Rethinking water savings in landscape design

For no other reason than to make a point, I plan to submit this recently completed front yard landscape redo in a xeriscape design contest. I'm certain the distinguished panel of judges will take a quick glance at the pictures and conclude that I obviously don't know what xeriscaping is. The entry paperwork will be tossed, er, recycled- I will get a polite note of thanks for participating in the contest, and the winner will receive acolades and praise for ripping off a High Country Garden drought tolerant design.

Or maybe I'll win because they'll have read my blog.

This handsome North End Bungalo likely started life with an equally attractive landscape. And like the Arts and Crafts style of the home, the landscape probably had a slight Asian feel. Sometime in the last 100 years somebody decided to install turf instead.

My clients moved into the home in 2009 and after I reworked the back yard, they asked if I could also help with the front. I tore out the sidewalk and the turf and replaced it with a planting scheme that by all accounts looks thirstier than the old lawn but actually offers a water savings of eighty percent.

Check out this great book on period Bungalow gardens:

Outside the Bungalow America's Arts & Crafts Garden

Saint O'Doran's Day

Saint Patrick's day is a bittersweet celebration amongst the Doran clan. It's the day we light a single candle and remember Jason O'Doran, Ireland's true hero.

While it's true Patrick drove out all the snakes from the Emerald Isle, her inhabitants were faced with the overwhelming ecological disaster of being overrun with rodents. Rodents so thick in fact, graneries were depleted & hardly a drop of Stout could be found.

In this great time of crisis O'Doran, a humble farmer and community organizer, led the people to collect what little grain was left. With it they lured the filthy creatures to an enormous vat of Stout where the vile vectors drowned. The resulting green, noxious liquid proved to be a remarkable fertilizer, and within a few months the granaries were full, the children were singing and the men resumed their happy, drunken brawling.

Alas, in the insuing year long party (and through the clever marketing efforts of Patrick's supporters), knowledge of the true events were forgotten by all but the O'Dorans themselves.

Politically Correct Plant Selection

A few years back a landscaper friend of mine sold his diesel work truck and bought a Prius. Even though the truck was more practical for his day to day work routine and actually got decent mileage, he'd been castigated by friends and clients for driving the "Beast" and felt the new hybrid would put a better polish on the image he was projecting. Coming back recently from three months of vacation, by all accounts his strategy seems to have worked.

Despite all the recently publicized problems Toyota has had recently, I like hybrids and the push to create more fuel efficient cars. During a period of the 70's that was dominated by enormous V8's, I was practically raised in the back of VW's that got triple their gas mileage. Kudos to my parents and to anyone today who wishes to conserve. What bothers me is the largely symbolic gestures businesses often make to ingratiate themselves to their customers.

I've done it myself, struggling with the symbolism of plant selection.

Here's the deal: Invasive species can have devastating effects on ecology and many invasive species were actually introduced for one reason or another. In the last twenty years I've seen the green industry become more careful in the growth and selection of plant material. Locally, for example, that means fewer Russian Olives (Elaeagnus angustifolia) are being planted. This a good thing given how the now ubiquitous invader has out-competed native species in riparian areas. But I see an unintended consequence to this elevated sense of concern: tough, drought tolerant plants are getting a bad rap in Boise because in much milder areas (e.g. San Jose, Ca) they tend to jump the fence. The truth is I've stopped using some plants in my installations not because I believe there is any danger in planting these blacklisted plants in Boise, but rather out of concern for the image I'm projecting.

I'm coming to grips with the inherent silliness of that reasoning. I finished a small commercial installation this week using, among other ornamental grasses, drifts of Nasella tenuissima. Mexican Feather Grass, as it's known by it's common name, is a wispy, somewhat ethereal grass that's the plant equivalent of mood music. It also happens to be a grass that some have called on to be banned because of its potential to become invasive. An attentive gardener employee at the location brought this to the attention of the owner and sent him a link to an online Sunset Magazine article about N. tenuissima (go here to read it). The author, Sharon Cahoon, does a great job presenting the debate, concluding that the matter of invasive potential needs to be determined regionally.

Honestly, I would be reluctant to plant N. tenuissima anywhere that receives more than 16 to 20 inches of annual rainfall but in our arid, high desert I think it's a fantastic alternative to many of the thirsty plants designers seem to use over and over (hey, I'm gonna start my own blacklist). While it's true it will self seed a little within a garden, in 20 years of digging in Boise's dirt I've never seen it wander into a neighbor's bed or naturalize into a non-irrigated area. I've heard the same debate about other plants like Euphorbia myrsinites, another tough, evergreen perennial. While I believe there should be a careful vetting process for any new introduction, designers should also be careful not to eliminate tough, drought tolerant plants from their design palette simply to appear, err, correct.

Monsanto kindly asks that you rake the forest.

Everybody has days when they realize their job is a pointless absurdity. Mine came the other day when I was raking the forest. Don't get me wrong- any kind of February work for a landscaper is a good thing, but I'm used to thinking that what I do is important. I regard landscaping as a nexus of Art and Science and often imagine myself poised heroically with a shovel in a Diego Rivera mural.

Daydreaming helps pass hours of endless raking.

On this day however, I was preoccupied with the silliness of what I was doing. A friend and long term client had taken pity on me and asked if I could squeeze in some late winter work into my busy schedule (har, har). A couple hours later I was on a little island near the Boise river raking up leaves and debris that had already begun to turn into wonderful compost over the winter. The adjacent homeowners had already cleaned their little sections of the island which just seemed to make my client's area just look, well untidy.

Cutting into this self sustaining natural system does have it's business advantages though. As an add on to my expert raking services, we also provide fertilization (which I will be sure to suggest for this little piece of Poplar and red twig dogwood riparian forest). I don't feel especially bad about it as we use organically derived, low nitrogen fertilizer but it does make think that there are probably better ways to manage our landscapes.

I'm currently working on a large community common area landscape redesign which I plan to write more about in the future. An important component of this design will be on site composting of all non-woody organic debris derived from the common area landscape. The idea is simple. Instead of hauling off the biomass, we can reduce it by a factor of ten or more through accelerated composting and reintroduce it to the beds as a nutrient rich soil conditioner. In my own landscape beds at home this has precluded the need for supplemental fertilization. This is a terrific way of emulating natural systems in an effort to create sustainable landscape maintenance .

I got the idea from raking the forest.

Juniper timber

My mother is convinced that nuclear testing in the 50's is responsible for a whole host of physical ailments amongst her generation. I often wonder if the 70's analogue would be the salad greens I ate as a kid that had been grown in creosote soaked railroad tie raised beds. Today we've got "pressure treated" lumber that's been treated with Chromated copper arsenic (CCA). Yuck.

Since untreated wood doesn't last long in direct contact with soil and treated wood poses likely health risks (especially in edible landscapes), I've stuck with using stone whenever there's a chance of decay. I was recently given the task of finding a replacement material to use in rebuilding old railroad tie steps in a neighborhood common area and was forced to reevaluate my assumptions about using wood in the landscape. Replacing a hundred or more steps with stone or a concrete product just wasn't financially feasible so I reluctantly began to look again at the lumber option.

At the lumber yard I glared at the mismatched, half rotten railroad ties and the green day glow pressure treated timber determined to find a better product. Back home on the computer I stumbled across a website praising the merits of juniper timber- an article that describes juniper fence posts still standing from the 20's. A little more research confirmed that juniper has remarkable anti-decay characteristics which makes the use of chemical preservatives unnecessary. I also learned that junipers are considered a "deleterious invasive native that threatens other ecosystems", and that the means of controlling juniper has historically been to use fire as there have been no commercial applications for the wood.

This has changed in recent years as mills are beginning to process the once unwanted trees into usable, dimensionable lumber. My Frank Capra moment came when I found REACH, a non-profit organization that runs a juniper mill in Klamath Falls. Their mission is to provide people with disabilities employment by manufacturing environmentally safe products for landscaping and agriculture. I'm nominating their juniper timbers as the feel-good product of the year.

I ripped out over a hundred railroad ties in various states of decay in the common area footpath and went on to rebuild several flights of stairs with the juniper timber. I'm pleased with the results and thinking about all the potential hardscape applications. As an added benefit, after cutting juniper all day I get to come home smelling half decent for a change.

During the summer I imagine myself as having long stretches of time in the winter to work on brilliant, paradigm changing landscape design ideas. More often than not come January, a good month after my crew has performed their seasonal mutiny, I find myself alone swinging high in the branches of a tree.

I usually prefer to perform arborist work in the winter (and with a ground crew), but on this day several weeks ago I was struggling to climb a Sycamore tree after a heavy snow. Sycamore trees have smooth bark and can be tricky to maneuver around in dry weather. With a foot of snow on the elephantine limbs, it was proving to be next to impossible. From the look the little old lady next door was shooting me, it was probably verging on the obscene as well.

I made it 3/4ths of the way up the huge tree, stopped to catch my breath & had a look around. I noticed something I hadn't seen at ground level. In this older neighborhood I could see a distinct difference between the trees in the front yards as compared to the ones in the back. Most of the trees in the front yards were in pretty bad shape, whereas the ones in the back were healthy. It was easy to see what the difference was: the trees in the front yards had been given bucket truck tree "care" but the ones in the back (i.e. the ones the bucket truck "tree care providers" couldn't get to) were specimens of health and forest grandeur. Tree climbers don't do extra, unnecessary work like hacking off the top of trees.

But I get it. People get spooked about big trees hanging around their homes. They have visions of gigantic limbs falling through their roofs and crushing loved ones. They call Mr. Bucket Truck to bring these trees down to a "safe" height by topping, reducing and generally ravaging the tree. The irony is two-fold. First, the tree reacts by going into overtime to regrow the lost crown (convenient for Mr. Bucket Truck next year). Secondly, multiple new limbs emerge Hydra-like from each cut and are weakly attached to the tree at wound points that allow disease to infiltrate the tree. The very efforts intended to make the tree safer often do just the opposite.

I'd spent considerable time with this particular home owner trying to convince him that his trees were in great shape and only needed basic pruning. He looked dubious but finally seemed to acquiesce to my firm belief that the trees did not need to be "lowered". I still haven't got paid so maybe I didn't convince him?

UPDATE: I got paid.