from one to another. The user interface has been completely redesigned with many more toolbars, drop down menus, menu choices and drafting options than GardenCAD standard. The figure below shows the GardenCAD Pro interface; note the multiplicity of toolbars, additional drop down menus and new plant symbol sets.

Toolbars

GardenCAD Pro uses many toolbars to speed the drafting process. Some of these are shown below.

New commands and options

Many new commands and options have been introduced in GardenCAD Pro and are available via an enhanced set of drop down menus. One example is shown in the figure below showing the options on the Tools drop down menu.

Plant selector system

A major change has been made to the method of inserting plant and other symbols into a drawing (Plant Selector). GardenCAD Pro offers a different and improved way of working with the Plant Selector library.

Users can simply select the Insert drop down menu, choose the Block Library and browse to folders containing a group of symbols. the arrow keys can be used to quickly scroll the list of symbols in a folder and a snapsjot automatically appears in the browse box.

The figure below shows a user browsing through a group of symbols representing medium shrubs.

The links to symbols are not ‘hard coded’. Users can simply add their own symbols to the Blocks folder or sub folder they create, and the new symbol will automatically appear in the new browser system. This improved selector system answers a common request from GardenCAD users – the ability to add their own symbols which then become part of the plant selector browser system.

New symbols sized to expected canopy diameter

As well as the availability of the same set of symbols available in GardenCAD standard (which number more than 100), we have added a second set of symbols in which plants have been grouped according to estimated canopy diameter viz:

Tall Trees [3.0 meter diameter], Small trees [2.5 meter diameter], Large Shrubs [2.0 meter diameter], Medium Shrubs [1.5 meter diameter], Small Shrubs [1.0 meter diameter], Mini shrubs [0.3 meter diameter], Ground Covers, Climbers

There is also a series of symbols linked to named species. An attempt has been made to create symbols with the feel of the named species.

Set a ‘see through’ upper canopy

If symbols from the new Tall Trees group in GardenCAD Pro are placed into a design, they are automatically lightly drawn such that other symbols representing plants in the understory and hard construction elements can be easily seen through it.

This is a versatile system because a concept drawing can be produced, one where the ‘bones’ of the design ‘hardscaping’ elements are seen to dominate rather than being obliterated by the planting. Understory plants (mini shrubs and ground cover) can be placed once a concept plan has been agreed with the client.

Multiple document interface

Another common request from users of GardenCAD standard was to implement the ability to work with several drawings in the one session, cutting and pasting material from (say) an earlier completed design into a new design for greater efficiency. GardenCAD Pro allows this. Several drawings to be open at the same time, users can copy, cut and paste whole drawings or part thereof from one drawing. The figure below shows two drawings open in one GardenCAD Pro session and the Window drop down menu used to switch from drawing to drawing.

Windows fonts

The ability to work with Windows text fonts has now been implemented.

Backup copies of drawings

Although GardenCAD standard backs up the drawing file every 15 minutes without user intervention. GardenCAD Pro now saves the standard .Vec file and a BAK (backup file) when a drawing is closed meaning atht two copies of a drawing are in existence all the time. This approach is in line with other mainstream CAD programs such as AutoCAD and IntelliCAD.

Sample designs

A new set of test drawings (designs) replaces the original set of GardenCAD sample drawings. Opening drawings containing a number of useful symbol sets for the samples will help users experiment with this powerful feature.

Linetypes

A wide selection of linetypes are pre-loaded  – dot dash, log dash etc., thus avoiding the need to load a extra linetype patterns.

Help

We have redesigned the help facility with links to a support site for the core software in GardenCAD. We have decided to call the core dCAD and established a web site (www.dcad.designcad.com.au) with links to movies offering detailed explanation of special techniques used in GardenCAD drawings. For example, scaling at ISO approved scale factors [1:2, 1:5, 1:10, 1:20, 1:50, 1:100, 1:200, 1:500 etc.] when creating views on pages sheets is not a trivial task and we provide links to comprehensive movies showing how this is done.

Explanation of the use of the various entity snaps is provided on that site along with more explanation about the best way to do hatching.

More symbols

We have had requests to provide many more block symbols, especially those such as north points, section indicators, scale bars, paving detail, bush planting, staking trees, setting up irrigation systems etc.

Users have asked to be able to download pre-drawn legend blocks.

Dimension styles

Several dimension styles will be created and pre-set in the default drawing. These will be suitable (and can be chosen) for different plot scales.

An image editor is included so adjust images, cropping, adding text, change the transparency of an image on the fly are possible.

Database

We have turned off the plant database tool as it does not run properly in all versions of Windows and we believe that we have a better alternative – http://www.gardencad.net/plantsel

GardenCAD Pro will be available in both metric and Imperial versions

Additional hatch patterns will be included.

Add a wider range of file types supported by the raster import tool.

Your (new) drawing file option loads a pre-set group of new layers, each conforming to international layer naming conventions. It also loads an appropriate set of linetype and hatch styles.

A pointstyle command has been implemented.

There are links to two Excel sheets – one to calculate the sustainability rating of your designed site and the other to manage plant lists.

We have created 5 new hand lettered fonts. One of these has been set as the default text style.

The genus Ranunculus

While driving along Australia’s east coast south of Sydney, I was surprised to see many instances of Ranuculus spp growing wild by the roadside.  I remember Ranunculus being used as the classic dicotyledonous plant when studying plant anatomy in basic botany courses. On a recent visit to Dunedin, I photographed Ranunculus gramineus, a great alpine species photographed in the superb Dunedin botanical gardens alpine collection. (http://www.dunedin.govt.nz/facilities/botanic-garden)

Senecio pinnatifolius

This most useful Australian Native  is a great colonizer of new ground. It is a branched herbaceous plant to 80 cm high and perhaps 70 cm wide although these measurements vary widely. The leaves are bright green and divided into lobes. The bright yellow daisy flowers are borne in early summer, seed set is substantial and dispersal efficient. Many new plants will appear as a result of self seeding in the second summer.

Can be planted in clumps and drifts as a quick cover.