Ecological Land Care to cultivate beauty & habitat
Website Update in Progress!!
My Approach to Land Care Work & Design
Currently, I do a few things:
Over recurring Land Care visits from about March through November, I cultivate a yard’s existing native plant communities and work with clients to blend their landscape goals and space activities more softly into their neighborhood ecosystem. The plant community expression of each yard and neighborhood is a special thing to behold and learn to integrate with, and this connection is something I try to cultivate. This is most of my work, currently. Design happens with every decision of what to leave and encourage, and what to cut, weed out, and discourage. Each year brings more understanding of the plant communities at different successional stages and the life that shapes them.
In the slower months of the year--mid-late summer, and winter especially, I work on Landscape Design Plans for a couple of clients, usually a large one in the winter and a smaller project in late summer. These are garden designs that I aim to blend into the native plant communities of the space. I aim for full garden beds of plants to occupy different niches of time and space, with the goal of cultivating stability, little to no future inputs of mulch, fertilizers, or treatments--just some monthly weeding, cutting, and the occasional transplanting. My designs are informed by my land care experience, which I think is crucial to great design, because land care is design! :)
The slower months of June, July, and August are also a good time for me to consult on and work on Land Management Plans for larger properties--not a garden, but thoughtful tending plans for the “edge of the wild.”
For anybody who would just like a little direction, and for both my Land Care and Design Project clients, I offer and begin with an hour or so of a consultation. In these visits, I do some contextual research beforehand, take your goals into mind, look around with you at your landscape of interest, share the plant species I notice and what appears to be happening onsite, and give my thoughts on how I might approach next steps of land care or design planning. Contact me to learn more!
April and May are the busiest times--a winter’s big design project is prepared, plants gathered and planted, consultations are happening, and Land Care for my clients starts up around this time as well. A second wave comes around September and October. My best times for chatting about new projects, including consultations and garden coaching, are just after these periods.
It’s mostly just me for now, but I’m thinking though having a crew of sorts and interested in collaborations! Community Land Care is a concept near and dear to my heart. You can also find me working on these ideas within the Greenfield Open Space Task Force, where we focus furthering Greenfield’s conservation and thoughtful stewardship of Greenfield Open Space, and occassionally with Greening Greenfield.
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
Tending a new landscape through care over time can reveal challenges and opportunities that can otherwise be overlooked with a speedier design and installation. By gradually managing invasive plants, tending a balance of differently competitive native and garden plants, observing changing conditions, usage of space, designs evolve and take shape in greater complexity, stability, and harmony.