Signature Garden: Designed by d4collective

The 2011 Northwest Flower & Garden Show starts a new annual tradition: The Signature Garden. This garden will be built by the show owners, will illustrate the year’s theme and will be separate from the time-honored gardens competing for medals and awards.

The question on everyone’s mind: Who will design the first Signature Garden?

The answer is…..

The four designers, known as d4collective for this special project, are Susie Thompson, Octavia Chambliss, Barbara Lycett, APLD and Daniel Lowery, APLD.

d4collective will soon have a blog ...watch for it. Independent designers and business owners, their personal websites are: www.susielandscapedesigns.com, www.octaviachambliss.com, www.blycettlandscapes.com and www.queenannegardens.com

They worked together on a NWF&G Show display garden in February of 2010 and won three gold medals. They are all members of APLDWA and are all past or present board members. Thrilled to be asked to submit a proposal to design the first Signature Garden, they built on the camaraderie of past experiences, a harmonic convergence, and are knee-deep in preparations for the garden to be built in just eighteen short weeks.

To jog your memory, the garden we designed and built on behalf of the Washington Chapter of The Association of Professional Landscape Designers, looked like this....

Breath as Teacher

Yoga is uninterupted, sustained mental attention. Originally designed as a way to focus the high energy of young boys, yoga is widely viewed as exercise in the western world. It is wildly popular among women as they typically outnumber the male students ten to one. I've practiced yoga for over 15 years and recently used private yoga lessons to keep moving my body after a surgery. Three times per week had been my usual practice and now it is every day.

Statistics show that we often use only 10% of our lung capacity. "Take a deep breath" is a useful suggestion when someone is upset. "Exhale deeply" and "exhale completely" are suggestions to remove greater amounts of carbon dioxide from one's lungs.

A personal affirmation: My gentle yoga practice is a treasured source of balance in my life.
This affirmation is used (often) to bring me back to a grounded and calm place so that I might better serve my garden design clients as well as nurture my personal health.

Have you ever walked into a garden...stopped, and taken a deep breath in appreciation for the beauty? That's what I do for a living! That's what I do for life.