Garden Tools

Decorative Outdoor Flag

	Heath Outdoor 2 - 1/2 -by-4 Feet Poly Cotton Decorative US Flag #25303 List Price: $9.99 Sale Price: $7.49 Average Rating:
	Deluxe 2-1/2 -by-4 Feet Poly/Cotton Decorative Flag. Pole and bracket not included.

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Decorative Banner Stand Displays

If you are looking to promote your products and generate prospects for your business, one of the simplest and most effective media is a banner or a graphic panel. Scores of these panels are located all over a city and along the roads. They have great appeal and are seen and read by a large number of people everyday. Using these can be an excellent business decision which can help you generate a lot of revenue.

The outdoor promotional displays can be of various types. The major are:

• Pop-up displays – There is a large variety of pop-up displays available, including banner stand display. They are available as curved, straight, cylindrical, floor-length, table-top, single or double-sided. Choose the one you like.
• Pull-Up Banners - Pull-up banners come in a variety of heights and can be used to take your marketing message wherever you go. You can align multiple single-sided banners for an impressive backdrop and with a cleaver design also use them individually. Double-sided make a great centrepiece or simply offer dual use.
• Literature Holders – You can create the right impression with an organised and uncluttered display and get your marketing noticed. A number of amazingly compact freestanding solutions are available, plus ingenious ways to mount holders and shelves to your display.
• Outdoor Flags & Banners – You can get your message out there with UV and weather resistant solutions. These are ideal for golf days and other sponsored outdoor events, function entrances, leaders to trade show stands, temporary information displays and much more.
• Counters – You can get custom-designed counters that can serve as a great marketing tool. Also available are plinths, shelving stands, showcases and interactive/monitor stations which can also be wrapped in your graphics.

The Showman is one of the premier design and exhibition specialists in the country. They are a regular supplier of decorative promotional displays to various companies and have a range of solutions and products. To know more the services and products offered by them, please visit www.theshowman.com.au and you’ll surely find just the thing you are looking for.

About the Author

Vanessa Holding has worked as a public relations consultant in Sydney for a number of years. Having had an interest in writing ever since her childhood, she has been doing a bit of writing work on the sides. Her articles on topics related to her field of expertise and allied fields are informative and comprehensive.

Military Garden Banner

	Patriotic USA Military Navy Garden Decorative Flag Banner List Price: $39.99 Sale Price: $22.49
	Colorful and hand-sewn appliqué flag is made of the finest nylon with superior wearing quality and excellent fly ability. It is meticulously designed, crafted, assembled, and individually tested to meet our highest quality and durability standards...

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Letters to the Editor
Were I a better letter writer, I would have written the letter Bill Ward wrote which appeared on the July 31. I would have written it word for word as he did; not an ‘and' or an ‘or' changed. He speaks for the silent majority. Let...

Return to Ballymoyer

Swift and faithful

· Hart family armorial motto,

Celer atque fidelis, granted 1883 ·When Captain Arthur Hart-Synnot came back to Ireland on a bright summer morning in July 1906, and walked down the gangplank of the overnight boat from Holyhead, he had not seen his father for two and a half years. The major general had received his telegram and was there to meet his eldest son and accompany him on the train for the last stage of his five-thousand-mile journey back from the Far East. A family of soldiers who had spent years in India and the farthest outposts of the British Empire, the Hart-Synnots were accustomed to the long sea journeys, extended personal separations, and occasional periods of great loneliness that military service required of them. As the train steamed close to the shore, passing the oyster beds along the ten-mile fjord that cut deep into the coast and divided County Down from Louth, and the sun caught the wooded slopes of the Mourne Mountains on the other side of the water, they began to catch up on family news.At Newry Station the coachman was waiting with the old black landau. Once the luggage was transferred, the captain and the general were driven up the narrow country road, past the low stone walls and scrubby hedges that divided the small fields of South Armagh, gradually gaining height on the two-hour journey to Ballymoyer. When they reached the lodge and turned into the gates, a crowd of estate workers and staff from the house were waiting for them, with a banner strung across the drive welcoming Captain Hart-Synnot home.

Arthur knew many of the faces from his childhood, and some had served under his father in the Irish Brigade in South Africa. They cheered and waved, grabbed the shafts beside the two horses, pushed the carriage from behind, and helped turn the wheels up the long gravel avenue that ran through the parkland towards the house. This was not a family used to displays of affection in public, but Arthur stepped down and embraced his mother and his sisters on the porch. A brass band played, and a little later the family and guests sat down to a noisy lunch with many toasts. The captain made a speech in which he said how happy he was to be back home with friends and family.

Only four years before, his father had been given a similar hero's return when he came back to Ballymoyer from the Boer War. Since then he had retired from the army and devoted his energies to the estate that his wife, Mary, had inherited, and which he had known since their marriage. With seven thousand acres of low hills, moorland, and small tenant farms, seventy miles north of Dublin, the property was one of the largest in the county of Armagh. The Synnots had made their money in the linen trade and mining and, unlike many other Irish landowners, had always been resident landlords. General Hart added his wife's surname to his own to become General Hart-Synnot, confirming his place among the Anglo-Irish gentry. The general was eager to show Arthur the improvements he had begun to make on the estate demesne, the home farm that was not rented out to tenants, knowing his son shared the same love for the place he would one day inherit.

The original stone manor had been built in the eighteenth century in a gentle valley at a point where three brooks, after racing down from their own glens, reached flatter land and joined together to continue as one fast-running trout stream. In the early nineteenth century a more imposing house in the classical style, with a stucco façade of three stories and a colonnaded porch, had been added onto the earlier, rougher building, and the two were linked with creaking corridors and staircases. The library, the smaller bedrooms, and the servants' hall were in the old section at the back, but the principal bedrooms, drawing room, and dining room were in the grander addition, looking across the lawns and parkland to stands of beech on the hillside. Over the years the gardens had been landscaped and replanted, and the streams channeled and directed over weirs, but the sound of rushing water could still be heard all round the house, and gave a calming, almost drowsy background noise. For Arthur's return, both parts of the house were full, with relatives who had come to greet him and would stay until the following day. The celebrations did not end till after dinner, when the general directed a fireworks display on the lawn. That night Arthur must have wondered how he was going to tell his family what had happened to his personal and emotional life on the other side of the world, and how he wanted nothing more than to put Ireland behind him as fast as possible and get back to Tokyo.Two and a half years earlier, before he left for the East, Arthur had known almost nothing about Japan, and his ambitions were centered on the army. The military connection was hard to ignore at Ballymoyer. Portraits of mustachioed ancestors in full uniform were hung all over the house, along with their swords and honors. Military biographies and campaign histories filled the library shelves. Arthur's grandfather General Henry Hart had edited Hart's Army List, the annual compendium setting out names, rankings, and organization that was indispensable to army messes and clubs around the British Empire. His father was a major general who had fought Ashanti tribesmen in West Africa, the Zulus in Natal, the Egyptians at Tel el Kebir, and a whole range of recalcitrant natives in India and Afghanistan. His father's brother Reginald was another major general, the better known because while still a young officer he had won the Victoria Cross, for crawling up a dry ravine in Afghanistan to rescue a wounded soldier, under withering fire from Afridi tribesmen shooting at him from behind rocks. Uncle Reginald's book, Reflections on the Art of War, laying out his forthright approach to "push-on" soldiering, was an inspiration to young officers. His father's other brother, Uncle Horatio, was a colonel with the Royal Engineers. In 1883, the three Hart brothers had jointly revived a coat of arms once used in the family, with a stag's head and rampant antlers over the motto "Celer atque fidelis," meaning "Swift and faithful."

The soldiering tradition conditioned Arthur's outlook and made him the sort of man he was. No one ever thought he would do anything else but become an officer. Family custom put him into the army, and family connections assisted his career through it. When Arthur left Sandhurst in 1890, he went out to India as a subaltern. He joined the 1st Battalion of the East Surrey Regiment at DumDum, near Calcutta, where his father was the colonel, and saw his first fighting in the mountains along the India-Afghanistan border, on a march to relieve a British force besieged by Pathan tribesmen in Chitral. When his Uncle Reginald, also serving in India, was sent to quell yet another rising by the Afridis around the Khyber Pass, he asked to have his nephew attached to the expedition.

After eight years in India, Arthur returned to England to go to Staff College, coached for the examination by his father. By this time his younger brother Ronald had, in his turn, just joined the East Surrey Regiment, and his father had come home to be a general. The British Empire was at its apogee. When Queen Victoria came to review her troops on the Aldershot parade ground in the summer of 1899, General Fitzroy Hart was able to ride past his sovereign at the head of his brigade, in plumed helmet, immaculate uniform, and highly polished boots, on a magnificent seventeen-hand Waler horse that belonged to Arthur, with his two sons jogging along beside him as members of his staff. At moments like this, when the pomp was at its most splendid and the military bands at their most stirring, it was not surprising that British rule over much of the world seemed so natural, or that families like the Harts could derive so much of their identity from it. A few months later, when that mastery came under challenge in southern Africa, and the Boer War broke out, professional soldiers like the Harts welcomed the chance for some sustained action against a more challenging enemy than the primitive tribesmen they usually found themselves up against. The war could bring honors and promotion. Arthur, his brother Ronald, his father, Fitzroy, and the seventeen-hand Waler all sailed for Cape Town in 1899 as part of the first Expeditionary Force, impatient to get there lest the fighting end too quickly. The only regret in the family was that Uncle Reginald, now in India, could not be released to come along, too.

Copyright © 2007 Peter Pagnamenta and Momoko Williams from the book Sword and Blossom by Peter Pagnamenta and Momoko Williams. Published by the Penguin Group; May 2007;$16.00US; 978-0-14-311214-3

Peter Pagnamenta is a writer and television documentary maker, with a special interest in Japan. He conceived and wrote the eight-part BBC series Nippon, an archival and testimonial history of Japan's recovery after 1945, as well as Bubble Trouble, about Japan in the 1990's. Other series for the BBC include the twentieth-century industrial history All Our Working Lives, for which he wrote the book with Richard Overy, and the twenty-six-part People's Century. He is a former editor of the weekly current-affairs television program Panorama. Momoko Williams was born and brought up in Japan and went to Britain in 1966 after graduating from Meiji University, Tokyo. She has coordinated and produced programs for Japanese broadcasters in Britain and Japan. She worked on the major NHK series The Twentieth Century and Pacific War. Interested in Anglo-Japanese cultural connections, she initiated and produced the photographic exhibition Japanese in Britain, 1863-2001. She is married to an Englishman and lives in London.

About the Author

Peter Pagnamenta is a writer and television documentary maker, with a special interest in Japan. He conceived and wrote the eight-part BBC series Nippon, an archival and testimonial history of Japan's recovery after 1945, as well as Bubble Trouble, about Japan in the 1990's. Other series for the BBC include the twentieth-century industrial history All Our Working Lives, for which he wrote the book with Richard Overy, and the twenty-six-part People's Century. He is a former editor of the weekly current-affairs television program Panorama.
Momoko Williams was born and brought up in Japan and went to Britain in 1966 after graduating from Meiji University, Tokyo. She has coordinated and produced programs for Japanese broadcasters in Britain and Japan. She worked on the major NHK series The Twentieth Century and Pacific War. Interested in Anglo-Japanese cultural connections, she initiated and produced the photographic exhibition Japanese in Britain, 1863-2001. She is married to an Englishman and lives in London.

Flag Pole Flagpole

	Valley Forge 20-Foot Aluminum Flag Pole With 3-Foot x 5-Foot Nylon Flag With Sewn Stripes & Embroidered Stars List Price: $109.99 Sale Price: $79.99 Average Rating:
	Set firmly into the ground, this 3-by-5-foot U.S. flag will wave in tricolor triumph through many holidays. It's made of heavy nylon with double-stitched red and white stripes and embroidered white stars on the familiar blue background...

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Bridgewater residents oppose T-Mobile cell tower on Green Knoll Fire Department property
Google MapsBRIDGEWATER — About 50 people waited an excruciating two hours at Tuesday night’s Zoning Board of Adjustment meeting to hear the first part of a controversial cell tower application that would place a 125-foot monopole at the Green Knoll...

Landscape Lighting Using Parabolic Optics

A parabolic optic consists of a lamp and reflector.  Lamps such as the very popular MR-16, and commonly used PAR 20, PAR 30 and PAR 38 integrate the lamp and PARabolic shaped reflector into a single package. These lamp types are mostly found in low-voltage and 120V line-voltage applications, and are available in both incandescent and metal halide versions.  A typical application is shown in Figure 1, where various spotlights are used to light trees and shrubs bordering a pathway.

Figure 1 - Spotlights used to light trees and shrubs bordering a pathway.

More sophisticated commercial applications typically use parabolic optical packages created by the fixture manufacturer.  In Figure 2, in-ground fixtures with metal halide spot optics are used to light some of the statues, trees and the flagpole in a 9/11 memorial.  Custom reflector designs, and a lamp such as an E17, T6, or T4, are used.  The reflector is parabolic in shape with the most common finish specular.  When the arc tube of a MH lamp is positioned at the focal point of the parabola, the light rays are output in a parallel beam from the reflector, creating a spot light.  Lamps with smaller arc tubes concentrate more light at the focal point, producing a narrower spot light pattern. 

Figure 2 - Spotlights used to light trees, statues and flagpole at 9/11 memorial.
Photo courtesy of Brad Bonnet Allred Architects.

Different lamp types placed in the same parabolic reflector will produce varying results because of their arc tube size. For example, a 100W MH E17 lamp has a much smaller arc tube than a 175W E17, even though their bulbs are the same size. The 100W E17 lamp will produce a much narrower spot with a greater concentration of light or center-beam candlepower.  Figure 3 illustrates the difference between these two lamps. Caution should be taken when changing lamp initial lumen values in a photometric package to simulate a different wattage lamp from that originally tested and recommended by the fixture manufacturer. The results in the field may not be as expected. The light may be to bright, or to dim and not as sharply focused in either a spot or flood pattern as required.

Figure 3 - E17 100W (top) and 175W (bottom) arc tubes.

A lamps wattage, and the light (lumens) it outputs, factored by the effectiveness of the reflector produce the real light output or effective lumens of the parabolic optical system.  Today, new low-wattage metal halide lamps, such as the 20W T4 or BT5, have very small arc tubes that can produce powerful narrow beam spot lights.  These perform significantly better on a maximum candlepower per watt basis than their higher wattage relatives.  A typical spot optic used by ALLSCAPE®? in their in-ground product with a 20W BT5 lamp from Philips, produces 46,999 center-beam candlepower compared with the lower 40,516 center-beam candlepower generated by a 39W T6 lamp.  The BT5 beam angle is narrower and more focused at 6°, compared to 8° for the T6.

When a narrow spot optic (less than 10° beam) is required, the best results will be derived from the lamp with the smallest arc tube for a given parabolic reflector.  A narrower beam throws light a greater distance, allowing taller landscape objects (trees, columns, and flag poles) to be illuminated more effectively.

A spot optic requires the arc tube of the lamp to be placed at the focal point of the parabola. What happens if it is not?  Moving the arc tube a small distance out of the parabolas focal point widens the spot, producing a flood optic.  The arc tube movement that is required is often small, less than 1/4 inch. 

Figure 4 illustrates this using a 39W T6 lamp with its arc tube positioned in (spot) and out (flood) of the focal point.  As a result, the light beam widens but is less powerful at the center.  In the flood position, the beam diameter increased to 7ft. from 3.4ft. in the spot position at a distance of 10ft. from the fixture. The center-beam footcandle level reduced from 405fc in the spot position to 95fc in the flood position.

Figure 4 - T6 lamp in the spot (left) and flood (right) position in a parabolic reflector.

Understanding the basic workings of a parabolic reflector allows the landscape specifier to select the best lamp and reflector combination for a particular application.  One common application is illuminating a column on a building. How do you decide what the best spotlight is to light the column?

Small columns less than 2ft. wide should be illuminated with a narrow-beam spot reflector.  A good lamp choice would be a 20W BT5 or T4. Wider columns up to 3 or 4 feet in diameter should use the 39W T6.  Even wider columns could use an E17 lamp or the flood versions of a BT5, T4, or T6.  If column height is also an issue, narrow-beam optics must be used, or a fixture must be placed at the bottom and the top of the column, or in the middle using an up/down light.  If height and width is required, several narrow beam light fixtures spaced appropriately apart may be required.  To achieve a smooth effect, make sure the beams of each fixture overlap.

When using a narrow-beam spotlight to uplight a column or tree place it as close to the object as possible.  If the beam width is approximately 2ft., as in the BT5 example above, placing the fixture 1ft. from the object will only graze the surface of the object. 

Placing the fixture further from the object may require the optical assembly to be aimed (tilted) towards the object, to get sufficient light on it.  Also, if an in-ground fixture is being used to light a column or palm tree, placing the fixture too far away can result in the base not being illuminated creating a floating effect which is not recommended.

In many landscape applications the fixtures are installed when the trees and planters are immature.  Typically, the lighting looks good at the start after the initial positioning and focusing but not so good a year or two later when the landscape has matured.  One efficient way to compensate for the maturing process is to use spot-to-flood adjustable optics provided with product such as the SL-51 Ciello landscape floodlight from ALLSCAPE. 

A flat-blade screwdriver is used to move the lamp in and out of the parabolic reflector.  Fixtures such as this allow adjustment of the beam width to suit the landscape. Spot optics would be used at the start, then adjusted to flood as vegetation grows and expands.

Figure 5 - SL-51 spot-to-flood adjustment mechanism.

Additional options may be occasionally required to provide extra light control.  Refractors are often used to widen or smooth light emanating from the reflector.  A linear spread lens is used to spread the beam in one axis, while a radial lens is used to widen and smooth the light in all directions. 

External fixture controls, such as barndoors, are used to provide a sharp cutoff perhaps to stop light from getting into a nearby window.  Other devices, such as visors and louvers, both internal and external, are also available to control glare.  It is important to control glare because it can be a distraction and even annoyance to the pedestrians in close proximity and can greatly reduce the impact of the lighting design.  Filters can be used to color the light or smooth the light output. Note: the light output is reduced every time additional filters or lens are added.

Figure 6 - Spotlights with visors lighting statue from two angles.

There is more to parabolic optics than literally meets the eye. Creating a great lighting design requires some artistic flavor but also requires a basic understanding of how lamp technology and parabolic reflectors interacts with each other.  Computer tools such as 3dOP Pro, available at http://www.3dOP.com, help make the correct spot optic selection at the design stage of any project.  Compare the optics available and experiment with the placement of the fixtures relative to the objects to be illuminated.  A few minutes of research and computer design will greatly improve the look of your project and ultimately make the customer happy.

About the Author

Ian R. Ibbitson, Vice President and General Manager of ALLSCAPE has over twenty years experience in the lighting, entertainment and electronics industries. Dr. Ibbitson joined ALLSCAPE a Philips group brand in 1995 and is currently in charge of several commercial outdoor lighting divisions, including Quality Lighting, and Metrolux. Dr. Ibbitson has a BSc. in electrical/electronic engineering and a PhD in computer aided design from the University of Sunderland in England.