The best educational talk for me on Monday morning was Peg Carney of Liberty Landcrafters and Pond Plants. She focused on a list of marginal and bog plants, then went into some real depth on growing, propagating, and thriving with Lotus. What impressed me about this was the time spent on Lotus. In all the years coming here I came away thinking . . . never has anyone gone into such detail. I thought it was good. Well thought out, professionally presented.
On the average side were Eric Sauer of Envision Works out of Dayton, Ohio. Eric is still doing PowerPoint presentations the way they were done in the mid-90’s, small font, small images-on same screen, and the most dreaded . . . reading from the screen. Hey if you put it up there for us to read, why are you reading it?
The other was Matt Horn who does great work out of a location in Spring Valley, NY. He owns Matterhorn Nursery, a very good Garden Center, and landscaping business. Matt had some good information on water-gardening but it was delivered in a jalopy of a presentation. Matt also save us by not trying to get through 300 slides in 50 minutes, stop flipping through slides telling us to ignore them. If we are to ignore them, do not have them in the lecture.
It seems most presenters in the Landscape industry act as though PowerPoint just came out about a month ago, well, okay . . . . maybe two. Small fonts, small images, too much info per slide, etc. It’s too bad because there are some good tutorials out there on presentations-but I digress.
The other speaker I caught today was Jane Bath from Bogart, GA. She just missed the mark. I got to think beginning designers came out of there very confused, or were ready to go down the wrong path. Jane jumped from one situation/problem/principle to another without much rhyme or reason. The talk was just too unfocused to pull from.
That’s day one.
The Whispering Crane Institute 