Vrooooooom! toward the future

Wednesday morning is when Eric Hansen drives his propane-powered 1-ton pickup truck from Detroit to Melrose Park for his all-propane-powered landscape crew. Here's a news release about it (which I wrote) from the Midwest Ecological Landscaping Association.

One of the questions I asked Eric was: Is your lawn company organic? And he said no--they can't get their commercial customers to pay for the extra labor it takes to maintain a lawn entirely without herbicides, or to accept a lawn with a lot of weeds.

But over the last few years, he said, they've moved from the once-standard blanket applications of pesticides, whether the lawn needed it or not, to occasional spot treatments where there really is a persistent weed problem.

That's a step in the right direction, just as changing from a less efficient fossil fuel for the mowers and blowers to a more efficient fossil fuel is a step in the right direction.

But still, as Eric told me, maintenance firms like his are tasked with "maintaining the landscape that gets built." And usually the landscape that gets built is not designed with serious consideration of all the long-term costs of maintaining it -- not just the monetary cost of water and fertilizer and the labor to mow big swaths of lawn, but the costs that so far haven't been monetized: greenhouse gas emissions from power tools, fossil fuel use, risk from herbicides, depletion of water supplies.

The ultimate answer, as Eric says, is to design different landscapes. But that will require a change in the mainstream aesthetic toward more shrubs, more ornamental grasses, more ground covers more native plants, more freedom, less rigidity and less lawn.

Real sustainability will happen when the people who rent space in office parks and the people who buy homes because they're in good school districts -- people who don't really much notice their yards unless they sense that their yards don't meet the neighborhood standard -- are comfortable with this different kind of landscape and will maintain it or pay to have it maintained.

For that to happen, these concepts need to move out of the garden-geek and green-geek in-groups and into the consciousness of the people who lay out parking lots and standard-issue subdivisions. These ideas need to become part of the standard issue.

I think that change is coming. The Sustainable Sites Initiative, a voluntary effort to create a set of guidelines for landscapes similar to the LEED standards for buildings, calls for no more than 40 percent of a landscape to be lawn. I expect that by the time housing development gets going again, expectations--from government, from zoning boards, from home buyers--will have shifted. Design firms and landscape maintenance firms that are already moving toward more sustainable practices will have the advantage.

Got a garden question? I recommend you call or e-mail the Plant Clinic of The Morton Arboretum in Lisle, the Master Gardeners of the University of Illinois Extension or the Plant Information Service of the Chicago Botanic Garden in Glencoe .

All contents of this post are copyright Beth Botts. Feel free to link or share a brief excerpt with a link, but please do not reproduce photos or any other part of this blog without my express permission.