Sunday, May 30, 2010

“Reporter's guide to hikes is free to all - Arizona Daily Star” plus 3 more

“Reporter's guide to hikes is free to all - Arizona Daily Star” plus 3 more

Reporter's guide to hikes is free to all - Arizona Daily Star

Posted: 30 May 2010 01:06 AM PDT

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We have the perfect companion for your hiking adventures.

"Hikes Close to Tucson," by the Star's Doug Kreutz, is a free guide that includes a map of Tucson's surrounding mountains with details about outdoor opportunities in each. The brochure also describes four hikes.

The map and mountain descriptions were originally printed in ¡Vamos! Now the presentation is in a convenient format to carry along or to give to visiting friends and family.

Kreutz, whose hiking stories appear twice a month in Saturday's Out & About, spends practically every weekend trekking trails in the mountains, canyons and deserts of Southern Arizona.

The pocket guide is free at Summit Hut, 5045 E. Speedway and 605 E. Wetmore Road, and at the Arizona Daily Star, 4850 S. Park Ave. For additional information e-mail dmeredith2@tucson.com and include hiking guide in the subject line.

You can also find Kreutz's outdoors stories at azstarnet.com/hiking

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Gardeners open gates for tour - Island Packet Online

Posted: 29 May 2010 09:17 PM PDT

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If you go

Admission to the Beaufort Garden Club's Garden a Day is free. Light refreshments will be served and certified Master Gardeners will act as guides and answerquestions. Maps will be available at each of the gardens.

It's like entering another world. Gone are the traffic noises and fuel emissions; birds are singing; the air is scented; you're in a feel-good place.

You're in Newpoint on Lady's Island and you are there to visit the gardens and gardeners who will welcome you to their elegant Lowcountry-style homes for the Beaufort Garden Club's annual Garden a Day tour to be held from 9:30 a.m. to noon June 7-11.

Before exploring the gardens in Newpoint, be sure to visit Beaufort's historic neighborhood, The Point, home to many antebellum residences -- as well as two of the gardens on the tour.

JUNE 7: THE IVYS

501 King St., Beaufort, The Point

The gardens of Diane and Conway Ivy were designed several years ago by good friend and neighbor Frances Parker. The parterre garden is at the rear of the house and centers on a traditional English fountain.

Other focal points in the garden are two antique Japanese garden lanterns, a replica Frank Lloyd Wright garden sprite sculpture, and a view of the massive live oak trees in the adjacent churchyard.

Colorful roses, hydrangeas, jasmine, tea olive, ginger lily, camellias, an Arizona cypress, citrus trees, and bananas give a tropical look to the side gardens. Conway gives Diane and Frances the credit for the design, but he admits to helping with "certain design features."

Diane says that there is much work in a large, varied garden such as theirs, but they are repaid daily with the ever-changing beauty.

JUNE 8: THE PRATTS

310 Federal St., Beaufort, The Point

The garden of Nancy Pratt was designed by Robert Marvin/Howell Beach & Associates and planted five years ago. A swimming pool was placed on the side of the house to afford a view of the distant river. The pool was designed to mimic historic gardens using an arched brick wall and historic brick paving patterns. Small evergreens on each side were used to screen the side garden area; a camellia garden was established in the back; a boxwood garden connects the pool area to the cottage; and a Japanese maple tree is featured in the side entertainment and cooking area.

JUNE 9: THE LANTZES

12 Prescient Ave., Lady's Island, Newpoint

When you pull up your car at the home of Lyn and Robert Lantz, you don't have to look for the house number -- the beautiful fresh flower wreath decorating the front door says "you are there." Fashioned by Lyn using pink Polka Dot plant and Dusty Miller, you soon discover that this is her garden theme, the soft pink of the Polka Dots (Hypoestes phyllostachya) and gray Dusty Millers are punctuating the gardens behind the walls.

Many of the plants that Lyn chooses for her gardens are bought from local farmers markets and friends who share. Lyn selects plants that complement her color scheme, need minimal maintenance and meet the requirements from the amount of sunlight available. Easy to care for plumbago, gaura, pink Knock Out roses, pentas and calladiums marry with purple cone flowers and wine-colored dwarf Loropetalum. A back shaded garden is filled with hosta, coleus and hibiscus.

Lyn thinks of a garden as a work of art and believes that the void is as important as the subjects. She uses a dark hardwood mulch to create a deep void. This takes the place of a grass lawn.

JUNE 9: THE KAYS

25 Mices Road, Lady's Island, Newpoint

At Charlotte and Lawrence Kay's house there are many flowering roses, hydrangeas with huge heads and an old-fashioned "Anthony Waterer" pink spirea that dominates the winding pathways.

This sun-filled courtyard is a mass of color with pentas, ginger lilies, petunias and gaura. Border plantings are of vinca that grow out of newspaper. Kay's neat trick is to spread a thick layer of newspaper, cut holes in it to insert vinca plants, then cover the newspaper with wood mulch. Voila! No weeds, less watering.

JUNE 10: THE DONAHUES

2 Tidewater Way, Lady's Island, Newpoint

The very formal home and garden of Barbara and Donald Donahue, with its life-size Italian-style statue, spectacular fountain and Boxwood hedges, is in keeping with the plantings of citrus, orange, tangerine and Meyer lemon.

Adding color contrast to the continental scene are Knock Out roses, pink and white gauras and white mandevillas. Walk the gravel paths to see stunning urns and an obelisk. There is a small piece of grass. Barbara says that they are in the process of getting rid of all grass, and they've limbed up the trees to make an under-tree canopy. It's like being in an outdoor cathedral, she told me.

JUNE 10: THE PORTERS

14 Waterside Drive, Lady's Island, Newpoint

Arlene and Richard Porter have been but three years in their Lady's Island home but you'd never know it from the looks of their gardens that extend from the house front to the garage in back.

Highlights are the mature hydrangeas that began as small cuttings from her mother's shrub in Delaware.

The hydrangeas are keeping company with lace cap hydrangeas, Angel's Trumpets and Mahonia fortunei.

The Porter gardens are heavily shaded; where there are islands of sun there's guara, agapanthus, ligularia and ginger lilies.

JUNE 11: THE CROWTHERS

18 Old Ferry Cove, Lady's Island, off Brickyard

There's almost an acre of garden on Factory Creek where Nancy and Carroll Crowther live. Nancy has created a formal garden in the front with a more informal one out back.

There's something blooming year-round and producing fruit from citrus, fig and kumquat trees; Nancy makes a kumquat jelly in the winter. She's an expert on grafting and has created many of the old-fashioned camellias and the hydrangeas. These are in wonderful colors and although she's not counted, Nancy believes that there are upward of 100 hydrangeas in her yard. She plans to demonstrate grafting techniques to visitors.

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Redrawing flood maps proves challenging - Nashville Tennessean

Posted: 30 May 2010 12:09 AM PDT

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When Ben Climer bought his Franklin home in 1997, it wasn't in the Harpeth River's 100-year flood plain. Ten years later, after the federal government updated the city's flood maps, it was.

But no one told Climer.

The retiree, who lives in the Fieldstone Farms subdivision, says that if someone had notified him, he would have bought flood insurance, which would have helped him recoup his losses after the Harpeth swallowed one of his cars, his water heater and other items four weeks ago.

Typically a mortgage lender will require a property in the 100-year flood plain to carry flood insurance, but Climer had paid off his mortgage by the time the maps changed.

"It should be someone's responsibility to notify the homeowner," he said.

With the Federal Emergency Management Agency and Metro officials already working to redraw Nashville's flood maps for the first time since 2001, more people could find themselves living or working in flood plains.

The results can be a no-win proposition for local governments. Some residents might be annoyed if they are included in the flood zone, typically requiring them to buy flood insurance. Others may be left out and yet still vulnerable to flooding.

Creating a new flood map isn't as simple as measuring how far the waters reached in early May.

Metro stormwater chief Tom Palko said the 13-plus inches of rain over those two days clearly exceeded what one would expect of a 100-year storm, which has a 1 percent chance of happening in any given year. Some people are even calling what happened in early May a 500-year storm.

"The big misconception is that the flood changes the flood plain, and it doesn't," said Palko, assistant director of Metro Water Services, adding that the existing maps predicted pretty accurately which areas would flood.

The remapping process actually started in October, when engineers from FEMA's regional office in Atlanta met with Palko and other Metro officials. Laura Algeo, a civil engineer with the agency, said the process typically takes two to three years.

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MTA Subway Map Gets a Makeover; It's All About ... - msnbc.com

Posted: 28 May 2010 07:42 AM PDT

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Changes at the MTA are really on track now.

There will be a new subway map dotting New York City starting next month, says the Metropolitan Transportation Authority.

The new design, intended to simplify the map and improve readability, depicts Manhattan taller and 30 percent wider than the former map, while Staten Island's size has been halved. The other three boroughs will grow as well, although not as significantly as Manhattan, because the "service guide" at the bottom of the map has been eliminated.

The intent, says the MTA, is to better illustrate Manhattan's sometimes overwhelming subway network.

"In its desire to be complete and provide a great deal of information, it took away from some of the clarity you would have with a simpler map," MTA chairman Jay Walder told the Times of the old map.

A million and a half copies of the new map will be distributed in June. A simplified version of the map will appear inside subway trains themselves, without details such as neighborhood names and ferry and bus lines.

The old MTA map, which has become a New York icon, had "humanity," opined Eddie Jabbour, designer of Kick Map, an alternative subway map for the iPhone, but "the MTA map is an artifact of its time, and its time was 1979," he told the Times.

This is the first major overhaul to the map in 20 years.

See a .pdf of the map here.


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