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  • Buffalo Horticulture. The Landscape by Matthew Dore
  • Services
  • BLOG: Buffalo Landscape & Border Gardening
  • Matthew Dore, Landscape Designer, Buffalo, NY
  • Contact
  • Journal: \\"The Buff Hort Project\\"
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Border Gardening

"Border Gardening" is intended to represent the Buffalo Horticulture ideals as a "Design and Build Landscape Construction and Garden Care Service". It is soft, or hopes to be, and writes with a voice for those in search of value(s) in and from the landscape.

3/26/2014 0 Comments

Landscape Collaboration - Bidwell Parkway, Buffalo

#territoryofcollaboration

I have been referring to a collaborative project with CS1 Curatorial Projects (learn more at CS1'a Facebook link at bottom) called #territoryofcollaboration. Part of my work with this week was looking at design forms in the house that we - in our collaboration - may pick up on and mimic or repeat in the garden materials. 
As I got looking closely, I came to understand what characterizes this as a "Queen Anne Style" house. Where it is accurate to refer to it as a "Victorian," that label does not tell us much about its architectural characteristics, it only refers to an era of fashion from about 1850 to 1910. (I have seen different dates marking the era). To say "Queen Anne" is to point directly to specific features of the house, not a date range.
Essential elements to a "Queen Anne" (found here) are (1) an asymmetrical facade, (2) towers or turrets - sometimes cantilevered out from the second floor, (3) a porch that always includes the front entry area and covers part or all of the facade, (4) decorated gables [in the peak seen in first image below], and (5) differing wall textures - here having two different types of shingles with brick below the second floor.

We feel the "turret" or "towers" are prominent in the everyday imagination of architecture in many parts of Buffalo; and in saying this, it points to the prominence of the Queen Anne style around the city.

Below are site images of #territoryofcollaboration.

https://www.facebook.com/pages/CS1-Curatorial-Projects/165938883611938
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3/24/2014 3 Comments

Buffalo Landscape: What is Horticulture

What is Horticulture and why "Buffalo Horticulture."


Taken from its Latin root, horticulture suggests "garden" and "culture" as it is the art (technique) of cultivating plants. It is a wide ranging field spanning specialties of arborculture (trees); agronomy and agriculture; turf management (inc. sports fields and golf courses); the production of floral crops - florists and floriculture; landscape horticulture consisting of garden centers and nurseries that farm ornamental plants; and the production of fruits (pomology), vegetables (Olericulture), and Viticulture (grape production). 

I am on the edge as to whether this blog should at times talk about what and how I make dinner as I don't see it as that far away from horticulture.

So, its a pretty broad field - of which "Buffalo Horticulture" contacts with perhaps eighty percent of the above fields. How I contact each field is a story in itself - a story to be told at other times and along the way. (future blog posts)

In the opposite column, I cut and pasted Wikipedia's introduction to their "Horticulture" page. What it helps to point out is that Horticulture is both a science and an art. And, what this means to me is, you can go to Cornell and get a Master's degree in the science of horticulture (although, it would be in a minor niche or specialty. I don't think they would actually call it a"MS in Horticulture." It would be specialized.)
But, on the other hand, horticulture is an art. Of importance here is that more often than not, I will refer to my spade, rakes, and pruners as if they are the most fundamental things to being a horticulturist. 

So, to be a horticulturist, you need to know the science, but, you also need to be able to rake and use a spade. 

Science and Practice.

But! Why "Buffalo Horticulture?"
Well, when I began operating as my own business, I was leaving a family business that named themselves with the word "landscape" and "landscapers." I could very well have been "Buffalo Landscape" or "Buffalo Landscaping" but, I believe the word landscaper over the past thirty years can come to mean "one who mows lawns." 

So.
"Buffalo Horticulture - We don't cut grass."    


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Horticulture is technically the science, technology, and business involved in intensive plant cultivation for human use. It is practiced from the individual level in a garden up to the activities of a multinational corporation. It is very diverse in its activities, incorporating plants for food (fruits, vegetables, mushrooms, culinary herbs) and non-food crops (flowers, trees and shrubs, turf-grass, hops, medicinal herbs). It also includes related services in plant conservation, landscape restoration, landscape and garden design/construction/maintenance,arboriculture, horticultural therapy, and much more. This range of food, medicinal, environmental, and social products and services are all fundamental to developing and maintaining human health and well-being.[1]

Horticulturists apply their knowledge, skills, and technologies used to grow intensively produced plants for human food and non-food uses and for personal or social needs. Their work involves plant propagation and cultivation with the aim of improving plant growth, yields, quality, nutritional value, and resistance to insects, diseases, and environmental stresses. They work as gardeners, growers, therapists, designers, and technical advisors in the food and non-food sectors of horticulture.

Horticultural scientists focus on the research that underpins horticultural knowledge, skills, technologies, education, and commerce. Horticultural science encompasses all of the pure sciences – mathematics, physics, chemistry, geology, and biology – as well as related sciences and technologies that underpin horticulture, such as plant pathology, soil science, entomology, weed science, and many other scientific disciplines. It also includes the social sciences, such as education, commerce, marketing, healthcare and therapies that enhance horticulture's contribution to society.

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3/10/2014 0 Comments

Buffalo Landscape Design: On Process

From Robert Irwin Getty Garden (2002):

I've been spending more time with this garden book than any other for the last couple weeks. Thank you Claire. Thank you Buffalo and Erie County Library.

I came across a nice quote in the transcribed interview represented in the book. I feel it fits into the frame of thinking about Art -vs- Craft. 

Robert Irwin, the Landscape Architect on the project, is asked by his interviewer Lawrence Weschler: "Looking at this specific instance here [discussing the plant palette and color], what did you plan?"

Irwin answers: "I didn't plan anything. I found a number of plants I really liked that had different kinds of compatibilities, different kinds of overlaps. Some overlapped in terms of scale, some overlapped in terms of color, some overlapped in terms of texture, some overlapped in terms of structure. You find these overlapping capabilities and then you compose them together so that they act and interact and relate to each other."

Shortly thereafter Irwin says: "When an artist says, 'It feels right,' people think, well, that's just some kind of out-of-the-blue, sort of intuitive statement...[but the artist over a career] starts out with a concept and he sets out a kind of hypothesis and he has a strategy and he then does a process of trial and error. He's got an idea where he thinks its going to go, and he tries this and he tries that, and he writes it down. This  
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one will work. This one didn't work. This is one reaction, whereas this one: nothing happened. Every now and then he might make a discovery along the way, if he was paying attention. So that after he's done ten-thousand of them, you say "oh, my God, he discovered this thing, and this is how he did it."
                                                    (p63-64)

I liked this point of the interview because it acknowledges the past work and experience of the designer/architect. In one sense, he's an artist - but not an artist in that there is some raw spiritual force that flows primitively from his soul - an artist in that he has spent a lifetime considering the finest and most minuscule of tactile phenomena.

To one person, it appears as something that "feels right," but this is only after feeling so many times that you also know what feels not right.  

Irwin's opening here, "I didn't plan anything," sounds great, but then he goes on to describe the planning process, how he assembled together a number of plants with compatabilities and overlaps. Assembly of a plant list is planning.             (February 2014)

http://www.amazon.com/Robert-Irwin-Garden-Lawrence-Weschler/dp/0892366206/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1394481794&sr=8-1&keywords=Robert+Irwin+Getty+Garden
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3/3/2014 0 Comments

Buffalo: Designing Green Infrastructure

"Green" Stormwater management - a Superquick Introduction.

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This sketch, or study as I often call them, when installed and realized in the world, will take approximately 250,000 gallons of stormwater per year, capture it, filter it, and infiltrate it back into the ground water.
"What is Green Infrastructure" is a wide ranging question - but I may suggest it is a critical position towards the development of the everyday machinery that runs a town or city. The city, as something built and designed, has to do things. It needs to deliver water, take away garbage, sewage, bring electric, fuel for heat, etc. 
One of the major infrastructural components in the city is the system that drains away the water when it rains. Those grates that you find every so often in the street, the small concrete swales, ditches, all the way  up to less recognizable forms such as the retention pond, flood basin, or, well, the nearest stream or river.
When it rains, the water can't go anywhere. It falls onto roofs, parking areas, and streets and can't move into the ground because these surfaces are hard and "impervious" to water. So, it is generally planned in any development to have this water carried away somehow.

In dealing with stormwater, there is first the concern that as stormwater moves over these surfaces it picks up and flushes away what accumulates on it - antifreeze, leaked oil, tire ware, etc. This often is carried directly into the nearest waterway, and then, your drinking water - simultaneously affecting wild and plantlife. Secondly, especially in the older cities, (BUFFALO!) the infrastucture - storm sewer - was designed before parking lots of the expansion of certain types of development. So, these "infrastructural systems" can't handle the heavy load of runoff. So, in a heavy rain, the system overflows and the contaminants fail to be contained.

Managing stormwater on site is specific to that site. Not every town or city has the same design to handle stormwater as well as the soils of each site demand specifically designed systems.

So, as part of landscape design and site development we are looking for ways to prevent water from flowing into the storm sewer. "Green Technologies" such as the Bioretention Cells, Swales, and permeable paving allow water to be "captured" and "impounded" in the landscape.

And so the plan above will impound a quarter million gallons per year. And, its only a parking lot with about 25 parking spaces. 


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Left: Large scale bio-retention project at the Buffalo Niagara Medical Campus. Designed by Buffalo Horticulture in the fall of 2012
Right: Small system of water capturing swales at the entrance to Exchange Street at Smith. Larking Building and Larkinville. Buffalo Horticulture designed 2009.

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    Matthew Dore

    Landscape designer and Proprietor of Buffalo Horticulture

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