Landscape Management and Maintenance

A Guide to Its Costing and Organization

John Parker, Peter Bryan

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781351923507
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Biological Sciences
• Subtopic: Horticulture
• Index: Biological Sciences

With increased public attention focused on the environment and government legislation on competition, landscape managers are coming under increasing pressure to adopt a more disciplined analytical approach to their work. Landscape Management and Maintenance will help you to set objectives for the use of your land, your manpower and your resources. The authors draw on their wide experience of different types of landscape management to give you clear examples of the methods and alternatives. At each stage they emphasise how to make cost effective choices, and achieve the best value for money.

Chapter 1

LANDSCAPE MAINTENANCE AND MANAGEMENT

The Process of Management

In almost any area of human endeavour, the process of management can be distilled down to:

setting the objectives

planning the operation

putting it into action

monitoring the action and replanning as necessary.

In landscape, the process of putting the plan into action, the work of the day-to-day maintenance, is the part that takes the most time and energy as well as cost. It is also the part that is the most obvious sign of any management at all and so it is not surprising that it tends to dominate our attention, sometimes to the extent that the overall objective, the whole purpose of the exercise, can become obscured or even forgotten.

The efficiency of the day-to-day maintenance is obviously important in terms of cost, but this can be to little real effect if it produces the wrong or undesirable results. Setting the objectives is therefore an essential first step if the manager is going to steer the ship of maintenance in the right course.

Setting the Objectives

The aims of landscape are many and varied, and gardens and open space seldom serve a single purpose. Thus any area of amenity land may be managed to provide:

pleasant views or appearance

screening or shelter

nature conservation

horticultural excellence

botanical variety and education

space for sport or recreation

job-creation or leisure gardening

Many of these purposes will be immediately self-evident from the layout or use of the land but, in many others, the circumstances may have changed since the site was first laid out and so obscured the original purpose. Therefore, whenever the maintenance is being planned or reviewed, it is essential to have a clear idea of the use and functions of the land.

The private landowner will probably have no particular difficulty in deciding what he or she wishes to achieve but, even so, writing down the objectives as a form of maintenance brief will often help to highlight the essentials of the routine work. For public open space the process is rather more complicated. Different individuals or groups will have different ideas and aspirations for the land and these have to be offset against the limitations of funds and even the political aspirations of the local authority – some may favour nature conservation and others seek relative formality or horticultural perfection.

With the potential for a wide range of views, the landscape manager may be tempted merely to fall back on his personal preferences or simply persist with the past and established regimes. However, it is important to try to assess clients’ wishes, even if they are difficult to determine, and so have a firmer base on which to allocate or seek resources. This can be done in a number of ways including:

surveys of the numbers using a park and the ways in which they use it

questionnaires or opinion surveys

meetings with community groups or leaders.

These methods of canvassing users’ opinions all tend to suffer from the disadvantage that the public at large is strongly influenced by what already exists and is unable to envisage any alternative. To some extent this difficulty can be overcome by carefully designing the questionnaire, but there is also advantage in developing experimental areas as public demonstrations.

Although a well-designed survey can give a good indication of public preferences, these preferences may not be those of the client who will have to make the final decision. In the case of most public open space this will normally be an elected council or committee who, while they represent the public, are under a wide range of different pressures for the allocation of resources. One of these pressures may be the professional landscape manager, so there may be a triangle of forces and influences as shown below.

In practice this diagram is a simplification and there are likely to be a number of other interconnecting strands of influence involving local user groups, political associations, trade unions and the many others on the stage of democratic life. These influences can be very frustrating to the landscape manager particularly if he is too committed to imposing his own aspirations onto the landscape. However, the true landscape manager must learn to work just as much, if not more, with people as with plants, and recognize the vital role of educating people’s perceptions of landscape as well as just managing it. This process of education has many facets but the manager should try to present the options as clearly as possible so that the decision-makers can make their judgements on the basis of the best available information. Costs are likely to be foremost in many people’s minds and means of considering value for money are suggested later in this chapter.

Table 1.1 Approximate annual labour inputs for landscape types

	Man-days per year/hectare
Amenity woodland	0 – 5
Extensive parkland	10 – 20
Sports and recreation grounds	30 – 50
Flowering shrubs	100 – 200
Annual bedding	1000 +

Costs and Style of Maintenance

The style and intensity of maintenance will sometimes have a much greater effect on the cost of upkeep than the organization or efficiency of carrying it out. In general terms, the more natural or informal the layout and maintenance, the lower the cost. Conversely the more formal, or removed from nature, the more expensive will be the result. For instance, from the figures shown in Table 1.1 the choice of summer bedding instead of flowering shrubs could increase the costs more than threefold.

The detail or complexity of a site’s layout will also influence its maintenance cost, quite apart from the type of landscape and its degree of formality. Simple layouts are much more easily maintained by powerful machinery with considerably less labour requirements for a given area. More complex layouts, with relatively small spaces, require a much greater use of small equipment and manual labour and are consequently much more expensive to maintain. For example, broad open sweeps of gangmown grass will require approximately 10–20 man-hours/year/hectare, but if the area is divided up into small parts, perhaps including numerous obstructions, and has to be mown with a ‘ride-on’ triple mower, the man-hours per year will be doubled at least.

While they are easier to maintain, the broad simple layouts of gang-mown grass are generally less interesting and attractive and, in particular, have been criticized for providing little in the way of nature conservation. They have aptly been described as ‘green deserts’ and different mowing techniques have been adopted to provide variation in the sward and encourage the establishment of wildflowers. These techniques, which can vary from hay sward management to suspending routine mowing at certain times of the year, have the potential to save time on overall maintenance. However, when compared with the simplicity of regular mowing, they tend to complicate the operations with additional and special machines having to be brought in. As a result the apparent potential for savings are not always achieved and the advantages are a more interesting variation in the swards, seasonal as well as biological, rather than any significant cost saving in terms of total labour inputs (see Table 1.2).

Some economic advantage may arise through the redistribution of the workload throughout the year, particularly if the mowing regime reduces the volume of mowing at the peak of the season. Thus in the example in Table 1.2, the peak summer workload for gang-mowing is reduced by approximately 14 per cent in the second alternative, even though the total work-hours are only slightly reduced.

Much more significant savings could be achieved simply by reducing the total number of cuts, but this would alter the overall character of the site and perhaps not make it suitable for the original use. More ‘natural’ approaches of grazing or hay cropping can also be very cost-effective, and indeed may be more appropriate in rural or informal situations. Unfortunately, the practical difficulties can be significant and include:

• modern agricultural sward management, for high productivity, will not usually provide the diverse swards that are sought for amenity ‘meadows’

• livestock in public areas can frighten the public (e.g. young bullocks); or can be worried by them and, particularly, dogs

• the costs of providing fencing and water can be considerable

• litter and other rubbish in a hay crop can harm cattle and damage machinery.

For these reasons ‘agricultural’ maintenance is sometimes quite difficult to arrange and is often only practised as a means of bringing livestock into country parks and the like for the interest of visitors.

Table 1.2 Simple mowing or variation?

Note:

Extra cost may be involved in raking off grass cuttings in the hay meadow.

Value for Money

Value for money is something that we frequently search for but is very difficult to define in precise terms. More often than not it depends a great deal on personal tastes or attitudes so that universal approval is rare. For instance, relatively few of us can afford or wish to pay...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Introduction
• 1 Landscape maintenance and management
• 2 Routine maintenance and site husbandry
• 3 Arranging the works by contract
• 4 Staffing levels and working hours
• 5 Staff organization and motivation
• 6 Staff welfare and safety
• 7 Machinery and equipment
• 8 Budget and cost control
• 9 A postscript on some future trends of landscape management
• Index