Landscape maintenance (or groundskeeping) is the art and vocation of keeping a landscape healthy, clean, safe and attractive, typically in a garden, yard, park, Institutional setting or estate. Using tools, supplies, knowledge, physical exertion and skills, a groundskeeper may plan or carry out annual plantings and harvestings, periodic weeding and fertilizing, other gardening, lawn care, snow removal, driveway and path maintenance, shrub pruning, topiary, lighting, fencing, swimming pool care, runoff drainage, and irrigation, and other jobs for protecting and improving the topsoil, plants, and garden accessories.
Groundskeepers may also deal with local animals (including birds, rodents, reptiles, insects, and domestic animals or pets), and create means to attract or repel them, as desired or necessary. A garden may also be designed to include exotic animals, such as a koi pond. In larger estates, groundskeepers may be responsible for providing and maintaining habitat for wild animals.
Famous quotes containing the words landscape and/or maintenance:
“The curfew tolls the knell of parting day,
The lowing herd wind slowly o’er the lea,
The ploughman homeward plods his weary way,
And leaves the world to darkness and to me.
Now fades the glimmering landscape on the sight,
And all the air a solemn stillness holds,
Save where the beetle wheels his droning flight,
And drowsy tinklings lull the distant folds.”
—Thomas Gray (1716–1771)
“It is an injustice that an old, broken, half-dead father should enjoy alone, in a corner of his hearth, possessions that would suffice for the advancement and maintenance of many children.”
—Michel de Montaigne (1533–1592)