“Sustainability for what?”
“Well, for landscape areas.”
“Landscape areas – you mean the paved walkways, planting beds, seating spots, and so on around public buildings?”
“Yes.”
“For those landscaped areas a worthwhile approach is sometimes called “designer ecology”. That’s an aesthetic, educational, and inspirational design with straightforward user programming that recalls the native habitat type of the place. People love it, even though it often requires intensive gardening maintenance.”
“OK but what about for larger areas?”
“You mean like 50 or 100 or even 500 acres?”
“Sure.”
“The larger the area the more chance that it will have capacity for ecological resilience. Resilience – that’s the ability to recover from disturbance, accommodate change, and basically continue to function in a healthy way.”
“Can you design resilience?”
“One approach is to establish hearth areas with native plants: you might establish a wetland area, a sunny oak grove, a cool pine stand, and an open field. Then let nature take its course. We can’t really predict how that landscape will develop but creating habitat diversity and allowing nature to build up biodiversity we are creating the beginnings of a sustainable landscape."
“Beginnings… so there’s more to it?"
“Yup: even the designer ecology pocket park is much more sustainable if it is connected to other natural areas. You know native birds will inhabit any area with the native trees that they like, but only if they can see them and get to them. So the downtown designer parks connected by a greenway bicycle path connected to larger parks in the suburbs which are in turn connected by greenways and stream corridors to big old remnant forests and fields outside the city has a lot more resilience."
“Aren’t we forgetting something?"
“Like what?"
“People! All that ecology stuff sounds lovely but landscaping is for people, isn’t it? You want to go for a walk or a run, have lunch with your co-workers outside, picnic with your kids, have coffee with your boyfriend, or play a pick-up game of football with your buddies. Like that old winery they are going to turn into a park. . . and besides, who is going to pay for all that ecology – so if they do turn that winery into a park it will have to be revenue-generating.”
“You’re right. Any large landscape area, whether it is a corporate campus or a public park, is probably going to have both ecological and programmatic complexity. So you build the wetland, and it also works for stormwater management. You establish a forest grove, and it also works for shade. When they do that winery they should remember to include hiking trails, interpretation, and they can turn the courtyard into a multi-use plaza with a coffee place for informal hanging out and programmed events like outdoor theatre. They could even reestablish a small winery operation, sell memberships, and members would produce a vintage every year with the old label...
Keeping the old winery buildings with their outdoor courtyards and updating their use is another part of landscape sustainability – it is called maintaining the cultural landscape, and people really love to poke around, explore it. It connects them to the lives of their Moms and Dads who worked in the winery, and lets their kids get to know what it was like.
Any landscape, big or small, could be successful and maybe live on long past its builders time if it is ecologically resilient and if it has a constituency of people who love it and use it and for whom it carries meaning.”
