Landscaping @ The Vaux

12/08/2011 – Just before Thanksgiving, fall landscape work got underway @ The Vaux. Dirk Jongejan, our chief plant steward (and a landscape architect by trade) says, "when you have 5000 people in a group, not all of them will be healthy, and it's the same with plants."

The original landscape was designed by Steve Shapiro Landscape Architecture, Inc., and five years later the plants have matured. Most thrive, but some do not. Some have grown so much they threaten to crowd out others. So it is that, in consultation with the rest of the Buildings & Grounds Committee, Dirk has supervised Dennis Seven Dees (our landscape contractors) to relocate many larger plants, filling in where failures have occurred, and adding others — pansies in beds at either end of the courtyard for winter color, a new Japanese Snowbell tree near the Savier gate, some new camellias, and many more. With luck, even the Oregon grape around the street trees will improve.