What is a Regenerative Landscape?
A designed landscape is both artistic and functional, using space, forms, and shapes via plants, hardscaping (rocks, concrete, wood, etc.), water, and human-based elements like furniture and sculpture to create or change an area so that people can enjoy the outdoors. But is there more that we can do to help the environment? Can we stabilize the current conditions while being efficient with expenses and energy? Or can we go further and try to build a landscape that resembles the ecology of an area from before colonization?
Incorporating ecology
Beyond the artistic and functional qualities of a landscape designed around how we live, there is an ecological component. After all, we’re talking about the outdoors. For example, we enjoy deciduous trees for their size, their shade in summer, the changing leaf colors in autumn, and their branches reaching to the sky in winter. Pines, firs, spruces, hollies, and others keep their leaves through winter, and we enjoy seeing green in a landscape that’s otherwise gray. The trees harbor birds and squirrels, butterflies and moths, and other insects- these creatures form part of the ecological system around us with trees, shrubs, and other plants as well as each other. Plants form communities also.
Putting plant communities first
Plant communities are found everywhere, even in urban areas. Native plant communities have evolved to grow in areas where they can live in that soil type, with the amount of rainfall the area receives, sunlight, temperature range, slope of the land, and more. We can work towards regenerating an area from common turf and well known trees, shrubs, perennials, and annuals that originally came from a faraway part of the world to installing native plants that require less maintenance. These natives evolved to grow in these soils and these conditions. With some research, we can determine what plants will grow best in a specific soil, and install them to become a beautiful landscape that also becomes a good home for the wildlife.
Daisyenne Designs LLC is proud to encourage sustainable and regenerative landscapes for the artistic and functional uses of the people using them, and for the future health of our world.
