Growing Trends that have been around awhile....

When Ann & I started ‘Growing Trends’ the web site, blog and radio show, we weren’t sure how to engage all of you. It seems a little wit, the odd anecdote and should I say a touch of knowledge has helped us enormously.

In a very short time we have built an audience of readers, listeners and fellow Horticulturists, they have come from :-

United States, Canada, Venezuela, Argentina, Columbia, Germany ,United Kingdom, Spain, Ireland, Italy, Hungary, Denmark, Romania, France, Netherlands, Jamaica,Barbados, Egypt, New Zealand, Australia, Malaysia, Japan, India, Saudi Arabia, South Africa, Republic of Korea,

We are just stunned… thank you all so much. Please if you have time send us a picture of your favourite space, garden or landscape with a few notes, we would love to hear from you.

Today, as we have a holiday weekend here in the USA, it seems that our blog should be a little in this spirit, so I’m going to try and find a bunch of pictures of projects we’ve completed along with pictures of unusual items used in the urban landscape that perhaps some have not seen before.. hope you enjoy them..

So let’s start with a really big tree being moved, it was one of many on this site, weighing some 600 tons and approximately 60ft tall!

One of my favorites a flower clock in Geneva, Switzerland.

This one was ‘snapped’ in Amsterdam, it’s an old cannon, now serving as a vehicle bollard !

The next is fairly common – creating a bubble fountain using an old natural millstone wheel.

This method completely softens a brick pier and makes it look ageless – we used a single canted brick on each corner, and added a double layer of tiles ‘Creasing Tile’ before the soldier course, the resultant ‘shadow line creates interest and helps the wall to ‘weather’ much better.

This one is much harder to do, it’s a circular patio of natural setts – they tend to be slightly different sizes. When laid like this, in a circular pattern creates a feeling of movement and space, in what is a fairly small area.

When you have a natural random wall it is always hard to create a ‘finish’ , we solved this by bonding a brick coping to match the drive brick edge.

What is really interesting is, if you look really carefully you can see the brick coping running into the driveway as the wall ends, this looked so good, the red tarmac ( which is quite expensive) helps with the overall effect.

Many years ago, we needed to find away to create ‘Raised planters’ on a roof that were exceedingly light weight, contained and yet attractive. We think we succeeded with these specially made by us artificial rock faced grp planters. – we won an award for the project , which was fun !