Here is the planting plan for the irrigation-free landscape. It’s curves layered upon curves layered upon curves and proved a wee bit difficult to translate into marked locations on the ground. But, after a bit of doing, we figured it out.

The above image shows all of the plants in the drawing marked out within the planting zone. It also shows the pathways excavated out, which will be filled with crushed Minnesota limestone. This limestone will double as the mulch for the plants as well. One seamless surface, and site and soil conditions that mimic the natural growing conditions of the plants chosen.

Cotinus coggygria “Golden Spirit”, one of numerous plants we will be using in the irrigation-free landscape

Spring is upon us, and PRAIRIEFORM has embarked on the installation of the irrigation-free landscape, a new landscape type we have developed that merges new techniques for real drought tolerance with a tidy but wildlife-friendly aesthetic. The idea is that even when we go through stretches of drought, the landscape will be able to survive and thrive without the aid of a sprinkler.

We will be chronicling the progress of the landscape over the course of its installation, through the summer during the drought training for the plants, and up to the final watering at the end of August when we send the landscape off on its own to brave the elements that may come before it. Before we even begin the chronicling, though, we thought it might make sense to give a bit of the back story behind the landscape and why we even came up with it in the first place, and why we would even bother to go through the effort of seeking funding and drumming up support for something that is half ornamental landscape, half experiment, and the first of its kind in the state of Minnesota. The story starts in Los Angeles and ends in Minneapolis, with stops in between in Mexico and Sweden.

Next post: on Los Angeles and its inspiration for the irrigation-free landscape.

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Early pollinator on apple tree in MPLS

Oh dear we’ve been busy, lining up logistics for planting for the irrigation-free landscape. In any case, just wanted to post this lovely photo of an early butterfly on an apple tree just outside the window. We used to think of apple trees as humdrum boring trees you just picked food from, but then a trip to Rosendals Trädgård in Stockholm changed all of that. Sometimes it takes stepping outside of your usual surroundings, and with the right people, to make you see an old plant anew and in a different light.

There is much talk surrounding urban gardens and their potential benefits to habitat, water conservation, minimizing the heat island effect, and so on. Some of these said benefits are grounded in research, while some are not. There is something to be said for not caring whether every element of one’s garden has withstood the microscope of scientific inquiry, as it is a garden after all, and it is supposed to provide space and time for relaxation and enjoyment and not always a forum for cerebral head-scratching. In any case, if we are to make claims that an urban garden can and does achieve a whole host of goals pertaining to sustainability, a bit of science to back them up would serve the cause well. Enter the Royal Horticultural Society (RHS) and their new endeavor to create a peer-reviewed guide to urban gardening that offers current gardeners and potential new ones advice rooted in real research and literature on what you can do and not do to ensure that your garden is a true beacon of green goodness and not simply one that has the veneer of being green. This effort to create outdoor spaces that are truly sustainable as opposed to ones that merely present a veneer of sustainability is something we strive to do in all of our work, so this report we could not be more excited about. The initial summary is available to read on their website, with the full, peer-reviewed report to come out in fall. Happy reading, everyone.

Dead turf outside of Los Angeles City Hall

For those who haven’t been following the recent sequence of events unfolding atop the lawn surrounding Los Angeles City Hall, we will tell you this: Occupy LA encampments smothered the lawn, now they’re gone, and a debate is ensuing about whether to re-turf the entire thing or mix low-water planting beds into the mix so as to demonstrate that the City is genuinely committed to water conservation. The latest and greatest is that the City is going with a design that includes a 51% reduction of turf, and the addition of drought-tolerant plants in designated planting beds. Well, it wouldn’t be 2012 without the addition to the discussion of the native-plant people, who continue to insist that “drought-tolerant” isn’t good enough; rather, the new plants must also all be native, as natives are “best,” and are “drought-tolerant,” “showy,” “low-maintenance,” and “low-cost.” In short, native plants are that flawless big botanical secret that will rock your world so hard you’ll never look back. And this is where we firmly take issue: These positive, glowing modifiers (e.g. showy, low-maintenance, drought-tolerant) are said in the same breath as “native plants” to the point of obfuscation. Not all native plants are particularly “showy,” not all are drought-tolerant, not all are low-maintenance, and, well, whether they are “best” is simply a matter of opinion and aesthetic taste. The native plant agenda is pushed so hard that certain truths are simply overlooked and brushed under the table.

Truth be told, we at PRAIRIEFORM actually do dig a ton of native plants and use them probably 75% of the time in our landscapes. And we think it would be great if more people incorporated them into their everyday planting beds. However, we would never go so far as to automatically equate “native” with “low-maintenance,” “drought-tolerant,” and “showy.” Some native plants really aren’t that showy and can look downright scrappy; many are endemic to woodland and riparian areas where they are dependent on water; and each has its own pruning and soil requirements, which, in the context of a large planting bed, translates into a large amount of skill and knowledge that is required to maintain it. No, lawns aren’t no-maintenance, but they require little knowledge to maintain other than how to prime a lawnmower motor and how to apply some fertilizer here and there. Their dense thatch of growth means that weeds, while they appear, do not appear as readily as they do in a planting bed, where space between the plants creates an optimum growing space for them. And pruning means simply firing up the mower once a week and giving the lawn a trim. In the context of a commercial or public landscape, the relative simplicity of lawn maintenance means that low-skilled, low-paid workers can be contracted out to do the upkeep at a minimal cost to the property owner. The same simply cannot be said of a landscape with sophisticated planting beds, including all-native planting beds.

Any planting bed requires a keen knowledge of the particular requirements of each plant – their water needs (yes, there is a range of drought-tolerance), pruning (what time of year? how (e.g. selective, all the way to the ground)?, and whether they are weeds or not). Weed identification, while perhaps at first glance sounds ridiculous, can be tricky, as some young plants will genuinely look like weeds, and some recently pruned or dormant plants (especially those that require a hard pruning to the ground) will look either dead or like something you don’t want around. The crew hired to maintain a planting bed will need to be trained in all of the aforementioned areas – whether the landscape be non-native, a mix of natives and non-, or a fully native bed – otherwise the landscape will fall into disrepair. This hiring and training of one such crew is where the increase in cost of such a landscape comes in – especially because in Southern California such skilled crews are few and far between and come at a serious premium.

Training and maintenance costs aside, we close this post with an aesthetic observation regarding native-plant gardens: we are hard pressed to find ONE landscape in Southern California that consists ENTIRELY of native plants and that looks visually stunning (the way a garden should) for 3/4 of the year. Sure there is perhaps that one- to two-month stretch where the landscape is in bloom, but for the rest of the year it is largely dormant and lackluster. And this is why even on purely aesthetic grounds alone we advocate for a mix of natives and non-: in a region whose denizens are used to year-round bloom and green, you are simply not going to gain converts to your cause if you ask them to appreciate gardens that peak for just a fraction of the year. It’s not going to happen. You have to mix in non-natives that will bloom and flourish when the native ones lie dormant. Yes, there will be a period in late summer and early fall where even this mixed drought-tolerant landscape will essentially be asleep, but 10 months of botanical splendor vs. two we will take any day, as will many many others. This whole “well-you-should-think-it’s-pretty-because-it’s-native” approach simply won’t cut it, and won’t cut it in front of City Hall, where the landscape should not only demonstrate the City’s commitment to water conservation, but should display the wide, vast array of non-invasive, drought-tolerant plants from around the world that can be arranged and planted to create a landscape of show-stopping beauty and splendor.

For more information on the City Hall landscape, click here.