Landscape Architect

A landscape architect and planning expert said last night he finds no compelling reason to build a trash transfer station on 17 acres in Elkridge and has many more reasons why the plan should be rejected by the Howard County Zoning Board.Browning-Ferris Industries proposes to build the transfer station on Cemetery Lane, where the waste-management company operates a recycling center. At the transfer station, trash would be consolidated and prepared for transport to a landfill.Last night, attorneys for opponents of the transfer station presented Mark Wendland, a senior associate and landscape architect for LDR International in Columbia, as an expert witness to refute BFI's claim that the proposed site is suitable for the transfer station.

It's nearly March. Your New Year's resolutions were pitched out weeks ago. But a vow you made last August, the one inspired by sweeps of lavender and gold- and red-fleckedgrasses along roads, by clusters of Shasta daisies and china-blue salvia in friends' yards -- that vow remains.You resolved to have more than sod and sidewalk on your little corner of the earth in 1997. You resolved to have a beautiful garden. And now is the perfect time to plan it. The problem is, you don't know an aspidistra from a hole in the ground.

The Bradford pear was born between the baby boomers and Generation X and reared in the suburbs. Now middle age is hitting with a vengeance.This lovely, low-maintenance tree, created by government arborists in the early 1960s, is known for the shock of white blossoms that coat its limbs in the spring.But, as it ages, the Bradford is also becoming known for something else."They can fall apart at any time," said Bob Rouse, staff arborist for the National Arborist Association. "You never can be sure.

The plan to encourage Baltimoreans to walk or bike from Leakin Park in the Northwest corner of the city to Camden Yards without having to cross a street may be stymied if money is not found to fully fund the project.The $8 million Gwynns Falls Trail park unveiled last night at the Baltimore Museum of Art has funding locked up only for the first three miles in the 14-mile project. The next two phases, scheduled to be completed in five years, are up in the air because a federal grant may not become available after the first phase is done.

ON THE MOVE* Alliance Mortgage Funding Inc. said Duane E. Giles has joined the firm's Baltimore office as a residential lending officer. Mr. Giles will work with homebuyers in his hometown of Catonsville and in Howard and Carroll counties.* Bozzuto Landscaping Co. of Greenbelt appointed Scott Smith enhancement manager and landscape architect. Mr. Smith was previously a landscape architect at Walt Disney World in Orlando. A subsidiary of the Bozzuto Group, the landscaping firm has offices in Columbia, Gaithersburg, Upper Marlboro and Leesburg, Va.* Century 21's Mid-Atlantic Division named Debra Chandler director of the firm's Central Atlantic Region, formed by combining the National Capital and Chesapeake Regions.

Dale Edwin LloydLandscape architectDale Edwin Lloyd, a landscape architect whose design expertise was applied to many health and educational institutions, died June 8 of congestive heart failure at his Towson residence. He was 78.Mr. Lloyd retired in 1987 from Lloyd-Smith Associates, which he established with Richard Smith in 1958. After his retirement, the firm was dissolved and his interest sold to Mr. Smith.Mr. Lloyd moved to Baltimore in 1953 from Cincinnati, where he was a city planner, and went to work for the old Baltimore County Department of Education and Recreation.

TC Welcome to Baltimore, Hon!What could say that better than a giant crab sculpture in the middle of Rash Field? Or a simulated row of brick houses with marble steps along Light Street? How about miniature replicas of Fort McHenry, the B&O Railroad Museum and the city markets, right by the waterfront?Architects and planners have all sorts of ideas for improving Baltimore's famed Inner Harbor shoreline. But they seem to agree on one thing: When it comes right down to it, there really isn't much of Baltimore in the Inner Harbor.

Artists and landscape architects from around the country will compete this spring to design ways to enliven a six-mile greenway stretching along the Gwynns Falls from Baltimore's Inner Harbor to Leakin Park.Mayor Kurt L. Schmoke announced that three artist-led design teams have been selected from among 19 bidders to participate in a two-month competition to develop plans for public amenities for the Gwynns Falls Greenway.The Greenway competition is the third in as many months involvingprime public land in Baltimore.

BUSINESS PEOPLETourism council names new board of directorsHoward County Tourism Council Inc. has announced its 1994 board of directors: William Petry Jr. of Courtyard by Marriott, president; Jan Morrison of Oakland, vice president; Mary Toth of Howard County Center for the Arts, treasurer; and Jean Moon of Patuxent Publishing, secretary.Directors are Ellie Butehorn of Historic Savage Mill; Doris Donaldson of the Howard County Fair Association; Regina Ford of Turf Valley Hotel and Country Club; Joanne Moroney, ex officio, of the Howard County Recreation and Parks Department; Tom Owens of Cider Mill Farm; Patrick Patterson of PJ's in Ellicott City; Sonja Sanders of The Mall in Columbia; Margaret Smith, board liaison, of Margaret Smith Gallery; Richard Story, ex officio, of Howard County Economic Development; Dan Wendel, of the Ellicott City Business Association; Ed Williams, of the Ellicott City B & O Railroad Museum; Kelly Yesko of Merriweather Post Pavilion; and a representative of the Howard County Chamber of Commerce.

Baltimore's Gwynns Falls Greenway could be the site of the city's first "Growing Center," a supernursery and educational facility where ecologists-in-training could grow flowers and produce for distribution to 20 communities along the trail.Or it could be the setting for "Four Seasons Festivals" featuring historical, ecological and cultural events designed to attract visitors from throughout the region.Or it could be a design laboratory for high school students, who would help create footbridges, benches and other amenities as a way of developing a sense of stewardship.

As a Towson elementary school student, Keith Bowers took a field trip to Columbia during the 1960s to watch the town being built and to walk on one of the trails that wind beneath an overpass. Decades later, the 48-year-old landscape architect, founder and president of Biohabitats Inc., is looking at ways to protect, conserve and restore Columbia's land, streambeds and woodlands as downtown becomes more populated. Bowers, whose ecological restoration design, planning and assessment business is part of the downtown design team that General Growth Properties Inc. has put together, led a public forum Wednesday to introduce his company.

Elliott Russell, a retired landscape architect who had worked for a Baltimore engineering firm for more than three decades, died of respiratory failure Monday at Howard County General Hospital. He was 89. Mr. Russell was born and raised in Brooklyn, N.Y. He earned a bachelor's degree in forestry in 1944 from Utah State University. He was drafted into the Army and served in the Quartermaster Corps for two years. He was discharged in 1946. Mr. Russell owned a landscaping business and nursery for several years in Bridgeport, Conn.

If you ask Alan Ward what's lacking in downtown Columbia, the landscape architect and urban designer working on the Town Center master plan will tell you that it's pedestrians, along with a sense of connection and vitality as you walk. "What's missing is an urban, residential environment," Ward, a principal with Sasaki Associates Inc., said in an interview last week. "There are pockets of residential, but it doesn't add up to the street life like you'd expect in an urban neighborhood. I think the expectations are to make it more lively and to make it more of a destination."

On Wednesday, General Growth Properties will host the first speaker in a series of public forums to introduce its design and planning team, which is working on the master plan for downtown Columbia. The forum will be held at 7:30 p.m. in the GGP Building, 10275 Little Patuxent Parkway, preceded at 7 p.m. by coffee and dessert. The first speaker, Alan Ward, is a landscape architect and urban designer at Sasaki Associates Inc. who has more than 30 years of experience. His accomplishments include acting as principal landscape architect responsible for winning the international design competition to develop the master plan for the site of the 2008 Beijing Olympics and for the development of Reston Town Center in Virginia.

On March 5, General Growth Properties will host the first speaker in a series of public forums to introduce its design and planning team, which is working on the master plan for downtown Columbia. Alan Ward is a landscape architect and urban designer at Sasaki Associates Inc., with more than 30 years of experience. His accomplishments include acting as principal landscape architect responsible for winning the international design competition to develop the master plan for the site of the 2008 Beijing Olympics and for the development of Reston Town Center in Virginia.

Carol Oppenheimer describes the garden in front of the old courthouse building in Towson as "magical," so visually arresting that the first time she saw it she nearly caused a car accident swerving to see it closer. To Elyssa Baxter, it's the antithesis of the grass and concrete expanses that ordinarily fill public outdoor spaces. And it reminds Holly Sefter of the lush public squares that have made Savannah, Ga., famous. But a consultant is recommending that changes be made to the favorite spot of many Towson gardeners, residents and county workers - just a year after a team of planners recommended that the garden be plowed over.

The cleverest part of a redesigned street-end park in Eastport is one nobody will see. The city of Annapolis, a charitable foundation and a landscape architect are working together on building an underground drainage system that stops dirty rainwater from flowing into Spa Creek by filtering it and channeling the results to irrigate the tree and shrubs on the tiny site. Once construction is finished next month, said Jim Urban, the landscape architect who is also owner of Urban Trees and Soils, visitors will hardly know the park is a rainwater management facility.

The fence is, at least by appearance, unremarkable. It's just a 6-foot-tall construction of plain wooden boards, running between a garden center and one Baltimore County backyard. But it has been the subject of more than 500 pages of correspondence and legal filings, a half-dozen government hearings and three court rulings - all part of a conflict that after more than a decade remains unsettled. "It still hasn't been resolved?" Baltimore County Councilman Joseph Bartenfelder, one of the first county officials involved in the conflict, asked last week when told that the matter was still in dispute.

John Philip Gutting, a landscape architect who was an early promoter of planting local indigenous species to create natural settings, died of a heart attack Dec. 31 at his Church Hill home. He was 63. He was hailed in Native Plants magazine in 2003 as a "regional pioneer in the use of native plants for more than 30 years." He was a proponent of protecting natural surroundings. "John was a committed environmentalist with an unequaled passion for trying to create landscape vistas that were beautiful, inviting, unique and true to the idea of using native species that belonged in their place," said Don Jackson, the director of operations at St. John's College in Annapolis, where Mr. Gutting had completed several projects.

Since the Archdiocese of Baltimore declared its intent last spring to demolish a 100-year-old midtown apartment building to better show off its famed Basilica of the Assumption, local groups have taken sides. Preservationists rushed to protect the Rochambeau, a seven-story Renaissance Revival structure whose absence, they say, would forever mar one of Baltimore's most historic corridors. Business and cultural institutions, meanwhile, have lobbied for the church and the mighty tourist draw of its restored basilica, a historical gem in its own right.