Ecological Gardening Services to cultivate beauty & habitat
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My approach:
Over recurring gardening visits, I’ll help cultivate a naturalistic landscape design for your outdoor space to suit your needs, support local ecology, and offer year-round interest and intrigue. Services include consultation, plant inventorying, possibly mowing, and customized maintenance with seed sowing, planting, and cutting back to build up a unique plant palette and encourage the underlying native plant community while managing weeds and invasive plants.
Layered Plant Communities
Different groups of plants evolved to share space and resources together for each kind of landscape setting, so encouraging an appropriate plant community will offer more stability than simply relying on a thick layer of mulch, year after year. Encouraging plant communities over reliance on mulch also allows a more dynamic, symphonic arrangement of sizes, shapes, and texture that hums with life, resists weed pressure better, and can better withstand the stresses of climate change.
Below are some examples of a range of different plant communities--some designed, some natural, and some a cosmopolitan mix of ornamentals, weeds, invasives, and natives--that inspire my thinking of resilient planting design:
Space for Life
Leaving leaves, dead plant stalks, rotting wood, and a variety of plants for cover immensely supports healthy soil creation, favorable growing conditions for plants, and wildlife habitat and connectivity--features which are particularly rare and needed in urbanizing environments.
Responsive Design
Managing a new landscape through maintenance over time can reveal challenges and opportunities that can otherwise be overlooked with a speedier design and installation. By gradually managing invasives, preserving desirable plants, observing changing conditions, usage of space, etc., a more harmonious design can be achieved.
Services
Design Consult
Land Care:
- Manage Invasive Plants
- Pruning, Periodic “Mowing”
- Diversify Garden Beds/Layered Life
- Reduce/Rewild Your Lawn
- Ecological Stormwater Management/Rain Gardens/Green Infrastructure