And while Don has been gone for many years his words still linger in my mind. I had heard many adjectives describing water, but ?EUR??,,????'??terrible?EUR??,,????'?? was new. Sure, water was powerful . . . tremendously powerful . . .

Ask a surfer about the power of water and you?EUR??,,????'???ll hear stories about how it feels to be flushed down the toilet. Ask a fireman about the power of water and he?EUR??,,????'???ll tell you of the strength it takes to hold a fully opened hose line. But these kinds of power are not terrible and not the force that Roberts was speaking of.

Water has the power of life. Try not drinking any for three days and see what happens. Try not watering your turf for a year and you?EUR??,,????'???ll find the power of no water. These are closer to Roberts?EUR??,,????'??? terrible meaning, but not dead on.

I am writing this on January 30 from a condo at Mammoth Mountain Lakes ski resort. Barely one-third of the way into winter and many are seeing one of the terrible aspects of water . . . Too much . . . This is certainly not the case in Mammoth this year, but it is in many places around the world.

Water has the ability to collect and move whatever is in its path. But it doesn?EUR??,,????'???t seek to move things. In fact, it only tries to accomplish its goal of finding its level in the path of least resistance. Unfortunately, few things can resist water. When water collects and seeks its level it has a terrible way of destroying anything that keeps it from its goal.

Water is not an animal. It does not have a conscious thought pattern of how it will go about finding that level. It simply does. Or it simply doesn?EUR??,,????'???t . . .

In the Sierra Nevada Mountains there is not much water this year. Unlike the past two years where there were record levels of snow fall, in 2007 there is barely a foot of snow on the ground . . . This is terrible! Ok that is self-serving since we are here to ski . . . But throughout the Southwest there is the beginning of another drought . . . or not . . . and a drought is a terrible force.

Probably nothing on earth kills more people than drought. Yet the southwest United States has some of the fastest growing communities in the nation, if not the world. The Phoenix area of Arizona has been a boomtown for at least a decade and Vegas is growing off the charts. Driving to Mammoth we saw new development after new development extending past the mountains that hem Southern California into the high desert . . . say again . . . Desert.

In this area, water is going to be a terrible force.

Read the pages of this magazine and you will find news items about this district or that putting restrictions on water usage. Florida is a place where there is more water in the air than on the ground. Everywhere you turn there is a channel, a lake, a stream or a pond. There is water everywhere . . . everywhere, that is, except the areas into which so many are moving every year.

In these United States, one thing is clear . . . People are moving into the regions where there just isn?EUR??,,????'???t enough water to support them. This isn?EUR??,,????'???t a global warming issue. It is an issue of common sense.

As landscape professionals we are in the business of using water to assure the life of the lands that are developed. Beyond the aesthetics, the plants that we grow produce the oxygen that we breathe. Yet in many places the choice is becoming whether we water the plants or water the throats of the masses.

So . . .While water is sometimes too plentiful and causes terrible destruction, it is also sometimes so scarce it wreaks terrible havoc by its absence. And both of these scenarios are terrible for the landscape industry.

What can you do? It is hard to say . . . This is supposed to be an El Ni?????o year that would saturate the southwest. Last year was supposed to be the year of the hurricane, drenching the southeast . . . Funny . . .These are the two places putting the most restrictions on water due to its absence . . .

What can you do? . . . The only thing I can say for sure is that we all need to plan for and expect the extremes that water brings us. Only in this way can we elude its terrible force . . .

God Bless