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Each lecture is approximately 1.5 hrs and includes handouts.
Christine Froehlich is an expert problem solver. Her lectures are inspiring - packed with practical, hands-on advice everyone can use to achieve the wow factor. Her designs reflect thoughtful solutions to design dilemmas that plague homeowners.
Powerpoint Lectures: 2021
By Christine Froehlich
Each lecture is approximately 1.5 hrs. and includes handouts, plant lists and tips.
1. Imperfectly Perfect: How to Garden In Impossible Places
Every landscape comes with its own set of challenges. Success comes about when you figure out how to make it work in spite of them. At first glance, some sites can seem impossible, but damp boggy areas, dry shade, root ridden soil, deer and other planting nightmares don’t have to stop you from having a beautiful garden. Matching the plants to the site is the key to ensuring an attractive, sustainable landscape.
Garden designer Christine Froehlich has done a fair share of banging her shovel against rocks, roots, clumpy clay soil and trying to figure out what plants have a chance of surviving. Close observation of plants in their natural habitat and willingness to experiment have played an important role in her work. She’ll take you through the process of identifying the limitations of a site, working with it and choosing the appropriate plants. Her slide lecture shows the transformation of a variety seemingly impossible spots into beautiful and sustainable landscapes.
2.Gardening With What You Have
If you’d like to improve your garden or landscape, it takes three things – your eyesight, a little imagination, and a plan of action. Many homeowners who want to create new gardens or improve existing ones struggle because they lack design experience and don’t know where to start. In this slide lecture, Christine will show you how to evaluate your existing landscape and how to correct common problems – from plant choices and siting to design – by leading you, with before and after images, through some of the projects she’s worked on. You’ll leave with plenty of tips for creating the gardens that you want by working with what you have.
3. Flash with Foliage
If you want less work and more beauty, stop relying on flowers for flash. Instead, go for colorful foliage that deciduous shrubs offer. With so many new little beauties to choose from, you’ll find they provide long-lasting color and texture flowers can’t compete with.
In this slide lecture, designer Christine Froehlich will show you how to liven things up with a variety of shrubs she’s planted in her own garden and those she’s designed.
4. Landscape Drawing On The Fly (workshop)
Drawing an entire landscape plan can be time consuming and costly. Sometimes the size of the job doesn’t warrant the cost or time involved in drawing a plan. Perhaps you’re having trouble coming up with an idea that will suit the site. Instead of struggling, find out how to knock out quick ideas on your computer or do it by hand on tracing paper. Garden designer Christine Froehlich will demonstrate her step-by-step method that employs two quick drawing methods that involve drawing over your photograph and choosing shapes that work.
5.Working With The Environment
Although the prospect of creating a design and choosing plants is exciting, this should be the last step in a design process. It’s worth it to spend time learning as much as possible about the site - working with its natural elements is the only way to guarantee plant success and a design that is complimentary to its surroundings. There’s not much you can do about changing the site you have, but there are plenty of ways to work with it. This slide/lecture will take you through the steps of doing a site analysis, choosing tough plants, amending the soil, camouflaging ugly views, removing trees, and adding screening for privacy and windbreak.
6. Designing With Woody Plants
Woody plants comprise the building blocks of any landscape design. They function in a variety of ways – framing views, directing the eye, providing privacy and sanctuary for wildlife. Choosing the most effective specimens and knowing how to put them together in a pleasing design is no day at the beach!
This slide lecture breaks it down into manageable pieces – providing examples of shapes, foliage, texture, and flowers. Principles that govern your design are illustrated in a variety of gardens so that you can learn to create effective, dynamic combinations. You’ll find out how to make a plan, avoid planting mistakes and create an enduring sustainable landscape.
A Passion For Gardening
I’m a passionate gardener. I love working outside and can’t imagine life without a garden. It’s been my vocation, passion, source of entertainment and comfort since I first put my shovel into the soil 40 years ago. My horticultural career has morphed through several stages, each one taking me to another level. After studying art in college, I got interested in plants when I began collecting houseplants. I quickly got hooked into world of gardening, inside and out.
My Training
Most of my training has been hands on. I got my first gardening job in Maymont Park, a public garden in Richmond, Virginia and a few years later, landed a position as the head gardener on a private estate in Wilton, Connecticut. After years of honing my skills on the job and getting further training at the New York Botanic Garden, I established my own garden design and maintenance company, which I operated for 30 years in Fairfield County and Kent, CT. I maintained and redesigned a variety of small suburban lots, modest rural properties, and spacious country estates.
A Passion For Problem Solving
I saw the same hodgepodge of garden problems on a routine basis - struggling plants, inadequate or no apparent design, overcrowding, poor siting, improper pruning and general lack of maintenance. In short, lots of underused plants, missed opportunities and unhappy homeowners.
The waste of resources drove me nuts, but as I worked with some of these homeowners I got excited about showing them how to use what they already had more advantageously. I got really passionate about the problem-solving aspect of gardening. It wasn’t until I moved to upstate New York with my husband in 2003, that I saw an opportunity to share more of my experiences through writing, teaching and consulting.
Life As A Freelancer
I began freelancing for a variety of gardening magazines; Fine Gardening, American Gardener, Country Gardens, American Nurseryman, The Upstate Gardeners Journal and Rochester Magazine. Writing spurred me on to develop lectures and classes I offered locally at the Rochester Civic Garden Center, a nonprofit horticultural education center in Rochester, NY. In 2007, I was hired as their executive director and worked for 10 years to develop the education programs further.
Executive Director
Throughout my time as director and instructor, I found that most people are hungry for horticultural knowledge they can use in their own garden. When I retired from that job in 2017, I stepped up my game as a garden communicator, designer and consultant. I began a monthly blog – Gardening With What You Have, as a way of sharing information with other gardeners, homeowners and anyone else who wants to know how to create a more exciting landscape.
garden design, sustainability