…Always Watching…

May 8, 2026 by eflaherty

They are… always watching…

…always watching…

I live in a heavily touristed mountain region. Guests from around the world in 2026 come for an hour or two to see the Jungfrau. The Jungfrau? A mountain?

Then the modern tourists are off to their next destination. Few are aware that this Jungfrau Region has been walked by the likes of Tolkien and Byron. Tolkien and Byron visited when the only means of transport were their own two legs. They walked. They slept. They walked again—over days. For them this region was life-changing. Why, you might ask?

Because, as one put it: “I saw the mountains but the mountains did not see me. I wasn’t there long enough.” Let me interpret. The enormity of these mountains, the enormity of their physical presence is the clue. They have a time frame, nay, a speed of communication that does not fit into today’s tourist drive by.

Byron captured it in Canto 3 of his ‘Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage’. Tolkien captured it in the Rivendel landscape in his ‘Lord of the Rings’. The Jungfrau Region mountains’ mood and communication comes via their microclimate, their clouds, their waterfalls—sunrise, sunset, moonrise over days, weeks, seasons.

They are… always watching…

🍀🎉Celebration Time C’mon!🎉🍀

November 9, 2025 by eflaherty

After decades of American and international landscape architecture and landscape experience, I concluded there was more to landscape architecture than science, horticulture, botany, hardscape and design.

So I started writing landscape stories—a genre nobody has ever heard of. This year I have finished my first series entitled ‘The Landscape Architect’.

The series has six books that trace the career of a landscape architect from university through retirement. In these books, the American protagonist, in his own words, addresses head-on all life’s twists and turns, seeking, as we all do, a healthy balance between personal life and work.

But, that balance can rarely be achieved because the protagonist constantly faces, in the Western European, North African and Middle Eastern places he lives and works, enigmatic challenges from those strange cultures and even stranger landscapes.

🍀!🎉!To celebrate the completion of that series, I offer free to everyone, the e-book version of book three, Yenbo Palms, where the protagonist, suffering from an horrendous family disaster at home in the USA, goes far, far away to work on a huge project in Saudi Arabia. Click on the following safe link to download the FREE Yenbo Palms e-book. https://bit.ly/4qBM3c1