I’ll be Speaking at the Royal Botanical Gardens.

On October 21st I’ll be giving the keynote speech at the 2-day conference for the Royal Botanical Gardens in Hamilton, Ontario, titled “Make a Splash: A Natural Approach to Water Gardens“. I was asked to come up with a title and short description for my talk and this is what we have initially come up with.

Naturalistic Effects for the Residential Waterfeature:

“Using Nature as you guide in the designing, building, creating, and maintaining your backyard pond and stream.”

The 2nd day is for professionals and I will do an entire day with those folks on water also, this is tentatively titled:

Introducing Naturalistic Design Principles for the Designed/Built Waterfeature:

Too often waterfeatures are built without forethought to creating ponds, streams, waterfeatures, that mimic what exist in the Natural World. The usual effect is the dreaded necklace effect of stones surrounding the pond, or a stream that looks like the county work crew dumped gravel into the stream bed.

It doesn’t have to be this way. If you watch, follow, listen, document, study waterfeatures as they exist in the natural World. Borrowing these principles to create something as close to Natural as possible.

The goal is to get the observer to believe; even if for a short time, that the waterfeatures was there 1^st and the landscape added around it.

There will be heavy focus on waterfalls and streams, especially streams, This is where good becomes great. Where the possibility to design/build reaches a new level.

Also the design process, showing the design on paper, the surrounding landscape, the background principle, understanding the transition principle, choosing stone, putting stone together. Also we will have enough time to go explore other subjects that come up during the workshop.

That title is likely to stick with some tweaking to the background info for the day-long workshop. This is breaking news so there is nothing about this on the RBG site. I can say for certain these are the days, we have lockerd them in Oct. 21st and 22nd.

I will post more on this as we flesh this out, and nail down some specifics. The important thing for me is not just to be able to spread the word on using nature as a guide, but the designing of the entire space.

A certain company does a great job of promoting the building of waterfeatures but nothing on design, design principles, and the space that surrounds the waterfeature(s). I am trying to change their mind.

The Royal Botanical Gardens are located in Hamilton/Burlington, Ontario . . . that’s in Canada for those of you who missed 7th grade geography, or was that in High School?

• It is Canada’s largest botanical garden and one of the country’s premier cultural, education and scientific institutions.
• Of the Gardens’ 1,100 hectares (2,700 acres), about 120 hectares (297 acres) are cultivated, while the rest remains a managed natural area. The glory of the Arboretum is the Katie Osborne Lilac Garden, which boasts the world’s largest living collection of lilacs
• The Cootes Paradise Sanctuary is the Gardens’ natural treasure. Ecosystems within the 250-hectare (620-acre) marsh, at the westernmost tip of Lake Ontario

Just a few tidbits from the RBG about page.