A friend of mine come over to see Yordie’s Zen Garden a couple weeks ago. He had never been there before and he was very surprised to learn that Japanese gardens are a passion of mine. He also said he was in awe which really made me feel good, but then he went on to say he thought I should do this kind of work in Second Life for money. At first I didn’t think I could make money at doing SL landscaping but he insisted.

Last week, I decided to open Yordie Sands Landscaping Service, an inword business. Initially, I plan to focus on the two environment where I have the greatest interest, namely Asian and tropical landscapes. However, I may add other settings, especially the Northwest.

If you examine my style of landscaping you’ll usually find a strong emphasis on forestation. In the case of my Zen garden, the garden is on the edge of the forest and my notion is that the garden is carved out of the forest. I’ve always enjoyed the forest and find endless fascination there; although I always seem to look for places to nest and build a home. hehe.

I’ve been landscaping or more correctly, learning to landscape since about May of 2007. I even started writing about my gardening experiences back in 2008. Yordie’s Zen Garden at Nishijima is actually my second extended Zen garden. I’ve created four other full gardens, my first was adjacent to the Zen Retreat in Rieul. Next I landscaped gardens at Gyaltsen and the second extended garden at Chodron. I’ve also done some tropical projects.

When you start on your first SL landscaping project you’ll have to confront the many unique problems that make all SL landscaping a not-so-obvious process, problems like: transparent-on-transparent bleedthru, the rollie-pollie world of terraforming, and just finding appropriate trees, plants, grasses, rocks, water features and other elements for your landscaping theme. No worries, I’ll be happy to setup a free consultation to prospective customers to discuss those issues and how I might help.

Anyway, I want to thank my friend (you know who you are, SS) for giving me the idea and confidence to move forward in this new direction.