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The most important step in Our Process as ecological landscape designers is site evaluation. Many properties, especially estates, have a multitude of microclimates with unique site conditions that allow certain plants to thrive and others to decline.

Sun paths throughout the year. image courtesy of House Plan Helper.

Sun Requirements

Assessing the amount of sunlight goes beyond the aspect (direction) of the zone; afternoon sun is stronger than morning sun, for example. Fences, trees, sheds and neighboring homes may cast significant shadows. Consider all these factors and then decide if your site gets 6-8 hours of direct sunlight daily. If so, consider it a full sun site and pick your plants accordingly.

A designed native meadow in Fairfield County, CT.

Full Sun Native Environments

When we think of native full sun landscapes, they include meadows, grasslands, and prairies. Full sun plants often flower for extended periods of time and provide a multitude of ecological benefits, from pollinator & bird habitat to carbon sequestration and stormwater absorption. The landscape design potential and ecosystem service potential are limitless in a full sun native landscape!

Many of our native, full-sun perennials are host plants for lepidoptera (butterflies and moths). Their nectar provides ample food throughout the growing season, and seed heads become fodder for birds in late summer and fall. Choosing native plants for your full sun site will make your property a thriving haven of birds, bees, and butterflies.

A designed faux-meadow next to an established wet meadow.

Soil Analysis to Inform Landscape Design

It is important to distinguish the hydrology of your site as well. Plants are designated a Wetland Indicator Status that determines how much soil moisture they require.

The scale ranges from:

Obligate Wetland: Occurs almost always in wetlands (99%)

Facultative Wetland: Usually occurs in wetlands, but occasionally found in non-wetlands (67-99%)

Facultative: Equally likely to occur in wetlands and non-wetlands (34-66%)

Facultative Upland: Usually occur in non-wetlands but occasionally found in wetlands (1-33%)

Upland: Almost always occurs in non-wetlands in the specified region (1%)

We start every project by collecting a soil sample and sending it to local labs for physical and chemical analysis. Understanding the soil structure, pH, organic matter content, and essential nutrient & mineral content is quite literally vital information. The results and analysis from the soil test inform our program for amending the soil. Green Jay’s Organic Land Management program always uses organic, natural source products, but each program is tailor-made to the site’s microclimate and design plan.

Most native prairie and meadow plants prefer a lean soil – not too rich in organic matter. We add amendments to cultivate soil microbes, correct pH, alleviate compaction, and add essential nutrients and minerals.

Favorite Native Full Sun Plants

For hot, dry, full sun sites, there are many beautiful natives to choose from. Some of our favorites are:

Blazing Star Liatris

Hyssop Agastache

Blackeyed Susan Rudbeckia

Coneflower Echinacea

Joe Pye Weed Eutrochium

Goldenrod Solidago

Asters Symphyotrichum

For damp to wet, full sun sites, there are also many stunning options, that often are more adept at cleaning soils and water of pollutants.

Cardinal Flower Lobelia

NY Ironweed Vernonia

Swamp Milkweed Asclepias

Swamp Rose Rosa

Blue Flag Iris Iris

Examples of Our Landscape Design Work on Full Sun Sites

Some of our fondest projects have been in beautiful, sunny Fairfield County, CT. Below is a roundup of our best landscape design work.

Private Nature Preserve in Greenwich, Connecticut

Perennial massing for a strong visual border along the pool area.

This stunning Connecticut estate has many full sun zones, including dual designed meadow gardens that flank an outdoor staircase. The pool area also received updated landscaping through long-blooming perennial gardens.

Modern pool landscaping featuring native perennials for pollinators.

Read more about the project on our previous blog post: #1 Estate-Scale Private Nature Preserve .

Garden beds define and relate landscape areas (ie. pool area and vegetable garden)

Modern Ecological Poolscape & Front Entry | Darien, CT

We had so much fun working on this contemporary home’s landscape plan, fusing together a clean minimalist aesthetic with ecologically beneficial plants. Textured, layered planting beds create habitat while contrasting with grand masonry. The existing meadow needed a revamp as much of the initial plant diversity had been lost due to improper management. Learn more about the project on our previous blog.

Front Yard Permaculture Garden | Darien, CT

This was an incredibly unique project that incorporated permaculture theory, edibles, and making the front yard a functional chicken enclosure! Thank you to our amazing clients for reimagining front yard beauty standards! This Darien, CT property is productive, organic and provides countless ecosystem services. Learn more about the project on our previous blog.

Thanks to the excellent reporting from Westchester Magazine, there is more attention and public awareness than ever on ecological landscape design. Residential neighborhoods all over Westchester, Putnam & Fairfield counties are turning toward organic landscaping that mitigates climate change, restores habitats, and maximizes ecosystem services. As spring approaches, now is a perfect time to evaluate your landscape from an ecological perspective. Consider hiring a landscape designer to help transform your property into an eco-friendly yard. Jay Archer was featured along with our much-respected colleagues, Amanda Bayley of Plan it Wild and Catherine Wachs of The Lazy Gardner, all of whom provide valuable tips and tricks for an environmentally-friendly home landscape.

Jay’s home landscape is a symphony of native flowering perennials, shrubs, trees & a designed stream & waterfall.

Jay Archer’s Tips for an Eco-Friendly Yard

Jay’s advice for transitioning from tradition, chemical-based landscaping to organic and ecological landscape design is as follows:

“The most important rule is to do no harm. We can do much more to make our green spaces healthier. For biological life, we need to increase biodiversity. We recommend improving soil health and adding native plants. This will contribute to better health at home and improve air quality around your house. You can build something almost like a private nature preserve on your own property. Mulching grass clippings and shredding leaves adds nutrients back into the soil and acts as a natural fertilizer. Most people overwater their lawns; you can save water by not using irrigation systems if you don’t need them. It’s never too late to start making improvements somewhere.”

Read the full article here.

Jay Archer, founder & president of Green Jay Landscape Design, shares tips for eco-friendly landscaping.

Reposting the thoughtful words from our friends at the Society of Ecological Restoration on the recent Russian attack on Ukraine and its far-reaching impacts.

Feature photo caption: “Polesia, Europe’s greatest intact floodplain, straddles the borders of Poland, Belarus, Ukraine, and Russia. This region, which already faces degradation from climate change, hunting, logging, and mining, is now threatened by war.“

“Conflict and violence are easy. Peace and the respect of people and nature are hard to achieve. During times of conflict, people and nature are profoundly harmed. But many people fail to recognize the integral link between ecosystem degradation and human conflict. First, as ecosystems are degraded, human security (e.g., food, water, social, and economic security) is also degraded, creating the potential for a vicious cycle of conflict. Second, once a conflict starts, ecological destruction is regularly used as a weapon of war, harming both nature and people.

The loss of human lives and social order as a result of the invasion of Ukraine is already shockingly and unacceptably high. The war in Ukraine will irreversibly exacerbate environmental degradation: from freshwater pollution to the threat of radioactive contamination from armed attacks carried out around the Chernobyl and Zaporizhzhya nuclear power plants. The Ukrainian invasion is even more alarming given the fragile state of our global environment due to climate change – as graphically articulated in the 6^th IPCC report released this week. At a time when all countries, all leaders, and all people must work together to repair the environment and promote peace, we are instead addressing a senseless conflict that is killing people and destroying nature.

Putin’s invasion also seriously threatens the work of conservation organizations in Ukraine and Belarus, including those working to protect and restore Polesia, Europe’s largest intact wetland. Ukraine has recently increased protections for several parts of Polesia. Birdlife Belarus has led the restoration of more than 17,000 hectares of mires, an amazing benefit for people and nature, including increasing carbon capture. Conservation status, however, is meaningless during a conflict, let alone a war. The desire to preserve their ecosystems even in such conditions makes civilians vulnerable – champions of nature, like champions of justice, are among the earliest victims of intolerance. Just last week the Belarus government threatened to formally dissolve Birdlife Belarus.

War and violence take human society backwards; destroy lives, communities, and ecosystems; and they rarely lead to resolution of what precipitated the violence in the first place. It is difficult to understand the ecological consequences of the invasion of Ukraine thus far, let alone those to come if this conflict is not stopped. The people of Ukraine and around the world deserve to be able to chart their own path in peace and to live in harmony with a clean and healthy environment.

As a global community of restoration practitioners and scientists, SER condemns the Russian invasion of Ukraine and urges all nations to take all possible diplomatic actions to immediately seek a peaceful solution to this invasion, one that protects human life, Ukrainian sovereignty, and nature from the permanent wounds of war.

Kingsley Dixon, Chair, SER Board of Directors

Jordi Cortina, Chair, SER-Europe Board of Directors

Mykhailo Paslavskyi, SER Member

Olga Kildisheva, SER Member

James Hallett, SER Vice Chair

Kris Decleer, SER and SER-Europe Board

George Gann, SER International Policy Lead

Bethanie Walder, SER Executive Director

No matter where you live in the world, please share this letter and your concerns with your national elected officials, post this letter on your social channels, and consider supporting a reputable charity to support the victims of the invasion. For example, SER-Europe has just learned that the Danube-Carpathian Program has expanded its scope from nature conservation in the Lviv region to providing humanitarian aid.“

A large part of our ecological consulting work involves wetlands throughout Fairfield County, Westchester County and Putnam County. In some settings, we partner with licensed wetland scientists or soil scientists to delineate the wetland area on the property — critical site information that informs the landscape design.

How Do You Know If You Need a Wetland Consultant?

Mitigation

Depending on where you live and local regulations, you may be required to install wetland mitigation plantings to offset development in the wetland area.

If your survey doesn’t show the wetland area, you may need to hire a wetland consultant to delineate the wetland. The wetland consultant surveys the property’s soil and maps out the soil moisture levels.

With the context of a wetland soil map, we can design a beautiful mitigation planting that matches soil moisture. Plants are defined by a wetland indicator status of one of the following:

Obligate Wetland: almost always occur in wetlands
Facultative Wetland: usually occurs in wetlands, but sometimes occurs in non-wetlands
Facultative: occurs in wetlands and non-wetlands
Facultative Upland: usually occurs in non-wetlands, but sometimes occurs in wetlands

These plants are always native, and serve multiple ecosystem services: up taking, filtering, and recirculating water; providing habitat for insects & birds; stabilizing soil and preventing erosion, to name a few.

Erosion-Prone Slopes

For this steep lakeside slope, we collaborated with a wetland consultant and engineer to develop an erosion control plan for the slope that demonstrated that sediment would not be transported into the lake below.

By developing the erosion control plan, we were able to receive a waiver from the town that avoided the wetland permit, a much more cost effective and timely option.

The erosion control devices employed included:

Silt fence surrounded site to prevent sediment loading during construction
Constructed stone terraces for garden beds and walkways
Installed log water bars in walkways to slow down stormwater
Installed compostable Filtrexx socks along terrace edges to slow and absorb stormwater
Filled beds with engineered soil: 80% mineral, 20% organic matter
Planted into jutte netting, allows plants to be held in place as root system develops
Plant palette of deeply-rooted native plants
- Planting timely is very important. Do not leave bare soil! Cover with hay if you cannot complete planting.

Read all about this Lake Peekskill, NY project on our previous blog.

Contact us to discuss a wetland on your property, or any other landscape design questions you may have. Now scheduling consultations and 2022 design & installation work.

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Green Jay Landscape Design

Where Design Meets Ecology

914.560.6570

Among the positively powerful emotions and deep feelings we experience as a result of realizing a naturalistic landscape composition are joy, wonder, curiosity and fascination. Exciting and serene, creative artistic landscapes offer visual interest and stimulation while serving many practical ecological services and value, among them are resource conservation, carbon sequestration, wildlife habitat and most importantly probiotic biology necessary for the good health and proper function of our bodies immune system. Quite simply, we need plants to clean the air and water, supply food and medicine as well as provide healthy habitat for humanity. These are the tenets of ecological landscape design, and our r’aison d’etre for starting and running Green Jay Landscape Design.

We need green space to support human life! Important to know, not all green spaces are created equal. Many, if not most, landscapes, parks and schoolyards are unhealthy and biologically and ecologically unproductive environments. If this surprises and shocks you…good ! Collectively, culturally speaking, we are doing a very poor job of nurturing what’s left of the natural world.

It is important to realize that there really is very little nature left! There are elements and remnants of nature, of the natural world, but very little of the essential elements and resources necessary for life on Earth.

So what do we do about it ?
We design and construct highly productive ecological landscape environments which conserve, preserve and protect what’s left of our precious natural resources for our own human health and the health of the planet. Contact us to start your landscape design project!

Live the Life You Love,
Jay

We are delighted to announce an upcoming virtual speaker series featuring our very own founder, Jay Archer! On Monday March 14^th, the SUNY Native Plant Center will be hosting its annual 2022 conference, this year titled The New Green Yard: Climate-Wise Practices & Solutions. Jay will be joining an impressive lineup of industry experts to discuss how landscaping and land management can affect real mitigation against climate change.

Registration is due by March 10^th and can be completed at www.sunywcc.edu/slc2022. $55 for Members, $80 for Non-Members; continuing education credits available.

Speaker Agenda & Bios

First up on the docket at 9 AM is prolific designer, plantsman, and podcast host Tom Christopher. Christopher’s lecture is titled Growing Greener: A Garden Makeover for the Planet. The synopsis is as follows:

Confronting climate change involves governmental and societal initiatives, but to be successful it must also involve millions of actions by individuals. By transforming your relationship to your personal landscape—changing your understanding of design, plant selection, and management—you can make your garden more beautiful, more fun, more alive, and a key part of the climate solution.

We are big fans of Christopher, especially his book, co-authored with Larry Weaner – Garden Revolution: How Landscapes Can Be a Source of Environmental Change.

Next up is Paul Tukey with his lecture Saving the Earth One Lawn at a Time. Tukey is a nationally renowned sustainable landscaping expert who has helped pioneer and popularize organic lawn care.

He summarizes his presentation this way:

Natural, organic protocols in the landscape can help every homeowner and municipality join the fight against climate change. Learn how to create a beautiful, safe lawn free of harsh chemicals that will require less mowing, less watering, and less fertilizing—while lowering your carbon footprint. Get advice on best grass varieties, soil health, fighting weeds, and sustainable maintenance.

Third to speak is Green Jay Landscape Design President & Founder Jay Archer. Jay’s topic is Impactful Design with Natural Landscaping and Sustainable Stewardship. Jay will use five real-life case studies from GJL’s project repertoire to discuss how residential landscapes can have a positive environmental impact. From the smallest exurban quarter acre lot renovated into a thriving pollinator habitat, to the steep, erosion-prone lakefront property, opportunities abound to improve our landscape environment and initiate more ecosystem services. From habitat building to stormwater management and carbon sequestration, meaningful change starts at home and can be realized relatively quickly. Join us for a deep dive into some of our favorite project examples.

Finally, Daniel J Mabe will be rounding out the speaker series with his talk on Changing Business as Usual. According to Mabe:

Cities, towns, and campuses across the country are adopting sustainable landscaping practices, resulting in healthier environments for their residents and workers. Discover how communities such as Larchmont, the first in Westchester, are reducing pollution, greenhouse gas emissions, pesticide use, and noise and increasing native plantings with American Green Zone Alliance-certified sites.

Mabe is the founder of the American Green Zone Alliance, an organization that offers training, certificate programs and reporting for companies interested in moving away from gas-powered landscape maintenance machines to zero-emission options.

Native Plant Center Conference Registration is Open!

Don’t forget to register for this amazing educational conference! www.sunywcc.edu/slc2022. The conference will be conducted virtually, look for a meeting link after you register. Excited to share and learn with you all in one month!

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Jay Archer