The Landscape Design Graduate Certificate or Master's Degree Program is ideally suited for landscape professionals seeking to upgrade skills, individuals who want to become professional landscape designers, amateurs with an interest in the art of garden design, institutional horticultural staff, nursery employees, and garden design writers. The program provides a background in horticulture, nursery and planting standards, and the creative process of design. Courses are geared to small-scale landscape design applications with emphasis on sound design principles, good site engineering methods, and creative use of plant materials.

By choosing the Master's degree program, students also learn a fundamental understanding of best practices in landscape conservation and sustainability, adapted to the small scale landscape, at the neighborhood level. These highly successful programs have a strong reputation in the regional industry. Area landscape design firms, plant nurseries, and contractors frequently seek out graduates of this program, and graduates often go on to pursue advanced degrees in landscape architecture.

Find out more information about our graduation rates, median debt of students who completed the program, and other important information.

Marion Clark Memorial Scholarship Fund

PROGRAM AT A GLANCE

Certificate

This part-time Graduate Certificate program offers classes evenings and weekends in five eight-week terms during the calendar year.

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Graduate Certificate and Master's Degree in Landscape Design

A family run business!

We are a team of fully licensed & registered Landscaping & Groundwork industry experts with 18 years landscaping experience.

Our aim is to build long term relationships, as we have with previous customers and continue to do with new clients and businesses.

We offer a huge range of landscaping & Groundwork design ideas, full maintenance and hard landscaping services, all of them can be catered to suit the size of your project and budget whilst making the most of your available space. We only choose the highest quality materials which give longer life and a better looking finish. We constantly source new materials to offer you the client the best possible prices with the least possible fuss.

Durkin Premier Landscapes Ltd are licensed waste carriage handlers, and carry an operative license.

Our qualified landscapers are all CPCSOperatives (Construction Plant Competence Scheme)and carry CSCS Cards (Construction Skills Certification Scheme)

You can submit your own landscaping plans, cad designs or drawings to receive a quicker quote. Click here for more info

'Having the right gear to carry out the job makes hard work a lot easier'

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Durkin Premier Landscapes

By Dennis Hill Saturday, March 21, 2015

Were putting in a new yard and are thinking about adding something that would save water. It seems like Im hearing different recommendations from everyone, and Im getting confused and a bit frustrated. I hear about xeriscaping being a good way to save water, but I dont want a bunch of gravel and cactus in my yard. Can I use less water and not end up with that?

Arthur

Lets start with the seven principles of xeriscaping for folks planning to put in a new yard or who are thinking of redoing their existing yard.

The first principle of xeriscaping is proper planning and design of the landscape. In addition to standard design considerations such as function, circulation, space, form and color, the landscape is designed with an eye to saving water.

Reducing turf areas is a start, but the designer also needs to take into consideration the relative water usage expected in different areas of the yard.

What Im talking about are things such as how shady areas of the yard dry out more slowly than areas exposed to the hot summer sun all day long or that slopes will dry out faster and demand more drought-tolerant plants while the more thirsty ones are best in low spots that tend to collect water or adjacent to areas that receive more water like next to the lawn.

A designer can even create topography to help harvest water and/or channel it to areas where it is needed.

I firmly believe in the value of designing a landscape before starting to buy plants. Designing takes a good deal of talent, skill and experience, and when you add the complexity of considering water usage of each plant, it becomes overwhelming to the average homeowner.

There are a number of well-qualified landscape designers locally who can help with this portion of the process. Personally, I think that its the best money youll spend on your yard.

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Xeriscaping principles emphasize designing your landscape first

Battlefield Excavating provides excavating, landscaping and equipment rentals to people and businesses in Grimsby, Ontario, and the surrounding Hamilton region. Lets be honest, landscaping and gardening is a chore for many homeowners. While some people relish the opportunity to spend time in their yard pulling weeds, pruning hedges, and planting flowers, other people dread the landscaping and gardening that accompanies spring each year. However, even people who dislike doing the work themselves still want their yard to look nice.

This is where professional landscapers come in. Battlefield Excavating is a full service landscape company that can take the work and hassle out of any yard project and give people the beautiful, stress free yard theyve always wanted.

Each project undertaken by Battlefield Excavating starts with a landscape design. Whether it is a garden, patio stones, or interlocking brick, the experienced crew at Battlefield Excavating first takes times to sit down with each customer and map out their project getting the details right and setting a firm budget to complete the job. This helps to ensure that everyone involved is on the same page, and that the landscape project is finished on time and on budget. Conducting a landscape design also ensures that there are no surprises for the customer, and that every conceivable issue can be considered from the outset.

Hiring a professional landscaper to plan, design, and build a beautiful yard or garden has many benefits including the fact that it helps to increase your homes value. Using a landscaper also provides peace of mind to busy homeowners who are run ragged keeping up with the demands of work and family, and who dont have time to design and develop a landscape project on their own. Whether planting flowers, bushes, or a hedge, the professionals at Battlefield Excavating can help ensure that all elements of a yard work together to improve the look and feel of a house.

People who are frustrated with their own gardening skills, or who dont have time to undertake a landscape project themselves, should contact the experts at Battlefield Excavating. They are the best landscapers in the Hamilton region. To learn more about Battlefield Excavating and everything they have to offer their customers, please give the company a telephone call at 905-309-1139, or visit them in-person.

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Professional landscapers take the hassle out of yard work

Omaha, Nebraska (PRWEB) March 16, 2015

Shrubs dont get no respect.

Call them the Rodney Dangerfields of the landscape. Shrubs are the under-appreciated, unheralded, forgotten plants in gardening. They provide much-needed greenery, and they fill the important gap between small flowering plants and the giants of the landscape, trees. But despite their crucial role in a great garden, shrubs just dont get any respect.

Every landscape needs shrubs, said Jeff Dinslage, president of Nature Hills Nursery, an online seller of trees, shrubs and gardening supplies at http://www.NatureHills.com. Not only are shrubs the backbone of a good landscape design, but when shrubs are properly selected for appropriate growing conditions and visual interest, they can become stars in the landscape.

Shrubs Get Overlooked

Dinslage admits that most shrubs are overlooked because they have historically been known for their green foliage and roundish shapes. But a new crop of shrubs now offers distinctive colorful foliage and even bright flowers that can dazzle and delight.

One of the newest shrubs to garner attention in the gardening world is the Florida Sunshine Anise Shrub, also known by the botanical name Illicium parviflorum Florida Sunshine. This broadleaf evergreen shrub can be used as an accent plant, or planted together to form a vibrant hedge along a property line. Unlike most shrubs, Florida Sunshine has eye-catching bright-green leaves that turn yellow-gold in the spring and summer months.

A Ray of Florida Sunshine

Florida Sunshine Anise is just as the name impliesa ray of bright sunshine for your yard, said Dinslage. Its an evergreen shrub that delivers superb four-season color and also provides a sumptuous fragrance. It even has small white flowers in the spring.

Florida Sunshine will grow up to 8 feet tall and 6 feet wide, and it is cold hardy in USDA zones 6-9. It has no significant disease issues and insects tend to leave it alone. A 3-gallon plant sells for $49.95 from http://www.naturehills.com/florida-sunshine-anise-shrub.

Link:
New Shrubs Earn Respect in Landscape and Gardening Design

Press Release -- Your landscape is there to be enjoyed by you and your family. Its the setting for your home and provides a space for outdoor activities. Lawn areas offer a wonderful place for kids to play, and family get-togethers and parties take place on decks and patios. If your family includes pets, your landscape will likely be used by them as well.

In some ways, having pets in your landscape is like having young children. Although pets are less likely than a young child to get hurt in a landscape, you must still take some similar precautions, such as watching out for poisonous plants. Pets can also cause problems in the landscape, but pet owners who love their pets generally manage to tolerate or forgive minor indiscretions.

Pets still raise two major issues keeping your landscape from harming your pet and keeping your pet from harming your landscape.

Hazards

All of us likely grow plants in our landscapes that could be toxic to dogs or cats. The good news is, despite the abundance and ready availability of these plants to pets, incidents of plant poisoning are not especially common. In the number of poisoned pet contacts reported to the ASPCA, plants ranked after human medications, insecticides (particularly those applied to dogs and cats for flea control) and people food (like chocolate). Rat poison, veterinarian medications and poisonous plants all had similar numbers of calls. The plants involved were mostly indoor plants, not outside. The ASPCA website has an excellent list of plants poisonous to cats and dogs.

Azaleas, for instance, can be fatally toxic to dogs and people, too. As they bloom this spring, look around at how many azaleas are in peoples landscapes. Obviously, dogs dont typically eat azaleas and get poisoned by them. I was made aware of an incident involving a puppy left alone inside a house all day with a potted azalea that resulted in the puppys death.

There is one plant, however, that dog owners should be very aware of. The cycad we call sago palm (Cycas revoluta) is not actually related to palms. It is a gymnosperm related to conifers like pine trees and bald cypresses. As such, the reproductive structures are cones.

Sagos come in male and female, and the females present the more dangerous situation. The females form large, dome-shaped cones on top of the plant during summer. The seeds mature in January and February and drop to the ground sometime thereafter. The seeds are covered with a fleshy red coating that dogs must find tasty, because they will eat them.

Although all parts of the sago are toxic, the seeds are highly toxic to dogs, and Ive heard of numerous fatalities over the years. Seeds from female sagos should be gathered up and disposed of as soon as you see them in late winter or early spring.

Learn which plants are especially toxic to animals lilies, for instance, are highly toxic to cats and avoid planting them in your landscape. But Im not sure how far I would go to radically change an existing landscape like rip out all of the azaleas to eliminate all potentially toxic plants.

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How to Ensure You Practice Pet Friendly Gardening

Terraced pool and tropical softscape form one of the entertainment areas created for a home in Santaluz.

A landscape renovation project can be overwhelming, even just thinking about the concept of what stays and what goes. There are many factors to consider in the early stages of a conceptual drawing for a renovated backyard or front yard.

The residential project featured here, in the Santaluz development east of Rancho Santa Fe, had great bones to work with existing established trees, for example which just needed fine-tuning. The homeowners, with our guidance, decided what was feasible to keep and what had to go.

The front yard was stripped, except for an amazing Canary palm, which we designed around. The homeowners wanted a formal theme, which was created with plant materials such as various hedging shrubs, boxwood shrubs and varieties of ornamental grasses and roses with just enough turf to round it all out.

The entry concrete was finished with Topcast etching and accented with Quartzite flagstone. Accent Unique LED lighting was used throughout the project.

The backyard was designed with a tropical theme, since existing large vegetation (birds of paradise and Phoenix Roebellinis) were scattered throughout. We created several entertainment areas, such as a covered patio structure with heat lamps and a chandelier, an elegant barbecue structure with a stacked-stone backsplash and a trellis accent feature, which dressed up an existing fire pit. Decking concrete used to create this hardscape also was finished with Topcast etching and Quartzite bands throughout.

A patio structure with stacked quartzite columns invites family and guests to sit back and relax.

The plants that were added were a creative mix of varietal flaxes, Leucadendron, Arbutus compacta (strawberry bush), Kalanchoe (flapjacks) Cycas revoluta (Sago palms), Cocos Plumosa (queen palms), ginger, hibiscus and agaves, just to name a few.

The homeowners newly renovated landscape has enabled them to extend their indoor entertaining to the outdoors and enjoy being on a vacation in their yard.

Local interior designers, architects, contractors and decorators are invited to showcase a recent residential project in this space. Contact Home + Garden editor Chris Ross,

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Backyard gets tropical makeover

By Holly Mahaffey hmahaffey@michigannewspapers.com

A pair of Eastern Bluebirds in Michigan, courtesy Wikipedia

Learn the benefits of native plants in the landscape from naturalist/Stewardship Coordinator Gary Siegrist of The Dahlem Conservancy.

At least 5,000 alien plant species have been introduced to the United States, either intentionally or by accident. Learn why it's important to incorporate native alternatives into our yards and landscapes.

Siegrist wil discuss how to design a garden to attract a variety of birds. The free event is set 11 a.m. to noon on Saturday, March 14. Pre-registration is recommended by calling 734-475-3539.

Upcoming events in the series include:

March 21 Composting Made Easy: Rick Weller, owner and founder of Organically Done, a Michigan-based manufacturer of organic plant products will discuss composting and why it is one of the most environmentally friendly tasks that we can perform around the house. Many homeowners are daunted by the prospect of becoming a composter but we'll make it simple. Topics we'll cover include the science of composting, composting do's and don'ts, simple composter designs and compost troubleshooting among others.

March 28 A Weed by Any Other Name: Some plants we often consider weeds are actually flowers theyre just growing in places we dont want them, like our lawns. That makes them the very definition of a weed, since horticulturalists define a weed as a plant out of place. Join us at The Garden Mill when owner Jennifer Fairfield discusses many common weeds, how to identify them, and strategies to keep them from taking over your yard and gardens.

Learn the benefits of native plants in the landscape from naturalist/Stewardship Coordinator Gary Siegrist of The Dahlem Conservancy.

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The Garden Mill hosts 'Birdscaping Your Yard' event

By Rebecca Mordini for the Santa Barbara Botanic Garden | Published on 03.10.2015 12:53 p.m.

The Santa Barbara Botanic Garden's annual Spring Native Plant Sale starts Saturday, April 4 and runs through Sunday, May 3, every day from 10 a.m. to 5:30 p.m.

The Garden Growers Nursery at the Botanic Garden always has a good selection of native plants, but during the Spring Native Plant Sale, more than 6,000 plants and 500 varieties are available. Whether you are interested in beautiful flowers, attracting butterflies or converting to a drought tolerant landscape, you will find just what you need.

With so many native plants in spectacular bloom, this is the perfect season to fill your landscape with color, said Robert Adams, local landscape architect and past president of Santa Barbara Beautiful. Native plantings can be utilized to create a natural look to the garden, and can even be shaped to create a unique style that can embrace the dry conditions that we have been experiencing."

Expert advice: Avoid costly mistakes in your plant choices by attending one of the Saturday Garden Planning with the Experts workshops from 9:30 to noon April 11, 18 and 25. Participants will tour the garden with native plant experts to identify mature plants that fit their specific landscape needs. Garden experts will help you consider soil, light and water requirements in choosing the right plants for your own garden.

Monarch butterflies: If you want to see monarchs in the summer, you need to plant your milkweed now, said Frederique Lavoipierre, education program manager at the garden. You will see monarch butterflies nectaring on a variety of plants, but they only lay their eggs on milkweed. The caterpillar lives on milkweed until it forms its jewel-like jade and gold chrysalis, and finally emerges as a butterfly. Without milkweed there are no monarchs! You can enjoy this miracle in your own backyard by planting just a couple of native milkweed plants.

Learn more about the garden's Milkweed to Monarchs program by clicking here.

For your vegetable garden: Monarchs are not the only insects that thrive on native plants. If you have a vegetable garden, look for plants that attract insect allies to keep your garden pest-free. Serious gardeners will want to attend Garden Allies: Landscape Design for Pesticide-free Gardening on March 24 from 10 a.m. to 4 p.m. This detailed hands-on workshop will help you choose native plants that attract the right kind of insect to your garden to keep it pest free. Your vegetable garden and your other flowers will benefit from plants that attract a variety of butterflies, bees and other pollinators that will help your garden's yields.

Water wise: With another dry year predicted, this is also a good time to look at creating a landscape that uses less water and more native plants. Santa Barbara Water Wise offers a rebate program to make this cost effective and the Garden Growers Nursery has all the plants you will need, whether it is native grasses or beautiful perennials. Click here for more information.

Santa Barbara Botanic Garden members get an extra day to shop, on Friday, April 3. The usual member discount is increased to 15 percent for one day only. Shop early, as the rare and hard-to-find species will go fast. As always, garden staff and volunteers are available to provide expert planting advice free of charge.

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Spring for Native Color in Your Yard at Santa Barbara Botanic Gardens Plant Sale

The ever-changing landscape of the NFL continued late this week. The Atlanta Falcons announced the release of running back Steven Jackson, via Vaughn McClure of ESPN.com, on Thursday, and the Arizona Cardinals parted ways with defensive tackle Darnell Dockett, according to Josh Weinfuss of ESPN.com, on Friday.

These are just two examples of moves that will ultimately help shape the 2015 NFL draft.

Will teams draft replacements for these players this year? That's a strong possibility; however, it may not be in the first round. There are plenty of factors that must come into play to make that situation come to fruitionschematic fits and prospect availability among them.

Let's take the Falcons for instance. They pick at No. 8 overall. Sure, they could snag Wisconsin's Melvin Gordon or Georgia's Todd Gurleybut would that be worth missing out on one of the draft's elite pass-rushers? Probably not. So, in this situation, we can expect Atlanta to look for a running back in the draft's middle roundswhere potential steals reside.

Which prospects appear to be the mid-round gems in this year's draft class? Before we take a look at some examples, here's an updated glance at how the first round is likely to shake out.

Analyzing Potential Mid-Round Steals

Mid-round steals can be a variety of things. These prospects could have sneaky starting potential and produce some impressive numbers out of the gate during their rookie seasons. They could also be athletic freaks who have the talent to dominate in the NFL after receiving the right coaching.

Every draft is chock-full of players who fit one of those aforementioned descriptions. The trick for NFL franchises is to figure out who they are. That said, let's take a look at some potential candidates.

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NFL Draft 2015: 1st-Round Mock Draft and Top Potential Mid-Round Steals