The fight against climate change is the biggest battle the human race has ever faced, and fighting it touches every part of our lives, in every way. That’s why sustainable landscape design principles are coming to the fore, something every professional and amateur garden designer is taking into account. In our world, green sustainable landscape architecture means everything, a proven way to reduce CO2 emissions, cut down the miles the tools, equipment and materials travel, choose the least-damaging materials and products, and generally create a garden with the smallest possible environmental impact. If you’re busy researching sustainable landscape design, this article is for you. By the end you’ll know what sustainable landscaping is, the considerations and principles behind it, and how SketchUp will help you achieve it.
What is Sustainable Landscaping?
So what is sustainable landscaping? The term green sustainable landscape architecture describes landscaping that is sympathetic to the surrounding environment in every way, and involving naturally available resources. The idea is that a sustainable human-made landscape will exist in complete harmony with the surrounding ecosystem, moving to the rhythms of the wider natural environment without causing harm or disruption to nature.
What is sustainable landscape design? It’s much the same thing. Sustainable landscaping means focusing on both the input and output of a human-made landscape, finding ways to minimise both. It’s about living well now without compromising the future, about putting the environment first, and importantly, about thinking local, using techniques that are not only sustainable but environmentally responsible and, ideally, even regenerative.
The smaller the impact on the wider environment and nature your design has, the better. The less impact on the future, the better. If you can design a garden that enhances what was already there, doesn’t cause any damage during the creation process and does a good job of nurturing the environment into the future, you’re onto a winner.
Next, let’s take a look at exactly what all this involves in context.
Sustainable Landscaping Considerations and Principles
The main goals of sustainable landscape design are to conserve water and energy, reduce waste and decrease runoff. To achieve these goals in an ordinary residential garden you’ll need to adopt a specific mindset. It’ll mean treating water as a vital resource to be protected, valuing soil as an essential we can’t live without, preserving existing plants, and thinking carefully about how to conserve material resources. All this dovetails neatly into a few key principles that support sustainable landscaping.
Principle #1: Treat Water as a Resource – The first of our sustainable landscape design principles concerns water. Too much water is one thing, too little is just as bad. We’ve all seen the horrific impact of recent droughts on countries like Australia and the USA, where November 2022 saw a frightening total of 43 US states experiencing ‘moderate drought’ or worse. The demand for water is already at an all time high and all too often precious rainwater is treated as waste, sent away into drains. Instead you can make wiser decisions thanks to a careful selection of plants and by designing with irrigation in mind. Depending where you live, flood prevention will be just as important. You’ll need to try and strike a realistic balance between water conservation and flood prevention.
Principle #2: Value the Soil – Compacted soil in gardens causes problems because it makes hard work of drainage. The resulting run-off can cause flooding as well as pollution. Good soil helps more plants grow more healthily, supporting a more varied ecosystem. If you have patches of poor quality soil, they’ll be perfect for many wildflowers and native plants that don’t like a rich soil diet but thrive on soil with very few nutrients.
Principle #3: Preserve Existing Plants – Too many people clear every plant out of a garden to design or redesign it, but that’s the opposite of sustainable landscape design. Because every plant matters, a sustainable approach is so much better. Assess the existing plants, keep native species, remove non-native planting if it’s causing issues, and design around new and mature trees instead of cutting them down. A tree is a thing of wonder, beautiful all year round, and an invaluable way to lock up CO2 out of harm’s way.
Principle #4: Conserve Material Resources – The fourth of our sustainable landscape design principles is about materials. Many hard landscaping materials are very energy intensive, and the environmental impact is even worse if they’ve been transported a long way. A sustainable approach means reusing and repurposing, recycling old stuff and insisting on local materials. Using local rock, for example, from a quarry nearby looks right in the context of the surrounding landscape as well as minimising the miles it has travelled.
Using SketchUp for Sustainable Landscape Design
It’s great to know you can use SketchUp to support your personal and professional sustainability goals in sustainable landscape design. Here are some things to consider:
[h3] Keep existing plants and source locally
For both garden designs and redesign, it’s a good move to identify as many existing plants as possible to keep, and work them creatively into your garden design model. It’s good to source plants locally rather than buy from a long distance away, and be sensitive about which new plants to add to your scheme.
[h3] Choose to move away from block paving to prevent flooding
Floods and water shortages are as bad as each other, so think about them both. It’s important to take rainwater runoff into account and manage it optimally. You might, for example, reject the idea of block paving because it prevents water run-off and can cause dramatic localised flooding to gardens, driveways and roads. Rainwater collection ponds don’t just give you water to keep plants alive and thriving, they also quickly become home to an extraordinary range of wildlife, which often arrives within days of a pond being filled. You might want to think about fitting a number of water storage butts fed from the gutters of the house, to help see the garden through times of drought. When you design optimal water drainage, routing and storage into your garden design, you cater for every rain-led eventuality that climate change brings.
[h3] Source materials locally
Can you source local stone and aggregates? Is there a fencing company nearby? The more of the materials you can source nearby, the better. You’ll support the local economy as well as minimising the miles travelled. Materials like Indian sandstone are lovely but when you think how far they’ve been transported, at what expense to the environment, their appeal dims quite a lot!
[h3]Sustainable outdoor lighting
There’s nothing quite so magical as outdoor lighting, and there are sustainable ways to achieve that, too. Make sure your garden lighting is low energy, solar powered garden lighting using cool, energy efficient LEDs rather than ordinary bulbs. Just make sure you don’t design bright lighting that stays on overnight, because it disturbs the circadian rhythms of the plants, birds, insects, mammals and other wildlife. Like us, to get a good night’s sleep, nature needs darkness.
[h3]Design with wildlife in mind
Last but not least, design with wildlife in mind. A sustainable garden isn’t sustainable if it drives wild creatures away. Perhaps you could design a special area where ‘weeds’ can naturally grow. In a sustainable world there’s no such thing as a weed, every plant matters to the balance of the local environment, crucial for wildlife that feeds on it, breeds on it, and relies on it. Plant natives for birds, insects, butterflies, and all the members of the food chain that depend on them. Consciously create safe spaces and shelter for wild creatures.
Add a host of excellent free tutorials and learning resources, a free version to play with and a full version called SketchUp Pro, and the programme offers everything you need to place sustainability at the heart of your outdoor design life. We hope you’re inspired by the sheer potential this popular garden design tool delivers for doing things the environmentally responsible way. Now you’re ready to go create your first green sustainable landscape architecture design, we wish you a great time using SketchUp to achieve something special.
