Landscape Architect

Homeowners anxious to dispel the winter blues and change the whole look of their gardens are not alone, local landscape architects, designers and installers say. Americans spent $3.1 billion on landscape design in 2002, according to the American Nursery and Landscape Association (ANLA) and $28.9 billion on landscaping-related services. The days when a few azaleas and a Bradford pear were considered sufficient to give a home's exterior a gracious look are gone. Today's residential landscaping is much more sophisticated, professionals say, aimed both at creating a soothing retreat and an environment where families and friends can gather to socialize and unwind.

John P. Donofrio, a nationally acclaimed landscape architect whose artful combinations of plants, trees, stone and natural elements created what he called "outdoor paintings," died of lung cancer Monday at the Westminster home of his daughter. He was 78 and lived in Mount Washington. Mr. Donofrio, who was born in Geneva, N.Y., was the son of an Italian immigrant father. He grew up in Westminster, where his father established Carroll Gardens, a perennial nursery, on Main Street. After graduating from Westminster High School in 1942, he studied horticulture for a year at the University of Maryland, College Park.

KERMIT THE FROG was right. It's not easy being green, and here's why: Environmentalism is the curmudgeonly brake, grinding to restrain that heady, high-revving, wondrous engine, the economy. Befitting brakemen, the language of us greenies is laced with words like limits, avoid, minimize, reduce, minimize, sacrifice, regulate. Right now, it has to be that way. For all our talk of "win-win" solutions, the faster our modern industrial economy runs, the worse nature usually fares. It's a hell of a thing that a homebuilding recession is among our more reliable protectors of open space; that a drought, cutting runoff from farms and streets, is the only way we clear up Chesapeake waters.

A team of urban designers unveiled a plan yesterday for a town center in Randallstown that they say would integrate the community's strong residential neighborhoods, natural features and history while mitigating the heavy traffic, commercial development and lack of identity that have afflicted the area for years. The product of work by the second Urban Design Assistance Team to visit Baltimore County in two years, the plan calls for the gradual transformation of aging shopping centers and apartment complexes around the intersection of Liberty and Old Court roads into an area combining high-density residential property, new commercial development, offices and a number of civic spaces, such as a community college branch, a YMCA and a theater.

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.

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.

There's a distinct signature behind Roland Park's hillside curving lanes, the picturesque Herring Run Valley and Dundalk's town square. That name, often hidden from much public recognition and understanding, is Olmsted.The senior Frederick Law Olmsted -- and his sons after him -- were visionary landscape architects who shaped much of the geography of pre-1950 Baltimore.Though these designers of hillside, parkland and garden suburb are long dead, their ideals are being kept fresh by a local group "dedicated to the protection, enhancement and appreciation of historic landscapes and green spaces statewide."

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.

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.