AND FOR YOU NON-NERDY NEWBIES:

WHAT IS DIGG? Digg is a place for people to discover and share content from anywhere on the web. Once something is submitted, other people see it and Digg what they like best. Digg promotes the conversations that happens around this content and provides tools to discuss the topics that people are passionate about.  [ our digg site ]

Digg

WHAT IS FLICKR? Flickr is an online photo management and sharing application in the world that helps people make their content available to the people who matter to them, and enables new ways of organizing photos and videos, in collaboration with one another.  [ our flickr site ]

Flickr

WHAT IS YOUTUBE? YouTube has many ways to help you find and watch videos. You can also interact with other YouTube users and around shared interests. If you make videos, you can broadcast them to the whole world, and maybe even develop an audience for your creations.  [ our youtube site ]

YouTube

WHAT IS TWITTER? Twitter is a service for friends, family, and co–workers to communicate and stay connected through the exchange of quick, frequent messages. People write short updates, often called “tweets” of 140 characters or fewer. These messages are posted to your profile or your blog, sent to your followers, and are searchable on Twitter search.  [ our twitter site ]

Twitter

A FEW YEARS AGO, I made an unexpected discovery about digital imaging. When using the graphic design industry-standard application Adobe Photoshop to colour-correct a few photographs, I noticed something strange about the “levels” tool. Without getting too technical, the levels tool produces a histogram of all of the pixels in a picture, so you can analyze the color balance and adjust it accordingly. When viewing the levels on an average image, the results can be wavy, jagged, even wildly erratic.  But on a snapshot of natural scenery, it produces a perfect bell-curve! It’s as if the entire ecosystem is in harmonious balance, not only in terms of the food chain of interdependent species, but also in terms of the light spectrum — which, ultimately, can be measured in energy wavelengths.

HERE BELOW ARE A COUPLE of great examples of the phenomenon I’m talking about. The first is an image of the Grand Canyon, in Arizona. The mountains are multi-coloured and craggy, not uniform in shape or in shading. But the histogram that they produce is nearly perfect (the ramp up at the end corresponds to the white cumulus clouds). The second picture was taken much closer to home, in Algonquin National Park, a two-hour drive north of Toronto. Here, at much closer range, in addition to the seemingly static landscape there is a moose making her way across the meadow. Incredibly, the same rule seems to be in effect, the natural hues of the moose blend right in spectragraphically, only slightly skewing the curve.

CONTRAST THESE WITH THE FOLLOWING three images of downtown Toronto, from different distances. In the first photograph, a satellite image, there are several unsightly protrusions coming out of the bell curve. The pictures get progressively worse. In the second picture, a bird’s-eye view of the downtown core, the curve is more deformed and includes irrational peaks and troughs. Finally, in the third image, a close-up shot of a luxury condominium, what real estate developers would have you believe is exemplary modern architecture — the curve has completely lost it’s bell, it’s now composed of all kinds of observable information that contrasts and clashes with itself.

SO IS IT POSSIBLE for humans to manufacture landscapes that are as beautiful as anything nature can create on her own? An earlier attempt to produce visual perfection is the pastoral landscape painting, as we discussed in an earlier blog entry, Clover the Hills and Far Away. In this rendering of an English Garden below, Rococo atmospheric master Hubert Robert manages to nearly capture nature with subdued hues that closely approach the slightly undulating bell curve. Nice, but what about real life, real environments?

IN 2006, PETER AND I traveled to England to learn about and document local natural building techniques — a topic for a future blog entry, to be sure. But while we were there in the county of Devon visiting natural building practitioners, I came upon these ruins of an old out-building that had been exposed to the elements for who-knows-how-long. I was struck by its incredible beauty, and recorded its image for my personal scrapbook. When I later developed the film, I was struck by the almost-perfect bell curve that resulted! So it would seem that when nature is left to her own devices, she reclaims human-made structures and they discernibly revert to their former glory.

BUT THE QUESTION REMAINS: can we as professional landscapers ever hope to approach the same sublime beauty that comes naturally to nature? I don’t think we can ever really reach that pinnacle, but we’re willing to give it our best shot. Going through the Green Apple portfolio of former clients, I think that our work stands up pretty well under these criteria. Here below is a shot of Peter’s own backyard waterfall pond. Notice that even though there are many diverse elements that make up the scene (including a little statue of Yoda from Star Wars — nice one, Pete!), the image as a whole is distilled into a single smooth curvy arc. Truly, beautiful!

WELL, FIRST OFF, maybe I should probably say a few things about our company culture. When I started working with Green Apple back in 2005, we didn’t have any office to speak of.  Peter took care of all of the logistics — estimating, ordering, invoicing, et cetera — and he did it all in the off hours from his home office in East York. But on Monday to Friday from eight in the morning or earlier, he was on the job site, labouring away like the rest of us. Nowadays, he’s doing his darnedest to delegate as many tasks as he can, so that he can devote more of his time to medium- and long-range planning. And we’ve got an actual office that we work at during regular business hours.

THERE’S AN AWFUL LOT that we still have in common: among other things, we all take great pride in working hard and creating a beautiful finished product with a low ecological footprint. But there’s also a good deal of diversity at Green Apple, and since we’ve experienced a doubling in size and a division of labour, the company culture has become even more heterogenous than before. At the end of the work day, some of us are sports nuts and others are political junkies; our roster includes gifted artists and techno-gurus, all kinds of archetypes. If we’re going to be broadcasting under the name Green Apple, it’s important that you know that it could be coming from any one of us!

AT GREEN APPLE, we’ve always been quick to adapt the business and adopt new techonologies, whether that means purchasing a new tool or learning a new computer package. But this new online phenomenon, the so-called social media, has got us shrugging our shoulders. Sure, when we sit down together in a meeting, we talk about lots more than just plant species and price tags. But are our customers really interested in hearing what we have to say on a whole host of topics, over the web? Online, there’s no way to effectively vibe-check, analyze a facial expression, figure if I should continue with an off-colour joke, or get back to business.

SETH AND ROB have come on board, and are actively encouraging us to engage our clients in a dialogue that doesn’t end at the door. The general idea, at least as I understand it, is that by having a web two-point-oh presence, we are humanizing ourselves online. Of course, we would prefer to have unmediated interactive experiences, be able to share our thoughts and feelings with you, and have you share your thoughts and feelings with us, without this many layers of ones and zeros. But since it’s going to take a little bit longer to transform Toronto into a series of small villages where everybody knows each other’s names, in the meantime, let’s converse virtually.

ALL OF THIS is to say, that if at some point you read a status update about an awesome new restaurant in Kensington Market, or receive a tweet from us about election results in Iran, and you wonder what the heck any of this has to do with landscaping — the answer is… well, it doesn’t, really. Now don’t worry, we will still be broadcasting lots of interesting information about our plant relations and how your house can be healthier. But we’re also going to start experimenting with these media and let you know what’s going on in our minds and in our hearts, talking about all aspects of the world we live in. Better to have blogged and lost, than never to have blogged at all!