Water Smart garden design is easy. Below are a few basics that can make any garden Water Smart. By incorporating these basics, success will come easy to those who take on the challenge.
Water-smart landscapes are not rock and cactus. A well-designed Xeriscape landscape should look like it belongs in any popular home and gardening magazine.
Additionally, you don’t need to totally redo your yard to achieve substantial water savings. Many simple ideas can be incorporated into your existing landscapes. I have listed some key design ideas below and provided some photos to provide you with some inspiration. Basically, using good, fundamental landscape design techniques will lead to not only an attractive yard, but also to water savings. Let’s look at some ways to design a water smart yard.
- Install a controller that self-adjusts to the weather
- Use low volume irrigation
- Choose plants with a variety of colors and textures
- Don’t choose plants that will outgrow their environments
- Choose plants with a tighter, slower growth habit
- Add multi-trunk tree canopy to create vertical interest
- Pick a low growing (turf substitute) groundcover for foreground planting
- Incorporate hardscape that ties to the naturalistic design
- Use natural looking groundcover textures like dry creeks and boulders or decomposed granite to enhance the natural look
- Contour grade the site to add intrest on the ground plane
#4 drives me crazy when I see it in the field. Every landscape architect should intern for a week for a maintenance company. They would pick up a lot of valuable information to help their designs be better maintained.
Nice article and good pics.
Lots of landscape will benefit from xeriscapiing. These drought summers are becoming the new weather pattern. If you have a water-greedy landscape it is time for a change.
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