My largest and most impressive installation was centered at Sweetser Circle, a very high traffic and once barren mass of land, that is the nexus of entry into the city proper. I was honored and moved to be able to provide the experience of beautiful landscape architecture, not only to the city but also to the countless commuters and passer-by people that once had nothing to look forward to or become inspired by as they rolled along this nightmarish result of state infrastructure.

As I worked I smiled and dreamed of the impression I would leave for all to share. I saw my work living beyond my lifetime, providing pleasure and inspiring pride for the future people of the city. My concept was simple and requiring little maintenance and natural resource: a semi- circle of formal Green Gem boxwoods numbering the years from which the city was established to the present. Four Dwarf Alberta spruces in wrought iron urns on pedestals proudly stood guard, breaking the rhythm of the formal green wall, representing four pillars of community structure; Honor, Loyalty, Service, and Leadership, each flanked with a pair of Spartan Pillar junipers. Beneath each of these urns lay a sarcophagus, a one cubic foot chamber containing coins dating from the time of the city’s incorporation as well as the present, and sealed mementos and articles describing the project and its contemporary history and controversy. I hand built, mortared, individually planted, and hand carved the land sculpture of this installation. I painstakingly laid and anchored landscape fabric upon the ground to provide the base for stone and mulch designs I worked so diligently drawing with a stake and markers to then install hundreds of feet of edging upon. Everything was composed and measured precisely in order to achieve a rhythm parallel to that of traffic. During the winter holiday season I provided a donation of decorative accents for each urn. I installed citrus and fruits representing prosperity and the bounty of the community, just as communities and households of our founding settlers had done long ago.

If you go to this area of the city today you will find only a center installation of a welcome sign and acres of irrigated sod. If you look closely along the edge of the circle you can see the remnants of my stolen work. I was robbed of my time, love, and passion because of political ignorance and the hindering furor of dying 19th and 20th century systems of urban planning.

I have on my side, honor and memory. Each of the pillars I erected along this site represented my sacrifice to a time and place I cared enough to give of my heart. I hold with me the great words of John Ruskin as a lesson bearing heavy consternation to the thieves of my gift as reassurance that history will be the judge:

…When we build, let us think that we build forever. Let it not be for present delight, nor for present use alone; let it be such work as our descendants will thank us for, and let us think, as we lay stone on stone, that a time is to come when those stones will be held sacred because our hands have touched them, and that men will say as they look upon the labor and wrought substance of them, "See! This our fathers did for us."

…Was it done with enjoyment – was the carver happy while he was about it? It may be the hardest work possible, and the harder because so much pleasure was taken in it; but it must have been happy too, or it will not be living.

…You cannot get the feeling by paying for it – money will not buy life. I am not sure even that you can get it by watching and waiting for it. It is true that here and there a workman may be found who has it in him, but he does not rest contented in the inferior work – he struggles forward into an Academician; and from the mass of available handicraftsmen the power is gone – how recoverable I know not: this only I know, that all expense devoted to sculptural ornament, in the present condition of that power, comes literally under the head of Sacrifice for the sacifice’s sake, or worse…All the short, and cheap, and easy ways of doing that whose difficulty is its honor – are just so many new obstacles in our already encumbered road. They will not make one of us happier or wiser – they will extend neither the pride of judgement nor the privilege of enjoyment. They will only make us shallower in our understandings, colder in our hearts, and feebler in our wits. And most justly. For we are not sent into this world to do anything into which we cannot put our hearts. We have certain work to do for our bread, and that is to be done strenuously; other work to do for our delight, and that is to be done heartily: neither is to be done by halves or shifts, but with a will; and what is not worth this effort is not to be done at all…and he who would form the creations of his own mind by any other instrument than his own hands, would, also, if he might, give grinding organs to Heaven’s angels, to make their music easier. There is dreaming enough, and earthiness enough, and sensuality enough in human existence without our turning the few glowing moments (of life and passion into wasted effort)…And since our life must at best be a vapor that appears for a little time and then vanishes away, let it at least appear as a cloud in the height of Heaven, not as the darkness that broods over the blast of (industry and convenience).