Talking up Terraces

Along with the terraces website, www.RGTerraces.com, we needed to do something more public—meaning more actively out there in the public—to let people know about the website. A website is, in itself, a passive thing: People may Google over your way, true, but it sure helps to let them know first, by other means, that you’re out there.

One of the best ways to get people to go to your website is to, duh, actually tell them to go to your website.

One way we’re doing this is by a mailer—something paper-based we could, literally, put a stamp on and take to the post office. OK, so it's paper-based. But what form, shape, size? Maybe a postcard? A brochure? A flier (which I interpret to mean a sheet of paper that’s folded on itself, in thirds, to form its own envelope)?

Brochures are too expensive for such general use. Fliers are too “I-just-did-it-myself-at-Kinko's”. Postcards it is.

To do the layout, we hired a company in NYC, Network Design. We’ve got loads of pretty pictures as well as loads of possible text, and it’s worth it to have someone with real talent take charge there. Network has done RGardening.com as well as RGTerraces.com, so they are tried and true. And we believe in supporting colleagues with a good as well as long track record.

And because everything is now digital, the pictures as well as the text, it doesn't matter where we or they are. (As it happens, we're in NYC and RI, and they're in NYC.) The whole project is then e-mailed directly to the printer (Modern Postcard. They're in Carlsbad, California, wherever that is.). “Modern” prints untold millions of postcards a year, and probably many thousands of actual postcard projects a year too. They are fabulously attentive, clear, quick, economical, and experienced.

I've used them right from the beginning of my "post card" era—close to 15 years ago—which was before much of anything was digital. Think of it: Cameras with film. Slides that you had to pay about $12 apiece to get duplicated.

Here's a scan of that postcard. It was the regular (i.e., small) postcard size. (What did we know?) The huge wreath clues you in that this was for December mailing.

I still have a bit of a supply of these postcards; they are fabulous on refrigerators.

I had long hair then, and I still have the shearling leather coat, so I could channel Fabio creditably, at least from a distance and keeping my clothes on.

Down boy!



























Here’s what was sent to Modern this time around, for our terraces mailer. This is the front side.






































The postcard is 6X11—huge—which Modern calls, memorably, “Sumo”. They still only take a first-class stamp, and when you’ve got the good pictures (which, humbly, I think we do), you’ve got room to make the most of them. In this case, three on the front, one on the back.

Here's the back side. It's horizontal; click on it for the whole view.
Both this and the "Inviting Terraces" picture on the front side are from the Design New England photoshoot of August 08, just published in August 09.

Richard worried that the exclamatory text—“Inviting Terraces!”—wouldn’t read well in the middle shot on the front page, with all of us at the terrace (that's Richard in the dark glasses) but also with the bright white of the house's clapboards as the background.
So he suggested that the typeface be “shadowed”. Click on the picture: The shadowing is very clear on the larger version.

Modern nearly always requires that you look at a proof first, which we did. Nonetheless, gulp, then we got the cards back, we had two doubts: That text shadowing looked, well, cheap.

And the night-time shot on the back was just too dark.
(This wasn’t Modern’s fault; the photo itself is dark, and it needed some Photoshopping first.)

Chastened, we removed the shadowing. What the hell, we also removed the exclamatory texts themselves. Here’s the next front-of-the card iteration:






































And we had the night-time shot brightened. And here's the back. As before, because this side is horizontal, you'll want to click on the image to see it large enough.
Trust me: It's brighter.

OK: We had the effing mailer done, acceptably, and we had 500 of the terraces postcards in hand. (500 is the minimum order.) Now what do we do with them?

More on that in the next marketing post.

Good and Gooder: Bodacious Daisies in their 2009 Spots

I’ve wrestled with the giant willow-leaf daisy, Helianthus verticillatus, for several years. Twelve feet tall by September, in bloom by October, the bright flowers, lacy texture, late-season color, and preposterous size all make it a star.

But it would just as soon flop out into a twenty-foot-wide tangle. Here it is in 2008, when I pinched it to keep it shorter. That year I was lucky, and it still bloomed: Pinching could delay flowering—not anything I’d want to rely on when it doesn’t start until October in the first place.

The solution for 2009 was to erect a permanent cylinder of ten-foot lengths of rebar five feet in diameter and about twelve feet tall. I got started in April, when the garden was still low Spring sprigs: easy to step through, and work in.

(What a sad suffering cherry laurel, killed half-back by the hateful 08-09 Winter. Yuck!)


I bent other lengths of rebar into circles and wired them about every two feet up the cylinder, not only to keep the vertical rebars vertical, but also to gently "belt in" the helianthus canes within the cylinder.







































Three other rebars were bent into half circles to span the top ends of the verticals, giving a bit of a dome-like profile to the cage that would therefore say “cool silo” not just “necessary staking”.

Here're the hunks of verticillatus, transplanted only weeks before, already sprouting inside their new silo armature.





























And here’re those same clumps, nearly filling the silo by early September.

And just peeking out from the top by early November.

Next year it really will get full-height again, and will truly soar up to, through, and above the dome itself. I'm hoping that then its Inner Floppiness will manifest, putting a bosomy outflow atop the whole thing.



And—oh yes—before I made the silo at all, I needed to first switch the H. verticillatus colony with yet another stratospheric daisy, Helianthus angustifolius. Here was angustifolius last Summer (where verticillatus is now happily corseted in its silo).

Angustifolius has even narrower leaves than verticillatus, and, in this cultivar, 'Mellow Yellow,' much paler flowers.









It clearly merited a more visible spot near the runway, to show off its subtleties. Here it is just yesterday: It's the back-center greenery, immediately to the left of the red-twig maple. The grass of the central axis, just visible at the lower-right corner, is now just six feet away instead of the twenty-five feet that had put this plant at the far-back corner of this bed.



Because angustifolius is "only” seven or eight feet tall at maturity, it’s self-supporting too. No silo needed.

Like verticillatus, angustifolius could care less about being transplanted in Spring. By September it was in bloom and nearly full-size too.



It’s such an attractive contradiction of achievement: Foliage that’s so narrow it’s delicate and ferny, flowers so pale and small that they should charm even the most cramped Color Conservative, and with height and vigor that should only appeal to rebellious, iconoclastic, big-plant fetishists like me.

I'm reaching up to the top-most flower (yes, that's day-of-gardening dirt on my wrist), and I'm not even close.

And now that it's so much nearer the grass runway, its ferny foliage, tasteful flowers, and surprising height can all three be highlighted. Fall really is the High Time in this border.

Smiting Back, Stone by Stone

Back in February, I beseeched the Gods of Good Fortune: Smite me not! And here it is October, and we're not be-smoted. We're not out of the woods either. But at least we're putting up a fight, not just begging for mercy.

But with victory still uncertain, we don't know if we're finally punching our way out of the dark or just shadow boxing. That our economic pugilism stylishly combines energy, inspiration, connections, and money will mean nothing if the business still doesn't come in.

So we're living with uncertainty. One way we're keeping busy? Bluestone. It's what terraces are paved with, and perhaps what dreams can be made from too. Richard had the idea that they could be marketed independently of the general, horizon-to-horizon landscape design projects we normally go for. Maybe: In these tight times, maybe all of our horizons have closed in, clients' as well as designers'. New swimming pools? Big trees delivered by helicopter? Maybe next year.

But a terrace could still be realistic right now, if not the gardens it might look out onto, the vistas it might someday anchor. Those might come later—or never: We're happy just to bring smaller dreams to people too.

Besides, one can still go wild with "just" a terrace. The adjacent horticulture, the container plantings, the water feature, the built-in grill, the furniture, the shady pergola, the lighting, the sound system. It's a focus that has a (comparatively) economical entry level, but doesn't limit the folks who can still afford to go sky-high ad whole-hog. Yum!

The big and lovely surprise was that terraces, marketing-wise, have legs. The literal "Hey, hire us to design your terrace" part of it was just the ground floor, the foundation. Take a look at our website just for terraces.

Fresh, sleek, diverse. Cool eh?


The terraces it showcases are sometimes approachable...






and sometimes astoundingly astronomical.







Cool, too, eh?

But as I said, this RGTerraces.com website was just the beginning...