We are a new Pennsylvania public garden, designed between 2018 and 2021, our initial plant installations and large scale sculptures were installed in fall 2020 and we opened doors in May 2021. We are open between May and October. Public access is free by appointment and only a single group at a time gets to visit the gardens and landscape. This was initially driven by the pandemic, but provides visitors a unique experience on a rural landscape and so we are continuing that regime.
Our site is 36 acres comprised of curated garden borders and pot displays, restored meadow and forest. Hence our visitors traverse the site from "gardens to wilds". We are located within a conservation landscape. So designated by the Pennsylvania Department of Conservation and Natural Resources, the Kittatinny Ridge Conservation Landscape is 185 miles of intact forest that extends south to north from our borders with Maryland and New Jersey. This Appalachian ridge is an important migratory flyway slightly inland along the east coast.
We are the founders of this enterprise and have lived on this land for 50 years. More info can be found on our website.
We surveyed our site in 2017 using drone imagery that yielded both property boundaries, physical features and 1 foot contours. This was completed by our consulting engineer. All data was placed into ARCGis Online and Pro. We have subsequently put our landscape architecture design drawings and plant lists into the data base as polygon layers. We are confirming plant locations (garden beds and meadow drifts) with drone imagery that we obtained with flights in March, June, July and October 2023 and supplement with spot locations using FieldMaps. This is being conducted with assistance from a small consulting firm specializing in drone imagery.
As much of our landscape is existing meadow enhancement (eg not seeded but rather 50 year + non-agricultural growth enhanced with drifts of new plants and some plug scale matrix plants) we are using drone imagery to document plant communities as installed and as creeping or contracting communities (existing, introduced and invasive) through the seasons. Our identifications are truthed on the ground and either simply annotated in GIS or using Field Maps. Our intent is to capture plant imagery in progressive growth stages and track the dynamics of native and invasive plant communities.
Most of my experience leveraging this technology came through my career in civil engineering. We are by no means experts in this yet and we are learning some shortcomings through our work. One of these is that drone imagery frankly lacks the resolution we would like to see. We have experimented with flight elevations to some degree, but practical flight heights are yet to give us individual species identification resolution. Quality is certainly adequate for color identification that we can use to outline community size, however. Second, we have yet to invest in sub-meter GPS and are making due with phone grade GPS (+/-20 feet) that we use in concert with drone imagery. This is ok but could be improved for tracking things like: wildlife interactions (eg pollinators, birds, nests, scat, deer browse etc) that are desirable for conservation/ecological restoration monitoring and tracking.
Hope this is adequate (and not too much input). Please let us know how you are doing things and benefits and drawbacks of this technology.
Our website is https://thegardenbower.com and my email is gardenbower@gmail.com insta is @gardenbower
