Concentrating most of your landscape maintenance around the beauty strip is a slippery slope. For best results you must cover the entire site, not just the high-profile areas like entrances and club houses.
Forestry beauty strips
I first read about beauty strips in environmental books as an undergraduate. Imagine driving though forested areas on a sunny day with your roof top down. Your girlfriend is holding your hand and your favourite tunes are playing on your car stereo. Next, it’s time to answer nature’s call so you stop and run into the woods. Since you’re shy, you venture deeper into the forest. Suddenly you see a lot of daylight. How can that be, you ask yourself. So you go towards the light and you discover yet another clear cut. Poor trees! Yes, you just found yourself inside a “beauty strip”.
Landscape beauty strip
In landscaping, beauty strips refer to high-profile areas like main entrances, club houses and car ramps. This was in my head as we walked a site today with unhappy strata members. They are looking to change companies and soliciting quotes. And a blog post was born.
Proper strata landscape maintenance dictates zero discrimination. Walking and maintaining the entire site periodically is the only way to go. Concentrating your efforts only on main entrances and club houses is a bad idea because the rest of the site will eventually “burn”.
Beyond the beauty strip
At this particular site the club house area was nicely cultivated and nearby beds had deep edges. Perfect! But what about the rest of the site? One word: horrific. I repeat, exclusively working the beauty strip will cost you future contract renewals.
Obvious deficiencies
- winter damaged plants not addressed
- weeds and leafiness in back corners
- tons of garbage inside shrubs and on walkways
- broken tree branches
- requests not completed
- dead branches in trees
- pruning not completed on shrubs
- deep edges missing
- dead cedars obstructing exits
Conclusion
If you expect to renew your landscape maintenance contracts, I suggest covering the entire site. Concentrating on high-profile entrance areas and club houses will inevitably burn down the rest of your site. Shooting for zero discrimination is best.
please continue to write and work on your website