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Checking in – Southwest Washington Medical Center, Vancouver, WA

Friday, February 3rd, 2012

The Southwest Washington Medical Center Parking Structure, Vancouver, WA

Back in the Fall of 2005, we were just starting to hang planters off the side of buildings. We had recently acquired Flower Framers of Cincinnati, a manufacturer of window boxes and other hanging planters. That led to the insight that we could probably do the same type of product for larger commercial applications.  The planters at the Southwest Washington Medical Center, installed in 2005,  were one of our first attempts at the design and fabrication of large, custom hanging boxes.  The photograph taken above, and most following, were taken by our sales manager John Denman during a visit to Vancouver, WA in December, 6 years after the product was installed.

Custom hanging planters, taken in the Fall of 2011

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Posted in Company News, Hanging Planters, Health Care, Parking Structures, Products | No Responses »
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New England Grows ’12 in Boston

Thursday, February 2nd, 2012

Tournesol Siteworks is at this year’s New England Grows in Boston again this year, exhibiting with our distributor partner Bisco Irrigation.

We’re showing off our entire range of products at the show, including planters, living wall and trellis products, as well as our newest additions, Deck & Paver Supports and Site Furnishings.  Come visit us during the show at Booth #2223, or see a few of the photos below for show highlights!

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Additional support for our engineering group – Hernan Espinal

Thursday, January 26th, 2012

Tournesol Siteworks is pleased to welcome our newest employee, Hernan Espinal. He’s joined us as a manufacturing technician in our engineering group.  His job is to make life easier for our production personnel by configuring our manufacturing space more efficiently, building fixtures and arranging equipment around the shop. He’ll be contributing to our quality efforts by documenting our standard operating procedures, as well as acting as a pair of eyes on the shop floor to look out for problems. Finally, Hernan will be helping to make Tournesol a safer place to work by participating in our safety committee, conducting training, and reworking processes to ensure that they don’t pose a threat to our production crews. He’s the first person to have this position at the company – we’d looked for over 4 months to find someone with his set of skills.

Hernan is fluent in both Spanish and English, growing up in Honduras then moving to Northern California.  He recieved his high school equivalency at Sequoia High School in Redwood City, CA, then went on to study industrial engineering in Honduras.  After returning to the US, he worked as a process operator and senior manufacturing technician at several local pharmaceutical companies.  He lives in Union City, CA, and has 3 children.

Welcome, Hernan – we’re delighted to have you as part of the team!

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Introducing the next generation VGM Modular living wall – VGM3

Thursday, January 19th, 2012

The new VGM3 module

Tournesol Siteworks has been working closely with our partner Elmich in Singapore to bring you the next generation of VGM modular living wall – the VGM3.  For those who have worked with VGM in the past, you’ll find the great features that made VGM a superior living wall solution (availability in 4″ and 8″ soil profiles, ease of removal/installation, open planting space, recycled materials) are all still there.

We’re not content to rest on our laurels – we want the best system to be better, at a lower overall installed cost!

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Posted in Company News, Green Building Products, Green Wall | No Responses »
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New 2012 Commercial List Pricing now available – including new products, lower VGM pricing

Thursday, January 12th, 2012

The cover, showing our new TWIG bench

Welcome to 2012!  We took the holidays off (from posting on the blog, anyway), but are excited to be in the new year.

We’ve just published our new 2012 commercial price list. This is typically the price that contractors will pay, and the price that is available through our distributor network.

The pricelist includes several important things for 2012:

Please contact your salesperson for a copy, or simply send us an email here. We can either email a pdf copy or mail you a hard copy – your choice!

Look for more to come soon…

Posted in Company News, Green Wall, Pots, Planters & Site Furnishings | No Responses »
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Tournesol at the Green Roof & Wall Conference in Philadelphia

Tuesday, November 29th, 2011

We’ll be at Cities Alive, the Green Roof and Wall conference taking place this week in Philadelphia.  Come by and see us at booth #106!

We’ll be showing the “next generation” VGM living wall module, our new deck and paver supports, and introducing the newest iteration of our green roof trays – one that we can offer at 27% less than our previous GRT2 product!  It’s a great opportunity for those of you one the East Coast to see all the newest and greatest in landscaping roofs and walls, all in the same place. We have tickets available for the show. If you are interested, contact Chris in Inside Sales for information.

I’ll be presenting during the third session (4:30-6PM on Thursday), in the Residential/Indoor Greening track.  My presentation is “Gathering Intelligence from the Interior Trenches”, and will be a summary of what’s worked (and what hasn’t) in interior greenwall design. I took the opportunity to discuss all aspects of living walls with several interiorscapers that have set up and maintained multiple types of systems. It was a good chance for me to distill general feedback from the marketplace, and I hope the topic will resonate with the attendees. I’ll probably use the info as a source for several blog postings to come!

Finally, I was invited to be a judge for the “Awards of Excellence”, so I’m really looking forward to the presentation ceremonies. It was inspiring to see some of the tremendous work that’s being done in this space, and the winners truly deserve the recognition.

I hope that we’ll see you at the show!!

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VGM Modular Living Wall gets high-wind certification

Tuesday, November 15th, 2011

We just recieved word from Elmich, our partners in Singapore, that they have received certification for the VGM Modular living wall systems at wind speeds up to 68mph. They contracted with a testing agency in Melbourne, AUS, who created and executed the test.  While the video above might not be particularly exciting, the results are excellent.

The short story-

  • The new 3rd generation VGM modules (coming at the end of November) feature an optional plastic retaining clip that keeps the module in place. While it was tested here with wind, the same clip can be used for seismic retention and vandal prevention purposes.
  • With the wind coming from three different directions, there was still no appreciable uplift on a typical module. That is, the brackets held the boxes fast on the rails no matter the direction of the wind.
  • The 3rd generation modules also feature planting windows with additional retention bars. These prevent wind erosion of the soil or plants, and help keep the planting bag in place.

We’ll be featuring a post on the new modules shortly after they debut in December. In addition to the benefits mentioned above, they feature full stainless steel hardware, and a fully removable lid.  As a bonus to the installing contractor, the new bracket system will be faster and easier to assemble than the previous generations.

You can find the full results on a pdf located at our website (http://tournesolsiteworks.com/products/vgm_windtest.pdf), and the certificate can be found at http://tournesolsiteworks.com/products/vgm_windcert.pdf.

Posted in Company News, Green Building Products, Green Wall | No Responses »
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The San Diego Convention Center: SeaCrest Series pots 14 years later…

Thursday, November 3rd, 2011

SeaCrest Series Planters at the San Diego Convention Center

As I’ve mentioned in previous posts, we like to feature projects that we’ve previously done – we’re proud of how our product holds up in the field! Most images shown by companies will be right after installation – when things look their best. Because the differentiation between the quality levels of  manufacturers often comes down to the product’s performance over time, posts like this will let you know where we stand on the scale.  This is a great example of our product’s durability.

We just returned from the American Society of Landscape Architects conference, which took place at the San Diego Convention Center. This was the site of one of our early large installations with the SeaCrest Series planters with built-in irrigation. They are double walled, feature our sensor-based irrigation system, and are made of durable lightweight polyethylene. The planters were installed in two different phases of the convention center expansion. Well over 100 large pots were purchased (as near as we can remember)  from 1997 to 1999. Sizes ranged from our 24″dia. x 22″h and 17″h (shown here on the steps leading up the front of the building) to the 55″dia.  x 36″h and 17″h, several of which grace the driving entrance and act as buffers to cars. The product was specified by Vicki Estrada of Estrada Land Planning.

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Posted in Company News, Pots, Planters & Site Furnishings, Public Projects | No Responses »
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Come visit us at the ASLA ’11 in San Diego!

Sunday, October 30th, 2011

Booth #2805, ASLA EXPO in San Diego

The sales team is looking forward to the next few days at the American Society of Landscape Architects conference in San Diego. We’ve been exhibiting at their EXPO for almost 15 years, and it is always a good chance to connect with our most important group of clients. Come visit us at booth #2805 anytime over the next two days.

This year promises to be something special. The show is bigger than ever – more floor space, more exhibitors, and more attendees. It hasn’t been on the West Coast for some time, so we expect to see many contacts from California.

We’re also showing something special -  site furnishings, featuring our new Boulevard™ Upcycled Urban woods. We’ve got our Sydney Collection bench and table there, the modular people-oriented TWIG bench, as well as the new VersiJack deck and paver supports.  We’ll have David Shaw, founder of our Australian partner Street & Garden Furniture, as well as Jerry Soh of our Singaporean partner Elmich on hand. It promises to be a great show…

We're showing a bench featuring our new Boulevard Upcycled Urban wood

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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Introducing Boulevard Upcycled Urban Hardwoods

Friday, October 28th, 2011

Sydney Collection Platform Bench

Many commercial-grade wood benches and tables are made using ipé, teak, and exotic hardwoods harvested from rainforests in South America and Southeast Asia. The durability of these woods is unmatched, but issues of deforestation, questionable chain of custody, and embedded energy in transit make them problematic.

Tournesol Siteworks has a better answer – Boulevard™ is an upcycled urban hardwood solution that offers the durability of exotics but without the environmental baggage.

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Posted in Company News, Pots, Planters & Site Furnishings, Products | No Responses »
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