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When is the best time to start planning your new landscape design? What goes into the design process, site development, construction and installation? Jay Archer discusses the design process in creating a Landscape Design Master Plan, as well as the importance of a well-thought out and executed installation timeline, especially pertinent when coordinating with home construction.

Fall is a great time to initiate a landscape design plan, especially if you’d like to enjoy your new landscape by Summer 2021! Site development can occur in late fall, winter and early spring, setting the foundation for planting and finishing touches in spring.

The global pandemic has shifted (among many other things) our perspective on our living spaces. There have been anecdotal reports of urbanites fleeing to the suburbs since the beginning of the stay at home orders. Fairfield and Westchester County home prices increased, and inventory shrank during spring and summer, an obvious ripple effect of the severity of the virus in NYC.

The desire for more real estate, including outdoor space, makes perfect sense given how limited our social outings and engagements have become. Americans are seeking safe, relaxing outdoor spaces to seek respite in the age of covid-19.

The garden captivates all. Photo by Tetyana Kovyrina from Pexels

At Green Jay, we have long touted the benefits of spending time outdoors, especially in a setting that engages you with wildlife and the magic of nature. Below we’ve compiled some tips to help you make the most of your new landscape in the suburbs.

1. Maximize Your Landscape’s Human Health Benefits

Our first priority is always to make the landscape safe and healthy for human engagement. This of course means using no toxic chemicals whatsoever, our landscapes are all 100% organic. Our landscapes are designed to be walked through, played in, touched, smelt, and eaten, not avoided because of a toxic pesticide application.

Air circulation is also of critical importance to prevent mold and maintain air quality. Designing for improved air circulation often involves removing or dramatically pruning existing vegetation, especially if it was planted too close to the house. Now, more than ever, we must take care of our lungs and respiratory systems.

Finally, cultivating diverse soil microbes, and spending time in the soil, has shown to have dramatic benefits on our mood and mental health. Read up on our previous blog post, How Can We Make Our Landscapes Safer and Healthier?

2. Observation Feeds the Soul – Design for Every Season

The reason we are in the landscape design business is because we are fully addicted and obsessed with the daily unfolding of nature in our landscapes. The constant evolution of a garden, day to day, week to week and season to season, begs us to slow down and take notice. Take a daily stroll in the garden: observe what is new, what has passed, and the indicators of what’s to come.

Designing a landscape that looks beautiful year-round is of course desirable. But designing a landscape that captures your interest and excitement year-round is another goal entirely.

Pay attention to what areas of your landscape will be most used when and plan your design accordingly – for example, a summer-blooming pollinator garden around the pool area will probably get maximum facetime and enjoyment from your family. (Does it get much better than butterflies by the pool on a summer day?)

Modern pool area with summer-blooming perennial pollinator garden.

We extend the blooms into fall with perennials like asters, phlox, and goldenrod – all natives that will keep the bees and butterflies happy!

A curbside perennial pollinator garden in all its late-summer glory! (Darien, CT)

As the temperatures drop, your maintenance choices become more critical. We leave up hollow stemmed perennials all winter for insects like native bees to overwinter in. Other native perennials like Coneflower provide food when they turn to seed for Goldfinches and other birds.

Native ornamental grass Northern Sea Oats (Chasmanthium latifolium) looks stunning in fall and the seed heads provide food for birds!

For the winter months, we make sure to have native berry-producing shrubs like Winterberry and Aronia which provide valuable food resources for migrating and local birds. Landscape architectural elements become more significant in winter, for example, evergreen trees, trees with unique bark (birches, dogwood), boulders and sculptures carry greater impact in winter.

River Birch makes a dramatic statement in winter.

3. Extend your Outdoor Living Season

As the days get shorter, our need for outdoor interaction does not diminish. Simple design elements can enable you to enjoy your landscape through fall and winter and encourage you out into the fresh air daily! For example, we have designed garden stroll paths that meander through mature trees and understory shrubs, a walk that is just as delightful in fall and winter as in summer.

Spring bulbs brighten up a landscape in early spring when not much else is awake yet!

Many of our landscapes include fire pit areas, which can be a great congregating spot for entertaining in the colder months. Our clients that love to entertain will opt for a full-scale outdoor kitchen, equipped with a fireplace and mobile heat lamps, to truly extend the outdoor living lifestyle throughout the seasons.

Design a landscape that can do both: pool area for summer and patio bbq area with outdoor fireplace for those cooler nights.

Simple & functional outdoor kitchen featuring built-in grill and mini fridge, perfect for entertaining!

4. Create a Dynamic Landscape with Water

Nothing quite beats the ambiance of softly trickling water – it is both energizing and soothing, mesmerizing and grounding. We almost always encourage a water feature of sorts to create a relaxing atmosphere, whether that be a smaller fountain or pond-less water feature, or a constructed waterfall, stream or pond! Even the simplest water feature will have a beneficial effect for wildlife. Birds seek shallow waters to bathe in, dragonflies will lay eggs in water and eat mosquito larvae, and a pond allows for a wonderful aquatic habitat at home!

Fish pond with constructed waterfall (not shown) brings a tranquil habitat to your landscape.

This pond-less basalt bubbler is easily switched on or off and adds a delightful trickling sound to your yard! (Honeysuckle will eventually cover the shadow box in rear, this photo is post planting!)

5. Invite Pollinators and Wildlife

Time and again we receive feedback from our clients about how vibrant and alive their landscape is – always buzzing with bees, butterflies, hummingbirds, songbirds, frogs, the list goes on! Once you have a yard that attracts wildlife and pollinators, you’ll never want to go back to the foreign, sterile plants of traditional landscapes. We invite you to find serenity in the suburbs by reconnecting with the natural world, taking time to observe the visitors in your garden, and recognizing the importance of the critical habitat you’ve created on your property. Learn more about Designing for Biodiversity and Designing an Organic Pollinator Garden on our previous blogs!

This new home construction in Greenwich, CT required a Landscape Design Master Plan as it was completely bare yet abutted a wetland—a blank design slate that necessitated careful planning and minimal impact.

Joining the project early on, Green Jay Landscape Design developed the ecological design plan that included modern bluestone walkways in the front yard, a patio along the pool area, numerous garden areas, a raised bed vegetable garden, wetland restoration plantings, and a sod installation. Learn more about our Ecological Landscape Design services.

Rectilinear, modern bluestone walkway planted with creeping ground covers. Vegetable garden in the background.

Modern & geometric bluestone patio off the deck in the pool area.

As landscape design and build firm, we always prefer to become involved as early on in the new home construction process as possible. In this case, we were able to coordinate our hardscape (walkways and patio) construction and landscape installation appropriately with the final phases of the home construction.

Poolside native perennial garden in full bloom (pre sod-installation).

The client hired us during the winter, allowing ample time for the design to be finalized and the project to be built on a timely schedule – they were able to enjoy their new, organic landscape sanctuary all summer long!

Bluestone walkway to main patio, pool area in the background.

The scale of this project might initially make you think it would require a landscape architect. However, Jay Archer has a unique expertise in wetland mitigation, as well as a seasoned eye in designing native and ecological perennial gardens. Our master mason Aztlan can realize any and all of your custom masonry dreams with artistic expertise.

As a design & build firm, we see to it that the design is realized accurately, with expert craftsmanship and attention to detail. With Jay as both lead designer and senior project manager, we are also able to adapt and respond quickly when site conditions bring about new challenges.

Front entrance bluestone walkway with sweeping native perennial gardens.

Curvilinear garden beds line the front yard, grounding mature trees and framing the property.

Poolside with the bird and butterfly garden. This is what summer dreams are made of!

The majority of landscaping in the United States is really just lawn care. There are approximately 40 million acres of lawn in the lower 48 states alone, accounting for 1.2% of the continental land mass.

What do we achieve from such colossal acreage? Well, lawns are the largest irrigated crop in the US, and Americans apply a staggering 80 million pounds of pesticides to lawns every year.

The Environmental Costs of Lawn Pesticides & Fertilizers

Culturally, we overlook this nonchalant, careless application of toxic pesticides as the norm, necessary to achieve the universal aesthetic of a flawless carpet of turf. We mostly fail to consider the production costs and supply chains of these chemicals – nearly all pesticides’ active ingredients are hydrocarbons, derived from petroleum.

To create synthetic fertilizers, natural gas is employed to heat and combine atmospheric nitrogen and hydrogen into ammonia; a forty pound bag of synthetic fertilizer requires the equivalent of 2.5 gallons of gasoline to produce. Nitrous oxide and methane, both greenhouse gases, are byproducts of synthetic fertilizer manufacturing.

Residential lawn run off during a storm event can deposit chemicals into water bodies.

We also fail to consider the downstream effects of their application. Pesticides leaching into ground water or being transported through runoff is a major concern. Fertilizers also easily wash onto driveways and down storm drains during storm events, where they are ultimately deposited into water bodies, creating eutrophication conditions (algal blooms and depletion of oxygen) which harm aquatic animals and plants. There is also concern that nitrate in synthetic fertilizers can leach into groundwater, because it is not bound to soil particles.

Runoff & eutrophication diagram, courtesy of Friends of the North Fork.

Petroleum & Emissions Associated with Lawn Care

Equally troublesome are the energy and air pollution costs associated with upkeeping a lawn. It’s estimated that Americans use 600 million gallons of gas to mow and trim their lawns every year! Two stroke engines in lawn mowers are a shocking 11 times more polluting than a new car.

Over application of fertilizers can also cause greenhouse gas emissions. A study by the National Academy of Sciences found that the excess fertilizer not used by plants gets converted to nitrous oxide by soil microbes, and is released into the atmosphere. Nitrous oxide is a GHG 300 times stronger than CO2; total NO emissions from fertilizers annually is the equivalent of 25 million tons of CO2! Leaf blowers, used to blow clippings and keep lawns leafless in fall, are just as troubling. Using a gas-powered leaf blower for thirty minutes emits the same amount of hydrocarbons as a car does driving 7700 miles at 30 mph!

Not to mention the real human health impacts from hearing high-decibel blowers. Catch up on the research on our previous blog post Why Leaf Blowers and Lawn Care Practices Are Hazardous to Our Health.

The Lawnscaping Alternative: Ecological Landscaping

It’s clear that lawns have a high cost: water, gas, the production of synthetic fertilizers and pesticides, the dangers associated with their runoff, and the emissions resulting from lawn care. On the flip side, every square foot of lawn is an opportunity to reclaim and design a landscape that positively impacts the local environment.

Client photo! Monarch butterfly on Echinacea.

As landscape ecologists and landscape designers, we are always *strongly* encouraging our clients to reduce their lawn area in favor of native gardens and ground cover. Think about what you really use your lawn for, it and devote an appropriate portion of property for lawn; let the rest go. Try to envision the creativity and personality your property can have when it stops being just a lawn.

With every lawn area converted to a garden you are:

Creating essential habitat for endangered birds and pollinators
Sequestering carbon
Reducing water use
Reducing petroleum use
Enriching the soil and preventing erosion
Purifying and infiltrating stormwater

There’s also the potential to grow your own food, herbs, and cutting flowers, turning static lawn into a productive space. Consider also, the mental health benefits of spending time in a vibrant, ever-evolving garden.

Raised bed veggie garden designed & built by GJL — far more productive than a lawn!

Learn more about the principals of Natural, Ecological Landscaping in Fairfield & Westchester County on our previous blog post.

We recently received this note from a client on their new pollinator garden:

Jay, I can’t thank you enough! We are truly enjoying our garden oasis!! It is so amazing seeing the changes even in just a few weeks and all the daily visitors. And the kids are loving it. Thanks again.

Another fabulous client photo of a Monarch butterfly in their garden!

Transforming lawn into a garden instantly creates a learning opportunity for the whole family. Educate yourself and your family on soil microbes, pollinators, plant life cycles, and bird behavior – and watch the phenomenon unfold in your own garden!

For inspiration on lawn-replacement projects, check out our previous blog posts:

Landscape Design in Fairfield County: Front Yard Pollinator Garden

Creating Bird & Pollinator Habitat At Home

Front Yard Native Garden & Custom Bluestone Walkway

Designing an Organic Pollinator Garden: Tips from a Landscape Ecologist

Lawn Removal Front Yard Zen Garden

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Green Jay Landscape Design

914-516-6570

Few things get us more excited than designing a lawn replacement project – especially when it’s a highly visible front yard, like this property in Stamford, CT. The goal was to remove the lawn and replace it with a highly productive and visually stunning front yard native pollinator garden.

Blue dasher dragonfly captured by the client in their garden!

This client is a true nature enthusiast and photographer – we received such amazing pollinator footage from their time spent observing in the garden – nothing better than that! Needless to say the organic pollinator garden is thriving!

Summertime in the perennial pollinator garden – so much color!

If you’re intrigued by this project, and wondering if you will miss your front lawn, try to count the number of days you’ve looked out your window to watch the changes in your lawn…

That’s what we thought. There is truly nothing interesting about a lawn.

Hummingbird feeding on Monarda in the front yard pollinator garden — much more interesting than a lawn!!

Now enjoy these photos of the lawn removal and fabulous garden evolution in just a few months! This property certainly qualifies as a Pollinator Pathway garden in Fairfield County, CT.

Before photo. Front lawn not adding anything aesthetically or ecologically.

Above is the before photo – pretty standard lawn. The site is full sun which opens up a myriad of native perennial options, as well as ornamental grasses and flowering shrubs.

Using a sod cutter to mechanically remove the front lawn.

The space is small enough that the lawn can be removed mechanically – this is the preferred method anyways, as it does not disturb the soil or the weed seed bank within it. Disrupting the seed bank can create a weeding maintenance headache if proper site preparation techniques are not employed.

The soil was then amended with organic compost and biochar to enrich the soil microbial communities and assist with soil structure and water retention. Green sand — an enlivened rock powder — was also top dressed onto the soil.

The green sand activates the clay particles in the soil and helps to alleviate compaction, allowing for air pockets in the soil that enable plant and microbial growth.

Field guide for the design and plant staging.

Designing the plant palette was lots of fun. The perennials peak in mid-summer, creating quite the show for the neighborhood. The butterfly, bee and hummingbird activity is unparalleled! We also made sure to have blooms – pollen and nectar – available in early spring and fall, and shrubs like native viburnum will provide berries in the winter for the birds.

Newly planted! Watch how much this garden grows since the April install.

Front yard pollinator garden filling in — organic soil amendments working as expected!

Amazing growth in season one of this front yard pollinator garden! It is truly a showstopper in the the neighborhood.

Learn more about Designing for Biodiversity on our previous blog.

Side view in springtime, the organic garden is newly planted.

Lush summertime color! A haven for pollinators too.

Imagine if this was the view from your window?!

Summer time shot — a spectacular show of native flowers!

Daisies, coneflower and cat mint — pollinator favorites!

We absolutely love how this plant palette accentuates and compliments.

We compiled the pollinator footage taken by our client in their new front yard pollinator garden. The pollinator and bird activity in this new habitat is truly inspiring! Think of the impact we could have on reversing insect and biodiversity decline if we continued to convert our monoculture lawns to thriving habitats!

Jay Archer