Part V
Great Greenery for a Green Garden
In this part . . .
The sustainable landscape is a living system that’s dependent on plants and all the other elements of a living ecology. Plants don’t just look pretty; they also do stuff that actually matters, like making food, preventing erosion, reducing energy demand inside your house, attracting beneficial insects, and a whole lot more. Of course they’re pretty too, aren’t they? There’s nothing unsustainable about that!
This part shows you how to use plants effectively, create beautiful plantings that demand little upkeep, and even design a lawn that requires very infrequent mowing and watering. You see how to care for your soil and the life within it. You also discover how to buy good plants (including trees and shrubs), how to plant them, and how to care for them using the most sustainable approaches, new and ancient. The basics of organic pest, disease, and weed control are in this part too.
Chapter 16
Planting the Seed: Sustainable Plant Basics
In This Chapter
Picking appropriate plants
Understanding your soil (and how to deal with it)
Creating and using compost
Planting perfectly
Contributing to your landscape’s sustainability with mulch
The huge variety of plants, the complexities of soil and fertilizer, and the mysteries of creating and managing the living portion of the landscape can be overwhelming. This chapter introduces you to the world of living systems and gives you the confidence to get to work on your own sustainable paradise.
Because so much of the wasted effort and materials in the landscape result from poor planting choices, discovering how to use plants properly will greatly improve the environmental performance of your project and will also save you lots of trouble over the years.
Making Sustainable Plant Choices
If you pick plants well and combine them skillfully (two of the most important sustainability concepts), they’ll be an asset and a delight for decades and even centuries. Choose poorly, and they’ll torment you forever, growing too large, becoming invasive or hazardous, or suffering from poor growing conditions. So give the selection of trees, shrubs, and smaller plants your utmost attention. The following sections detail some practical matters to be aware of. (Check out Chapters 5 and 6 for plant, tree, and shrub design considerations.)
Discovering which plants are sustainable and why
A number of factors make any given plant sustainable in a particular application and setting. A plant that’s sustainable in one place would be dreadful in another. Here are some general guidelines to consider when choosing plants sustainably:
Learn all you can about each location on your property, and match plants carefully to the light, soil conditions, and other factors.
Choose plants that are adapted to your climate.
Pick long-lived plants so you don’t have to replace them often.
Choose plants that are resistant to pests and diseases. Often one cultivar will do better than another in your area.
Where appropriate, emphasize local native plants because they’ve had millions of years to adapt to local conditions. But realize that many exotic plants from similar climates will be just as successful as natives.
Avoid invasive or troublesome species. There are often official lists of problematic exotic plants in your area; take these seriously.
Consider the need for inputs like water and fertilizer. Tough plants don’t need much of either.
Screen your prospective plants for drawbacks, such as susceptibility to wind, high flammability, and thorns to name a few. Avoid trees that may crack your pavement with their extensive root systems, drop sap or seeds, or poison the neighborhood kids.
Loading up on plant information
Information on plants is everywhere. Because gardening is one of the most popular leisure-time activities, ample advice is just waiting for you to find it. However, as with most things, some of that advice is bad, so choose well-established sources. The following are some great ways to learn about plants:
Look at mature specimens. Visit real plants in real places, not in pots at the nursery where they all look pretty much the same and there’s no hint that one plant will grow to 100 feet tall while another will stay a foot or so.
Botanic gardens offer mature plantings in well thought-out combinations, with good labels and lots of chipper staff to answer your questions. Public parks often contain a remarkable variety of species as well. Walk around neighborhoods, especially your own, to see which plants are doing well. Go on garden tours.
Seek out gardening books that address your region. Nothing is quite like a good plant encyclopedia to get you up to speed on an unfamiliar species.
Take advantage of the Internet. Many wholesale growers and retail nurseries have great Web sites. So may the cooperative extension service or ornamental horticulture department of your state university. Search for the scientific name of a plant.
Be sociable. Gardeners love to talk. Strike up conversations in nurseries and at public gardens, or pester people working in their front yards. Tap the (free!) wisdom that’s all around you.
Size does matter: Giving plants room to grow
Plants aren’t just pretty things to put around the yard; they’re living organisms with their own way of getting along in the world. They have a very specific destiny — a set of genetic instructions that determine their height, width, growth rate, and many other characteristics. Plants are indifferent to your needs. This concept is difficult for a plant lover to accept, but it’s true. Plants don’t give a hoot about you and your landscaping. Sorry.
This means that your job as a landscaper is to figure out what plants need and then make sure they get it. Suppose you put a 20-foot wide shrub where you want a 4-foot one. The shrub, in its blissful ignorance, will keep trying to grow to 20 feet wide, and you’ll have to keep cutting it back. A plant can’t be trained as if it were a dog, and your relationship with that plant will go on unchanged, with much labor on your part, until you finally take it out and put in something that grows to the proper size.
The implications of not giving plants room to grow are many:
You work harder, finding yourself in a constant battle with your yard. The battle gets bloodier the more oversized plants you have.
The plants suffer from the abuse necessary to keep them in bounds. They look cut-back rather than natural, and some may never flower.
Your green waste container is always full of clippings. Green waste is the plant parts you remove in the course of pruning work.
Pruning is bothersome and wastes energy. The energy use and noise from using power tools and hauling clippings away is bad news.
I call this strategy adversarial horticulture, and believe me, it’s an epidemic. In some gardens, 80 percent of the work consists of cutting plants back all the time. It’s unnecessary and is a sign of terrible, unsustainable planning.
The remedy, of course, is simple. Believe the gardening books when they list sizes. Choose plants that grow to the size you want for any given application. Then enjoy watching the garden develop into a graceful state of equilibrium, getting easier to live with rather than harder.
Starting off on the right root: Choosing healthy plants
Suppose you had to choose between three plants at the nursery — all the same variety and all in the same sized containers. One is huge and in luscious...
