Sustainable Landscapes 101

What if you could have a beautiful garden that also put a “Mona Lisa smile” on Al Gore’s lips? And what if your yard thrived without toxic chemicals and reduced your energy and water bills?

It’s not only possible, it’s easy. Just adopt a few simple sustainable landscaping practices to have a positive impact on your pocketbook and the environment.

By now, the principles of sustainable landscaping are becoming more commonplace, but you’ll still get a variety of definitions depending on who you ask. Sustainability is certainly about eliminating the use of toxic substances, conserving resources, recycling and reducing waste. But there’s also a strong connection between landscaping and climate change. By implementing a few common sense changes in the design and care of your yard, you can start making things better.

The simplest approach is to create a garden that mimics nature. You won’t see a gardening service driving through the Los Padres National Forest turning on sprinklers, spreading fertilizer, or raking leaves. That’s because our back country has evolved into a system that doesn’t need anything more than what nature provides. No extra water, no hedge trimming, no insecticides.

In our own yards, we can copy this idea by selecting plants that thrive on little or no supplemental water. Nurseries are filled with California native plants and plants from Mediterranean climates just like ours. These plants are all adapted to our dry summers and when properly placed in the garden, can be pest-free. The result is minimal irrigation and healthy plants that don’t need to be pampered.

That big patch of green in your front yard might be another place to do something positive. The monetary cost of maintaining a typical American lawn approaches $1500 a year for water, fertilizer, weed killers, labor for mowing, and maintenance on the equipment. The environmental cost comes from gas-powered tools that can be 20-30 times more polluting than an automobile engine operated for the same amount of time. One more piece of the environmental equation – the nationally advertised lawn products we dump on that patch of green are mined from the earth, refined and processed, packaged and shipped. All of these activities consume energy and produce CO2 - another strong argument for removing lawns that do not provide true recreational value.

What about those energy bills? “Passive solar” is one answer. That big evergreen tree on the sunny side of your bedroom looks majestic, but wouldn’t it be nice to get a bit of morning sunshine through the window on a chilly morning? Deciduous tree to the rescue!  In the winter, the bare branches let the warmth of the sun in so you can turn the thermostat down sooner, save a few dollars and consume less energy (there’s that carbon thing again). When the warm days of summer arrive, the leaves will be filled in keeping the house shaded and cool. Even better – if you have an air conditioner, place a shade tree nearby so the unit starts with cooler air and doesn’t have to work so hard.

I can hear the cry – deciduous trees equals raking leaves, and that’s work. Not necessarily. Let’s go back to our natural system analogy. Back in the mountains - - where never is heard a discouraging rake - the leaves decompose, the nutrients reenter the soil, and the cycle starts again. This is what mulching is all about, but you don’t have to purchase and haul bags of the stuff from the local garden shop. No packaging, no shipping, no carbon. If you pick the right plants to grow under your trees, the leaves can just fall through the shrubs and stay on the ground. Less work, greater water retention, more fertile soil – you get the idea. But if you absolutely have to rake the area, please add the leaves to your compost pile. You do have a compost pile, don’t you?

As you can see, there’s nothing mysterious about adopting sustainable gardening practices. It’s a common sense approach that benefits the environment and saves you a pile of money, all the while reducing some of the drudgery that can steal your weekends away.

Is that a smile I see in the corner of Al’s lips?

(First published in Santa Barbara Homeowners Magazine - March 2008)