Sustainable Landscaping and Garden Design

Q: I want to live in a way that benefits my family, the animals and pollinators around us, and the planet. I’d like to know more about sustainable landscaping. What are some simple things I can do in my garden to live in harmony with my surroundings?

A: You can make significant and lasting improvements to your environment (and even save yourself money) by following sustainable garden design and landscaping practices.

Below are a few easy steps you can take to plan, plant, and maintain a garden that will bring you joy, support your ecosystem, and help rather than harm Mother Earth.

Work With Your Climate & Setting

Sometimes we get stuck wanting to recreate our mental image of what a garden should be instead of focusing on the materials that nature has given us to work with. Just as you can’t create a cactus garden in a marshy bog, you can’t expect to create a lush and constantly thirsty garden in an arid landscape. Sustainable landscaping involves choosing plants, soils, and soil amendments that work with the climate and setting you have.

Plant placement matters

Before you place your plants in the ground, consider your garden’s layout, lighting, moisture, and temperature. Where’s it hot and dry? Where’s it shady and damp? And how many hours of full or partial sun does each part of your garden get?

Some plants, like hydrangeas (whose very name means “water jar”), require a lot of water. They fade rapidly or fail to thrive if planted in soil that can’t retain water. While they enjoy sunshine, constant full sun can stress them, especially if their roots aren’t shaded. Placing a hydrangea at the top of a hill in a garden where it fights with gravity’s pull on its water supply can cause stunted growth. Moving that hydrangea six feet away to a spot at the bottom of the hill where the rain’s runoff gathers around its roots can make all the difference.

Plants native to Mediterranean climates want plenty of direct sun and need soil that drains well so they don’t get soggy roots. For example, lily of the Nile (agapanthus) needs six to eight hours of sunlight daily. If roots get and stay too wet, it can rot. Planting agapanthus at the bottom of a hill where it gets constant water runoff is a bad idea. Sustainable landscaping keeps light, heat, and drainage needs in mind.

Minimize the Need to Irrigate

Do you live in an area that periodically experiences droughts? Planting thirsty species that need a lot of watering even after they’re well established makes little sense in a climate that doesn’t get regular rain. Xeriscaping (using plants that need less water and handle full sun well) makes the most of your land and produces healthier plants. It also uses less water. You avoid dealing with sky-high water bills and a lot of dead plants that need regular replacement, and your plants grow robust and beautiful.

Even if you get plenty of rain, you may need to redistribute it to make your garden happy. Gathering water passively in rain barrels lets you supply watering cans with plenty of water without running your sprinklers. This is especially helpful if you have potted plants, or if you don’t have a built-in irrigation system.

Grass lawns are huge water sinks, and people often water them incorrectly, so they lose much more water than they would if they were watered properly. Let’s talk a bit about choosing and caring for lawns.

Replace or minimize grassy monocultures

A large patch of a single kind of planting (a monoculture) such as a lawn fights against plants’ natural inclination to spread and mingle. It’s a lot to ask grass to stay all one color, all one length, and to keep it from allowing any clover, dandelions, ranunculus, or other spreading plants to touch it!

Lawns tend to be cut frequently and close to the ground. This means their roots aren’t shaded, and water evaporates more quickly. Keeping grass evenly green and thick is very difficult, so gardeners often resort to heavy fertilizer and pesticide use. This messes with the ecology of a garden, killing both predators and beneficial insects and animals. It can sometime put human health at risk as well.

Limiting the amount of lawn you care for, or eliminating lawns completely, is the most sustainable option. You use less water, and can plant more native plants that attract and support wildlife and pollinators. I like to take over some of my former lawn areas and plant beds with easy-care perennials, evergreen shrubs, and groundcovers. These provide color, flowers for pollinators, berries for birds, and leaves throughout the year.

Get the most from each drop

If you love your lawn and want to keep it, follow a few steps to water most effectively:

• Water early in the day: If you water before 10 a.m., less water will evaporate before it gets to the lawn’s roots, and roots will stay cooler. Well-watered grass stands up to heat better, and grows and stays stronger. Night watering or frequent light watering leaves water sitting around the roots too long, which supports fungal growth. You end up with mushrooms and weak, yellow grass.
• Water less often and more deeply: Lawns’ roots need 1” to 1-1/2” of water per week. Water should moisten the soil to about 6”. If your lawn’s soil is too hard and dry to insert a screwdriver 6” into it, water more deeply. 
• Water clay soils twice a week, and sandy soils every three days: Water moves through sandy soil faster—that’s why cacti and succulents prefer it.
• Don’t rake grass clippings: When you mow, leave clippings on the lawn. They’ll fertilize grass as they break down, shade roots, and help the lawn retain moisture, so you can water less.
• Leave grass a little longer: Whether you leave clippings or rake them, adjust your mower blades higher so grass is longer. This shades roots so water doesn’t evaporate as quickly.

For excellent tips on the smartest ways to water your lawn, I recommend this article from Popular Mechanics.

Use Native Plants

Using all or mostly native plants in your garden is an excellent choice. Natives provide food and shelter to native animals and pollinating insects. They help endangered pollinator species that can’t gather the nourishment they need. If they don’t find enough natives, they’ll die, as will the crops we eat that depend on them for pollination.  Natives are also less susceptible to disease or failure, and are easily available (which means they’re often cheaper).

Avoid non-natives that are invasive in your planting zone. Some that are perfectly beautiful can become problematic if they crowd out and take over from natives. Butterfly bush, holly, some honeysuckles, and water hyacinths are attractive, and may even be sold at your local nursery. But when they kill off other plants and try to take over your garden, or send friendly animals and pollinators away hungry, they’re not so appealing any more.

Native ground covers like creeping sedum plants provide low-maintenance, low-water alternatives to lawns, and they appeal to pollinators, too.

To find out what plants you should avoid, ask a master gardener at your favorite nursery. You can also do an online search for “invasive plants” plus the name of your state or province.

Try Natural Pest Control

Avoiding synthetic herbicides is important for a safe and sustainable garden. Weed killers like glyphosate (found in products such as Round-Up and Rodeo) do kill dandelions effectively. However, they also poison insects and insect-eating animals like birds and amphibians that keep wetlands in balance. Then the pesticides in those animals spread to larger animals that eat them. Pesticides can also get into human bloodstreams, with sometimes dire consequences. Some can cause cancer or birth defects.

Native plants need less fussing and intervention. With them, you can skip herbicides and pesticides, or use more natural forms, like vinegar-based herbicides.

For more about sustainable weed killing and removal options, I recommend this Washington Post article. Among its suggestions are these:

• Avoid the void: Don’t leave empty spaces in your garden. Weeds seek them out, germinate, and spread. Crowd them out with other plants instead. Consider filling in around shrubs and trees with native perennial groundcovers.
• Use “green manure”: Vegetable gardens require exposed soil, so pulling weeds regularly when they’re small is the most effective method. During off seasons, plant winter rye, vetch, or clover. These cover crops or “green manure” crowd out weeds and enrich soil for spring planting.
• Try thin, sharp hoes and weeding knives: A Dutch hoe slices through weeds in tight areas. A Japanese hori-hori’s serrated edge cuts through weeds quickly.
• Solarize weedy areas to kill many weeds at once: A black plastic sheet is an effective temporary weed-killing tool in hot, sunny areas during summer.
• Try organic herbicides: Vinegar-based sprays, herbicidal soaps, and corn gluten products can be helpful while being critter-safe.

Compost Yard Waste

If you’re uncomfortable with leaving clippings on the lawn, compost them (along with other garden and food waste). A composter with a handle makes the task of turning the scraps into usable compost simple. Mix the contents of the composter about every two to four weeks so that it all disintegrates at a similar rate. For best results, don’t turn compost more often than every two weeks. The center of the compost needs to stay still and rot enough to rise in temperature and promote healthy bacterial activity.

Covered compost bins are better than open piles. They keep animals or flies from gathering around or digging through your compost. They also keep the compost warmer and not as wet, so it breaks down faster. Just remove the lid and toss the contents around with a long-handled spade every few weeks. Then spread all that free, nutrient-rich composted soil throughout your garden for happier plants!

Make Your Garden a Gift to the Planet

Healthy, happy, sustainable outdoor spaces bring joy. They create places to play and relax in, help pollinators, and support ecodiversity. Thanks for doing your part to make your corner of the world livelier and lovelier.

To read more about sustainable living and beautiful, affordable sustainable furnishings and decorating, see my article, Sustainable Interior Design.

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A garden doesn’t need a lawn to be comfortable, beautiful and welcoming. Mixing evergreen and deciduous shrubs, trees, and flowering perennials makes a beautiful outdoor space all year round | Maria Orlova for Pexels (Detail)