Business add-ons: sustainable landscape rehabilitation plans and sustainable landscape maintenance specifications.
Like many of your clients’ properties, a vast number of large private properties in the Bay Area were designed in the 1960s and ’70s, without much thought given to the long-term impacts of their landscape. They are now encountering issues such as overplanting, which shades out other plants, inappropriate plants for the immediate microclimate, and the need for excessive water, fertilizers, and fossil fuels to manage them. The problems have been exacerbated by lack of forethought in the original design, poor management practices and the fact that these properties have now reached the end of their viable life cycle.
The problems with older landscapes present a great business opportunity for landscape professionals.
San Francisco Bay Area landscape architect design firm Simmonds & Associates, Inc., in association with Linda J. Novy, are offering sustainable landscape rehabilitation plans and sustainable landscape maintenance specifications for owners of these properties. Novy founded the Bay Area landscape management company, Gardeners Guild, in 1976 and grew it from seven to 125 employees before selling it to those employees in 2003.
“We work with clients to establish a program that is phased to their budget requirements,” says San Francisco Bay Area landscape architect Warren Simmonds. Simmonds says that landscape rehabilitation may be phased over several years to make it affordable. The initial steps involve discovering and mapping what is already on the site and taking inventory of what is working and what is not.
Simmonds and Novy take a sustainable approach to rehabilitating landscapes seen at corporate campuses, homeowners’ association properties, and medical campuses. They analyze the microclimates on the property, the current condition of the soil, the water use, the state of plantings, and the native vegetation that once prevailed on the property. From that point, they can develop a plan that significantly reduces all the negative impacts and can save the owner significant amounts of money in landscape maintenance costs.
“We will likely bring in an arborist for a thorough evaluation of the trees, an irrigation consultant for a detailed assessment of the watering system, and a soil testing lab to analyze the soil for us,” says Novy. “Once we have all the data we can prioritize which areas need immediate attention. By the second or third phase, the savings in maintenance and water costs can be reallocated to future phases of rehabilitation.”
Simmonds and Novy use plants that require little or no summer water, that will thrive in the location they are planted in, and do not require constant pruning.
“We need to move past the kind of maintenance where pruning the shrubs into little round balls is seen as good maintenance” says Simmonds.
“We need to move from mow-and-blow maintenance, to an ecological stewardship of the property,” says Novy. “This requires a degree of re-training maintenance personnel.”
Simmonds and Novy also work with the maintenance personnel to help them understand the principals of sustainability and the ongoing needs of the plants and trees they are installing to ensure their long-term success.
