As we watch the Sun Belt’s water problems develop over time, we see varying responses to the issue. There is denial and acceptance, large expansive lawns in weird and inappropriate locales and some encouraging looks at adaptation in using more native plants as well as innovative and more miserly irrigation systems, servicing all this. It is called embracing reality.
Some projects have a certain stark beauty in being left sparsely-planted, if done right:
(click any image to enlarge hugely)
Other aspects then come into play, such as rocks or other features like mounding or even in representing a desert climate with – who knew? – a desert look!
The above and below pictures will certainly not be everyone’s cup of tea. Naturally, the plants here did and will get a bit larger, depending on how they are fed and maintained, but this particularly severe example of design is probably on the sort of “lunatic fringe” of acceptable for many people who have other ideas for landscaping. However, this particular place offers a minimum of maintenance and most definitely a piddling amount of water cost for a season. Indeed, this one uses barely any water at all. Overall, it does have a consistent theme and it does have the Feng Shui of meandering paths leading to new visualizations and the imaginary prospects of weather events like running water inside the dry creek beds. (which, I might add, are actually functional for that very reason).
On the lusher end of the scale, once again we confront ourselves with the mathematical certainty of water use in terms of quantity. Let’s use this picture as an example for what to expect from a garden at its maturity:
If you enlarge this picture, aside from all else that might gain attention, there are approximately 30 plants in all requiring water. 4 of them – the trees -require double of what the shrubs require. Some of the perennials, one half of that. Essentially, we have placed 2 gallon per hour emitters under the ground, feeding the roots of all the shrubs. Because of the far larger root bases, the trees have 2 – 2 gallon per hour emitters. The perennials all have a one GPH emitter. When this landscape was first run, we ran it for 20 minutes, twice a day, and we felt extravagant. Therefore, this particular section used up about 40 gallons of water per day, less than a bath. The entire yard – and it is rather park-like and large – used up about 200 gallons a day, the truth is. Having said that, this is hardly a normal place inasmuch as it was a higher budget scenario. Just the same, even using 200 gallons per day, we found we were able to cut the times when it was cooler and adjust it upwards for the heat. That amounts to 4 baths, according to the standard of 50 gallons in a bathtub.
Below is a more normal sized yard. I often feature this landscape because it was one of our best, in my opinion and also because, in many ways, our most successful adaptation to using less water than ever before. This one features perennials, most noteworthy. They tend to do marvelous things with little care and they also tend – depending on the species – to require less water in general.
This one, all-in-all, is a “2 Bath affair”. We used rock mulches to keep the moisture in and to shade the water access to prevent evaporation and to hold the humidity tightly within the plants’ parameters.
Another look.
This project is a water-saver deluxe, actually, in spite of its rich look. My point in all this – and it always is – is that water, placed judiciously and correctly, can be delivered in small enough quantities to be nearly insignificant. Not only are we being responsible citizens by using less water, but we get our cake too! And not only are we saving a precious resource, but we pay less “at the pump” as it were.
Here are just a few other 2- and 3- bath a day watering spectacles:
With the thought of conserving water borne foremost in mind, what does an unrepentant garden lover do to adjust to the new realities? How do we change the way we design gardens and landscapes? What fundamental changes are required in us to develop gardens in still-beautiful ways when we face so many hard decisions about social responsibility and in such a public way? Let’s face it – as I have said before, landscaping is the “Ultimate Cosmetic”. No one deals with a larger palette.
What do we do when we find out we have an actual budgeted amount of water use? As absurd as this question may sound, it is the height of design wisdom. Water auditing for existing landscapes and gardens have been and should take place prior to their installation or further development. A sense of how much water we have used in the past should reflect favorably on making changes to lessen them in some very specific ways. The methods are out there and the results for redeveloping existing lawns and gardens as well as for installing future ones can be and should be more than exciting, actually. There is much to learn but it does not have to be anywhere close to disastrous. The fact is, done right, we can literally make things better as opposed to merely settling for some dire end.
(click all images to enlarge)
What to do with grass lawns?
In the first place, the primary sponge for water in typical landscapes remains lawns. I have always maintained that cutting down lawn space actually can give a completely new and fresher look to an existing home landscape. While lawns serve a variety of functions, including a place for children to play (perhaps its most important role, IMO), they do not have to be a monolithic presence. Broken up appropriately, over time, a lawn can change into many things, among them an adjunct and contrast to new color and new features. Lawns do not have to be gigantic at all. Inasmuch as their cool characteristics make them so similar to water in a landscape design’s effects, leaving a pool or “lake” of green is wise and refreshing.
Cutting the size down to resemble a feature in their own right can include shaping them to reflect their “semi-aqueous” nature. It can set a lawn apart, actually and thereby take advantage of how glorious colors look as a backdrop to swaths of green.
Grass can be engineered to resemble a literal trail, or pathway. Instead of having a monstrous assembly of grass as a mono-colored foreground, it can lead to interesting places, offering a cool walk in bare feet to inspect the place better. At the same time we find it interesting in form as well as function. The gentle and most inviting curves of a lawn lead the eye on in a wholesome way, appreciating the structure and form of a landscape itself. It’s a bath in cooling and soothing color and texture – the perfect use of grass lawns to a designer.
Lawn grasses have been developed now which send their roots an insane depth, which require far less waterings and are virtually geared to a more responsible water usage. They stay just as green for longer during Summers- in fact, more so than Bluegrass – owing to their drought tolerant natures.
My bottom line is this: so far, I have not cut out the notion of grass lawns, simply because I happen to love them. Admittedly, they should be used far, far less in desert climates – among others – and there is a body of thought that has no need whatsoever for a lawn to make a garden beautiful. In fact, let’s visit some of them now.
How do we replace lawns in design?
This is a huge and interesting subject. It reflects all that is newest in landscaping, from the array and plenitude of hardscaping materials to even water features themselves. I realize how ironic it must seem to proclaim a water feature to be some sort of alternative method of landscaping with less water. But they do. And they do it well, indeed.
Water features recirculate water. Once filled, the same water does the same dance over and over and over – well, you get it. Yes, there can be evaporation loss and, yes, we install automatic fill mechanisms to “top off” the feature once it reaches a certain lowered level. But, even in hot and sun-drenched and hot Nevada, we rarely run a 3/4″ feed pipe more than 2 minutes a day on normal sized features, implying the use of about 30 gallons, or less than a shower a day.
Landscapes whose be-all and end-all in the past was a wide expanse of lawn studded with trees have now become far more complex and interesting. In place of the expensive water-thirsty lawn, we now have “features”, like this water feature and the pretty patio and walkway pictured here. Full of color and shape, the carnival atmosphere lightens the mood yet still provides a consistency of form and function. The ultimate irony of a landscape such as this is that, after figuring the watering costs for a lawn set ion the same place over time, this place will have comparatively paid for itself in three years. After that it is just beauty and money.
The home owner of this place below wanted lawn and nothing else. He owns a car dealership and he listened closely as we explained what the costs of lawns was and where they were headed. As a businessman, he investigated on his own as well, having some thinking fodder to work with. Delighted with his research, he assigned the water feature you see below which he thoroughly and absolutely relishes watching as it rushes along below his patio deck above. Lit up at night, the falls and the creek have phosphorescent appearances at three different falls locations. As with all well-installed features, such as lighting and waterfalls with pumps, it runs off a timer and stops automatically to preserve power. He also served good wine.
The source:
A different mind set in general accompanies all this increasingly complex designing, now that the monolithic lawn is out of consideration. Suddenly, things like more patio space are entertained. The notion of sculpting the actual land by creating hills and mounds studded with rocks and plants becomes a fascinating alternative, making the entirety of any landscape suddenly more riveting an event. More park-like, less boring, more interesting and livelier by far, suddenly we are actually released to play around a little bit. Art seeps into the equation at about this time and all designers, I bet, can trace the moment of this discovery. It actually gets a bit intimidating, the truth is, because designers become far freer to experiment and to entertain alternatives for the regular folks – instead of just for the wealthy. In fact, it becomes an imperative.
We arrive at features like Bubble Rocks.
We do new things – different things – things like inserting lighting, making vineyards, enlarging patio space and making walking platforms from natural stone – all of which I will show next as we consider what features we deem suitable for a water-conserving regime which retains beauty before all else.
Just a quick break from all the irrigation and blooming talk for a look at someone I always felt deserved a wider audience.
Joe Zawinul won Best Keyboardist in the Jazz magazine “Down Beat”, 30 times. A young prodigy who came to the US to learn music at the Berklee School of Music, he was told he was already so good he needed to “Go out and play for a living.”. He soon joined Cannonball Adderly, then wrote for Miles Davis and then formed the groundbreaking band Weather Report, with Wayne Shorter.
Joe liked melody and he liked his music up beat. He was a serious experimenter with electronics as this clip shows. But what he loved best was a red hot band he could play with. Famous for a world beat sort of lyrical weirdness – just try to figure any of the languages sung here – even the voices are instruments, including the lady in this song who began with Zap Mama. He always played with the best in the business and they enjoyed working with this hero of mine.
This song is insanely upbeat. The youtube synch here is bad but I really don’t care. The music wins this race – and it does cook. Enjoy, Joe Zawinul, a giant in music. Here’s what a 75 year old bopster does.
Which picture below is the landscape that has irrigation? One of these pictures is irrigated by buried pipe and the other has no irrigation supply whatsoever.
This? (click all images to enlarge)
Or this?
If you answered the second picture, you would be correct. The top picture – from Vancouver, British Columbia – is from a project we did many years ago, obviously, which has performed spectacularly and grown thanks to the local climate – which is quite wet.
The second picture is from Reno, Nevada – smack in the middle of the Great Basin high desert and not quite a year old yet at the time of this picture. It is very irrigated, by means of buried pipes in the ground and small emitters which produce a designated amount of water to each individual plant. One thing about planting stuff in Reno is that, if somehow the watering regime is not right, you will find out fast! A pounding and relentless Sun mixes with an utter lack of humidity to expose any deficiencies pretty much immediately. For the record, here are later looks at that project, 2 years later:
This latter property is completely irrigated. Yes, as time has gone on, additional emitters were added, adding marginally to the water bill. Many times and in many places, this is the case, especially in neighborhoods such as this which were subdivisions, completely terraformed by excavators and bulldozers to conform to planned needs. Other places in this dry region where drip is used – in, say, homes built on more established existing soils, sometimes the drip irrigation merely acts to get roots to a water table which literally takes over from there. In these cases, the irrigation system, at least for trees and for many plants, can take a hike.
Here is a picture of what a project looks like during the course of installing drip irrigation:
Notice the black pipe coursing throughout the plantings. Eventually, it will be buried, as will the smaller distribution tubes that carry a certain pre-allocated amount of water to the roots of the trees and plants. One can actually determine precisely how much water is used over a period of time by use of these regulated devices. Put on a time clock, we can say, for example, that this group of plants has 200 different plants on it. Of these, the trees will have 3 – two gallon per hour (GPH)* – emitters apiece. Otherwise, the plants themselves will have one 2 GPH emitter apiece. (Note: some of the smaller ones will actually have 1 GPH emitters).
If we run it for a half hour, our 40 trees and 160 plants will need a total of:
(Trees- 40 x 6/2 = 120 gallons and the Plants – 160 x 2 / 2 = 160 gallons. Total = 280 gallons of water).
Inasmuch as this big project had some 4 planting zones of a similar make up, we can see that it would use around 1,000 gallons of water per day.
A Caveat: (Once again, this is a 5 acre project, somewhat densely planted. Yes, it must be nice! Bear in mind, for this guy, he had his own well, too, so much of his water went literally right back down into his own water table.)
For the project above this one, where we compared irrigation versus non-irrigation, the numbers for one zone listed here apply to the entire yard. So what is 280 gallons? How does it compare to our daily uses of water, per se?
Bath: 50 gallons Shower: 2 gallons per minute (15 minutes shower = 30 gallons) Teeth brushing: 1 gallon Hands/face washing: 1 gallon Face/leg shaving: 1 gallon Dishwasher: 20 gallons/load Dishwashing by hand: 5 gallons/load Clothes washing (machine): : 10 gallons/load Toilet flush: 3 gallons Glasses of water drunk: 8 oz. per glass (1/16th of a gallon)
As can be seen, the “hardship” of water can be lessened by the proper use of the right irrigation materials. Put another way, if you let a hose run, it puts out around 8-12 gallons a minute. If you have your garden hose running for an hour, watering plants and trees, you will have used 2-3 times what that drip irrigation system supplied to all those plants and trees. The equivalent to using the drip system for 40 trees and 160 plants is to taking 2 baths, flushing 6 times, washing 2 loads of clothes and running the dishwasher.
Now, grass is thirstier. The project below had 12 sprinkler heads using 2 gallons each per minute. They often ran it for upwards of 10 minutes. Just this lawn alone, therefore, used 240 gallons a day! And that’s when they only watered it once. (Many times, they ran it twice.)
They asked us for a method of keeping some lawn but cutting down costs of watering. By using alternative materials instead of lawn, such as brick pavers and by creating planting beds, we were able to save them substantial watering costs. For one thing, we used low trajectory nozzles on their sprinkler heads which minimized how much sprayed water was lost due to wind – in Reno, this is a concern. For another, we placed them in better spots and used a nozzle that has been developed which uses less water in general, yet still delivers to the exact spots they are designed for. What we ended up with was a landscape which cost them 2/3 less money on watering and yet still had some lawn. Here it is:
Any more, we consistently convert what once were huge swaths of grass into more manageable and less water-hogging landscapes. What is most bizarre about the entire scenario is how friendly one can get towards plants and flowers and – frankly – how much more interesting they can be, done right. Irony of ironies, I suppose, even installing a water feature using water recycled by a pump can reduce a water bill.
There are design rules which have also adapted to the new realities surrounding watering shortages and wiser use of this precious resource. That’s what I will address next.
