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Fertilizing with harmful, petroleum based fertilizers can wreak havoc on our environment. These unnatural fertilizers are typically applied excessively and never fully break down where they are applied. Instead, they wash downstream where they upset the nutrient balance. Petroleum fertilizers contain high amounts of nitrogen and phosphorous, which leach out of the soil, flows downstream, and find their way into rivers, bays, and oceans. Once there, they will upset the nutrient balance often seen in algae blooms, which make the water cloudy, remove oxygen from the water, and harm fish and other aquatic life. (1) This is not a sustainable ...

Wildlife needs our help since they are being wiped out by our zeal for development. We can help wildlife by creating a wildlife habitat in our home gardens and landscapes. Steps we can take to attract wildlife to our garden include, installing a water source such as a pond, water fountain, and water bath, creating and planting new garden beds, installing native plants, removing lawn, providing shelter with birdhouses, evergreen shrubs and trees, and brush piles, and installing native plants that provide food for wildlife like nectar, berries, nuts, and seeds. Wildlife that may be attracted through these efforts include ...

Most people hire landscape architects in the spring. This is not the ideal time to do so. In the spring everyone wants their garden designed and installed. However, if you hire a landscape architect in the spring, it may take several months to complete the design, and then you are getting into the summer heat when it is not the best time to install the garden. The spring window of opportunity has passed! In addition, designers and installers get overloaded with too much work during the spring season. So, either projects are moved to the fall or simply turned away. ...

Have you ever wondered why the Chesapeake Bay, our rivers, and oceans have become so polluted? One main reason is that we have been abusing our landscapes for many years. We have been abusing our landscapes with excessive applications of fertilizers, toxic chemicals such as herbicides, fungicides, and pesticides, clearing the land of all or most of its vegetation, built a lot of impermeable surfaces, and installed much lawn. (1) All of these practices harm our natural ecosystems and creates problematic runoff that eventually finds its way to our waterways downstream. Unnatural petroleum derived fertilizers typically are not fully used ...

The traveling exhibition about the founders of Oehme. Van Sweden landscape architecture firm in DC is called The New American Garden and is currently being shown at the Vollmer Center at Cylburn Arboretum in Baltimore until early March 2017. This is a fascinating detailed view of the two pioneers of the revolutionary garden style that swept across the US in the ’70s through the ’90s bringing back many native plants and the beauty of the American prairie that dislodged the stodgy clipped evergreen foundation plantings. Wolfgang Oehme is my father and inspired me to continue his revolutionary and ecologically sensitive ...