Landscape Triage: Rescuing Older Landscapes

April 12, 2022, 12:00 PM PDT

The Old Way of Doing Things:

• Broad expanses of turf maintained by armies of mowers and edgers, over-fertilized, over-watered, and toxic with herbicides.

• Miles of hedges needing constant 2-cycle hedging.

• Shrubs cut into unnatural cubes and spheres.

• Mulch? Nope, it's all been blown away on a weekly basis for years.

• Compacted dirt in these landscapes gets regular doses of herbicides to keep down the weeds trying to repair the ecological niches.

It's so sad once you understand the wasted water, the immense carbon footprint, and the pollution that drains from these sites. But they are everywhere. "Clean & Green" it was called. "Ecological Disaster" is closer to the truth. "Boring" is another good description.

What to do? There are budgets! How can we TRIAGE these wastescapes and transform them into the fertile, biodiverse, and beautiful climate-appropriate and ecologically functioning Landscapes we now desire? How do we prioritize the improvements? How will we maintain them? The desired transition can be overwhelming to property owners, BOD's and property managers.

Dave will present a logical, strategic approach, and the compelling message to help sell incremental improvements that can, over time, bring these older sites into the new paradigm of California's ecologically functioning landscape aesthetic while improving code compliance -and promoting buy in from stakeholders and users of the sites.