The Many Awards Won by Surrounds Landscaping 

Surrounds has garnered numerous awards and recognition for its work from the Landscape Contractors Association (LCA) and other organizations.

We take great pride in being a member of the LCA of Virginia.  Each year this organization hosts an awards competition that is open to all area landscape companies.  The competition judges both commercial maintenance and residential installation projects in several categories.  The awards categories range from Honorable Mention and Distinction to a highly prestigious Grand award for residential installation.  Surrounds has taken home several of these coveted awards over the years.

Also, each spring, Surrounds participates in one of the local Home and Garden Shows.  We are challenged to build a garden in a confined space in a short period of time.  Our gardens have been recognized as one of the best each year we have participated.

A Collection of Publications Surrounds Landscaping Has Appeared In

Surrounds and it's owners, Howard Cohen and Barry Schneider, have been featured in various home and architecture magazines.  We have also been honored to grace the cover of Home and Design magazine more than once and chosen as their "best of the best" for 2006 receiving a full two page feature story.

If you've walked through Central Park in New York City, visited Dumbarton Oaks, the FDR Memorial in Washington, D.C., or spent an afternoon at Chicago's Millennium Park, then you've experienced landscape architecture.  All of these places were designed by Landscape Architects, a profession that was first recognized in the United States in the mid 1800's.

Landscape architecture was put on the map by Frederick Law Olmsted, who won the design competition for Central Park in 1857 with English architect Calvert Vaux.  Olmsted is credited with opening the first U.S. landscape architecture firm in 1883, a company that designed some of the best-known landscapes in the  country, such as, Boston's Emerald Necklace, the grounds of the U.S. Capitol, the Biltmore Estate in Asheville, NC, Yale University, and the University of California (Berkleley), just to mention a few.

Olmsted's work inspired many others.  In 1899, eleven landscape architects founded the American Society of Landscape Architects, ASLA, a national professional association that today has over 18,000 members.  One of the founding members, and the only woman among them, was Beatrix Farrand (niece of writer Edith Wharton), whose best-known project is the multi-level garden at Washington, D.C.'s Dumbarton Oaks.

ASLA defines landscape architecture as a profession that "encompasses the analysis, planning, design, management, and stewardship of the natural and built environments.  Types of projects include:  residential; parks and recreation; monuments; urban design; streetscapes and public spaces; transportation corridors and facilities; gardens and arboretum; security design; hospitality and resorts; institutional; academic campuses; therapeutic gardens; historic preservation and restoration; reclamation; conservation; corporate and commercial; landscape art and earth sculpture; interior landscapes; and more."

To become a member of this professional organization, landscape architects must graduate from an accredited landscape architecture program, have three years of professional experience, and/or be licensed by a state to practice the profession.  Licensing by most state requires the successful completion of a rigorous test that measures proficiency in areas such as site engineering, design, construction, resource and conservation management, and project administration.

Surrounds is proud that both Landscape Architects, Howard Cohen and Chad Talton, are ASLA members in good standing and are licensed in both Virginia and Maryland.