Sustainable Design

A sustainable landscape recognizes these issues and is designed to help alleviate them. This approach to landscape design is commonly known as sustainable design. Collectively, these living organisms form an interconnected web of life embracing the entire residential landscape. A range of sustainable principles and strategies are discussed in detail in the fol­lowing sections of this chapter. Sustainable principles do guide design choices while simultaneously permitting considerable freedom and room for design creativity. A sustainable design can potentially have a great deal of control and look highly maintained if that is the intent. • coordinate with natural events and cycles. Sustainable design is integrated into the
landscape with minimal impact on the land while supporting the health of all living organisms on the site. Less obvious to the eye are millions of microorganisms that exist in the air, plants, and soil. Similar terms for sustainable design are design with nature, green design, environmentally sensitive design, and low-impact design. The natural forces likewise animate the landscape as they touch, move through, or seasonally alter every aspect of the outdoor environment. • restore damaged sites. Undertaking one strategy often contributes to others as well. The desire to create a sustainable residential site that is sensitive to both the near and distant natural environment is an encompassing design philosophy that affects all steps of the design process and numerous decisions about what elements to include in a design, along with their location and material. Simply stated, “sustainable” means ongoing, enduring, and self-sufficient. Like the concept of creating outdoor rooms or aesthetic guidelines, sustainable principles and techniques provide a frame­work to design within. • reuse and recycle. However, sustainability does not mean that a site must look completely “natural” to be “sustainable.” A sustainable site design can appear natural if desired, but it can also be created in many other styles in any geographic location. Thus, “sustainable landscape design” is a process of creating an outdoor environment that is capable of enduring over time in a self-sufficient manner with minimal expense of energy and maintenance. This chapter examines what sustainable landscape design is and presents numerous design and management strategies for making a residential site environmentally fit. It is important to realize that every residential site is not an isolated island but rather an integral part of an environmental continuum where all things and processes are inter­connected. • create a healthy environment. INTRODUCTION
Although there are many commonalities between designing interior and exterior rooms, one significant difference is that the exterior space exists in the outdoor envi­ronment where natural elements and processes are constantly present. Sustainable landscape design is a desirable concept not only for the benefits to an individual residential site, but for the larger environmental context as well. These ever-present forces provide the necessary ingredients for life to exist, though they can be devastating when there is too much or too little of any of them. Accomplished design should also be considerate of the larger environmental issues affecting the region, country, and world. • have minimal site impact. Thus, the various principles and strategies should be implemented collectively so that they can have the greatest opportunity of creating a sustainable residential landscape.