Sustainable Gardening in the Washington Post

FABULOUS article by Adrian Higgins about the need for sustainable gardening, and the great work going on to spur the movement.  He starts by getting our attention:

There’s someone on my block pouring greenhouse gases into the atmosphere, contributing to summer smog and allowing polluted runoff to reach the Chesapeake Bay.  It’s me.  Oh, and you.  And everyone else.

The ecological pendulum has swung somewhat since the postwar decades, when homeowners blithely burned autumn leaves and applied nasty pesticides and too many synthetic fertilizers to their garden plants.  But we still have a long way to go before our gardens are ecologically sustainable.  This may sound strange, given that the whole point of gardening is to venerate nature, secure in the knowledge that our plants trap carbon, provide shade and pump oxygen into the air.

But in existing properties, too many gardens are part of the problem, with plants needing chemical support because they are il-chosen or in poor soils, or both.  Lawns, apart from required repeated fertilizer applications, rely on gas-powered mowers and blowers.

Even gardeners who are dutifully trying to be green by minimizing the lawn, turning to hand tools and planting low-maintenance vegetation see storm water gushing down the driveway into the street, losing water that otherwise could be used in the garden while reducing river pollution.

AMEN.   He goes on to describe the nearly-complete guidelines for Sustainable Sites, a joint project of the U.S.  Botanic Gardens, Lady  Bird Johnson Wildflower Center and the American Society of Landscape Architects.  Like LEED standards for buildings, these guidelines will become the standard for environmentally responsible treatment of landscapes nationwide.  Very exciting stuff.  Here’s Higgins’ summary of the practices endorsed and given credit for:

Using recycled rain and household water for irrigation, improving soil health with compost, choosing plants suited to the site and its climate, avoiding chemicals that contribute to smog and using vegetation to reduce the heat island effect of cities.

The photo above and many more of landscapes using these practices are available on their website, which looks like it’ll become a terrific new resource for us all.  Higgins relates the experiences at two test gardens in California.  Side by side gardens were grown either conventionally or using native plants only, and the costs and amounts of water used yearly were recorded.  Great information to have, and I look forward to some residential examples here in the East.  (Heck, I’ll volunteer my own lawnless garden as a "case study".)

Higgins goes on to make the important point that it may take the right landscape firm to make this all happen – by teaching the homeowners how to maintain their new sutainable gardens, which is "not the business strategy of a lot of garden design firms".  Looks like they need to team up with some garden coaches!

Photo: Cayuga Medical Center in Itaca, New York