Landscaping and greening engineering is the engineering of building garden landscape and green space. Landscaping and greening provides people with a place to rest, enjoy cultural entertainment, get closer to the natural environment and satisfy their desire to return to nature. Landscaping and greening refers to a type of environment building engineering including garden construction in a green space of a garden city and scenic spots, such as garden construction engineering, earthwork engineering, hill piling engineering, water management engineering, paving engineering, greening engineering, etc. It aims at expressing garden art with engineering technology, and ensuring the engineering products on the ground go well with the garden landscape.
Based on the general knowledge, it should be said that landscaping and greening engineering and civil engineering projects are to some extent similar. The similarity here refers to the same building materials, such as reinforcing bars, cement, wood, sand and stone used in building small scenery and landscape structures like pavilion, gallery, garden path, rail, wall, pavement, and revetment. For this reason, they use the same construction specifications, too. Therefore people usually say civil engineering is part of landscaping and greening engineering. But the two, though they have similarity, are largely different, or even completely different in some areas. It is exactly these differences that create the unique characteristics of landscaping and greening engineering.
1.Some of the objects of landscaping and greening engineering are living organisms. People use colorful plants, flowers, trees and grass to realize good combination, and they use various trees to clean the air, reduce dust and temperature, achieve sound insulation, and create beautiful living environment. Therefore, this is a unique industry originated and different from forestry and other planting industries.
2.“It takes three minutes to plant, and seven years to maintain.” Planting is temporary, and maintenance is long-term. Only by continuous caring and maintaining can we ensure the living and proper growth of various plants, otherwise the special requirements and results cannot be achieved. This means that after the landscaping and greening engineering project is completed, maintenance plan and relevant investment should follow.
3.Landscaping and greening engineering pursues artistic beauty. If any architecture would express beauty, then landscaping and greening engineering focuses more on art in terms of small landscape, plant allocation, and classical building, and the result should offer an exceptional sense of beauty. This is difficult to achieve in some designs, and that is where engineers and technicians come in. Their creative work can make possible the best design ideas and prospects. For example, construction of piling rockery and building yellow-stone revetment according to the same blueprint at two neighboring sites can yield highly different results in terms of artistic effects, expression and viewers’ feelings. This means we need professional and in-depth requirements concerning the artistic beauty of landscaping.
4.Besides large park construction projects, landscaping and greening engineering generally appears in the form of support to construction project. The size is small and work is scattered, which makes it hard to supervise and manage. Under such circumstance, there are two common phenomena. The first one is that a few owners believe that nothing serious will happen in landscaping and greening engineering, and that the worst case would be a few trees dying, so they limited their investment to an extremely small amount, and whoever offers the lowest price will win the bid. This idea goes well with the social practice of “low bid” for a time but causes serious problems to quality control and supervision of projects. The second one is that due to the small and scattered work arrangement of long-term project, some low-quality construction companies may take advantage and undermine the work, making it hard to fully control the quality of the project.
5.The prices of plants used in landscaping and greening engineering can fluctuate in the market, and are difficult to predict. China now has no unified standards for labor quota of planting, and local places have different calculation methods. Some people believe that landscaping and greening engineering project has high profit and low risk, and this belief gives rise to the phenomenon of “taking the title, not the responsibility”. The result is that once these people win the bid, they only pay a portion of management fee to the bidding company, and allow them to organize and manage the construction on their own. When the construction begins, the “five major managers” show up late at construction site. Some of them even do not know anything about the basic specifications, procedures and information about the construction. How can such construction meet the quality control targets of landscaping and greening engineering? In addition, a few construction companies would collect a portion of fee after winning the bid and then outsource the project to a contractor, which will cause serious problems in terms of achieving the quality target of landscaping and greening engineering.
As people live a better life and have higher requirements of environmental quality, landscaping and greening in the city need to be diversified. Both the size and the scope of the project need to be bigger. Various engineering areas have introduced high technologies, such as large optical-mechanical-electric fountain, new pavement material, new construction methods, computer management during construction, etc. All these bring new challenges to people who carry out this undertaking.
