Buffalo Landscape and Biography

Approaching the Mundane

My Saturday afternoon closed with an eight point list of things I needed to address on a collaborative project I’m participating in:

1.       Concrete solutions

2.       Final Juniper selection

3.       Reconsider screening

4.       Develop “second garden space”

5.       Move Smokebush

6.       Acquire sandstone cobbles

7.       Shrub alternatives

8.       Write 100 word description of Buffalo Horticulture for media release

The final one has me reeling.

Our late afternoon meeting followed six days in the field repairing snow damaged turf at a thirty acre distribution facility in Cheektowoga. Massive piles of snow left several 5000 square foot sections of turf suffocated and dead and many other areas rutted up from tires and gouged and torn from snowplows. I like to share my work through social media – which is new, but exciting for me as my work has always been enclosed in a backyard or identified with someone else’s name, Buffalo Horticulture having been “subcontracted.” So to post an image of my day, a paragraph of something I’m researching or trying to solve, or to share the range of places and projects I’m involved in make me feel less isolated in the intensity of my work. But here, all of a sudden, working at the warehouse, I couldn’t find a way via blog or Facebook to show “turf repair” in an exciting manner.  The best I could do was Tweet an image of my truck one foggy morning. How do “I” show up in such a simple project. The “I” that always seems to be working on visual and design – how is it reconciled with smoothing topsoil?

Almost exclusively, for six days, I worked along the edges of parking areas and roadways with my “Jackson True Temper, 16 tine bow-rake.” It was the rake we used for grading when I was a kid, but somewhere along the way it disappeared. My earliest responsibility growing up in the business was to inventory the tool bins, make sure each crew had a specific set of tools, and what was missing or damaged needed to be replaced. This would happen each spring around the end of March as we prepared for the upcoming season. After sorting and listing, I was sent to “Land-o-Trees” which was at the corner of Dick Road and Wherle Drive in Cheektowoga – one of the original garden centers in WNY – and I would buy our tools there. I really knew nothing else, but they had every tool we used. But, “Land-O-Trees” closed in the mid-nineties and I believe ever since then the tools have come from Home Depot. And so, ever since then, the 16-tine bow-rake has disappeared.

                A few years ago, I was grading a lawn in the back of the renovated “257 Lafayette” (the old elementary school of the Catholic Annunciation Church) and I wrote this short journal entry about grading – tractors and rakes. How, here I was trying to install this lawn, only, now there were only skidsteers with hydraulic grading implements and hiring or renting a conventional tractor was near impossible. Also, working with a crew of four that day, I couldn’t help watch everyone grade, watch their rakes move, their techniques – and notice that no one had ever used a bow-rake before. Everyone was trying to rake out soil with “stone-rakes” which is now the ‘commercial grade’ rake Home Depot carries.

Somehow, last year I found that “Jackson” and “Ames Tools” were still making 16-tine bow-rakes and I was able to order one online for only $28. I was very excited and didn’t want anything to happen to it. I explained to the crew that I had special ordered this rake and that once-upon-a-time I used it when I was a kid. “Please be careful with it.” Amazingly I somehow went through most of last year never doing any grading. It’s just how it goes. Horticulture is a wide ranging field. So, when I arrived at this distribution center to do all this turf repair to open the season, while there were no brilliant images to excite you with, nothing to catch your eye, nothing to suggest Buffalo Horticulture’s design prowess or gardening savvy – there was this simple rake I was using everyday, wood handle, cast iron 16 tine head. It comes in blue or red. I chose blue.