Sustainability in Practice —
Manage or Maintain? Thinking Differently About Landscapes by Heather Prince
As clients increasingly discover
and demand new styles or aesthetics in their landscapes, contractors, designers, and architects are having to adapt. Be it the New Perennial Movement, meadow gardens, or prairie-style yards, these plant-dense styles of landscape design are increasing in popularity in public and private spaces. We talked to Kelly Norris, Director of Horticulture at the Greater Des Moines Botanical Garden, about these new directions and what it might mean for our clients and the companies that create and work with these sites. “I think we need a semantic shift. We’re still engaging with land, we’re
48
just changing the rules of the game. Instead of the agronomic point of view where the goal at the end of a season is to win and harvest something, landscaping and gardening is now a game without an end, it just keeps going forward,” commented Norris. Gardening as an offshoot of farming in many ways has underlying roots in the production of something tangible. However, as we learn about and employ plants’ complex relationships, there aren’t necessarily literal fruits of our labor. Instead, we build communities for ourselves and our sites where the ebb and flow of life brings pleasure and perhaps contentment. Plant communities like a meadow with a mix of perennials and grasses
The Landscape Contractor July 2020
require management. Weeds are managed, but plants are allowed to intermingle and reseed or spread to their best situations. In essence, you plant or seed it, weed it, and see what happens. This is a very different approach than a more traditional design where plants are treated as static forms to be kept to a particular aesthetic that often involves a high degree of care or maintenance. Examples of maintenance might be shearing, deadheading, heading back, or cleaning up. “The mindset becomes different. It’s management, not maintenance. When we manage we contribute to growth. When we maintain, it’s a static achievement, we’re keeping something at a fixed point (continued on page 50)
