When you spend valuable time reading a blog, it’s good to know something about who's behind it. This is particularly true in the field of urban agriculture or urban greenscaping.
The blogosphere and mainstream media are both plagued with misleading information, much of it written by hobbyist gardeners with little or no horticultural or scientific education.
Bob Hyland is an urban greenscaping professional with over 30 years experience since his days running a leading interior plantscaping company in Los Angeles. He was a national industry organization speaker, writer and educator during those years.
His current project is the founding of the Center for Urban Greenscaping in New York City. There will be a new website for the center in the near future. The InsideUrbanGreen blog is currently the voice of the center.
Hyland is widely recognized as one of the country’s leading practitioners of modern methods of irrigating containerized plants. His applied research has helped prove conclusively that sub-irrigation employing capillary action is far superior to traditional (but outdated) drench and drain watering.
His prior career with NCR, IBM and Nortel made it natural for him to find technology solutions to container plant maintenance and growth. In particular he discovered planters that employed capillary action sub-irrigation.
This technology, much of it imported from Europe, was available as far back as the 1970's but is only now being discovered in the U.S. consumer market. It is anything but new.
This is what Interiorscape, the leading industry trade magazine, had to say in the Nov-Dec 1983 issue.
“Bob is truly an advanced thinker in our industry. We can think of no other individual who is more familiar and tuned in to advanced technology for interiorscapes.” “Surely, when the history is written of our still evolving industry, Bob will be recognized as the interiorscaper that modernized the industry with irrigation technology, and for that we will owe him a debt.”
Flattering words, but thanks to woefully weak consumer education, the job is still undone. Hopefully this blog will make a contribution for the benefit of all consumers, urbanites in particular.
