Landscape and Irrigation is read by decision makers throughout the landscape and irrigation markets — including contractors, landscape architects, professional grounds managers, and irrigation and water mgmt companies and reaches the entire spetrum.
Issue link: https://read.dmtmag.com/i/129601
Landscape Design and Construction Principles of Ecological Landscape Design Principles of Ecological Landscape Design By Travis Beck © Island Press (December 2012) Island Press Paperback and E-Book 296 pages | Price: $ 40.00 ISBN: 978-1-59726-702-1 (P) www.islandpress.org ith "Principles of Ecological Landscape Design," landscape architect Travis Beck gives professionals and students a book to translate the science of ecology into landscape design practice. This groundbreaking work explains key ecological concepts and their application to the design and management of sustainable landscapes. Beck makes these concepts more accessible with numerous photos and figures, as well as by drawing out guiding principles as section headings. "Principles of Ecological Landscape Design" covers topics including biogeography, building plant communities, avoiding invasive species, integrating animals, and dealing with climate change. Beck draws on real-world cases where professionals have put ecological principles to use in the built landscape, highlighting particularly effective examples throughout the text. For our focus on designing drought- W www.landscapeirrigation.com tolerant and water-wise landscapes, Beck provided the following excerpts from "Principles of Ecological Landscape Design." Choose plants that are adapted to the local environment Because plants exhibit such a wide range of natural adaptations, we need not struggle — expending both limited resources and our collective energy — against the environment we find ourselves in to make it a better home for ill-suited plants. Using biogeography as our guide, we can always identify plants ready-made for the conditions at hand. Gardeners, nursery owners, and landscape designers have long recognized that plants ill-suited to the temperature extremes of the place where they are planted are unlikely to survive their first year in the ground. The US Department of Agriculture has codified this knowledge in a map of hardiness zones, which was up- dated in 2012 (fig. 1.3). Hardiness zones represent the average annual minimum temperature, that is, the coldest temperature a plant in that zone could expect to experience. There are 13 hardiness zones, ranging from zone 1 in the interior of Alaska (experiencing staggering winter minimums of below –50°F) to zone 13 on Puerto Rico (experiencing winter minimums of barely 60°F). Plants are rated as to the lowest zone in which they can survive. Balsam fir (Abies balsamea), for instance, is hardy to zone three. The hardiest species of Bougainvillea are hardy only to zone nine. Plants are sometimes given a range (e.g., zones 3 to 6). Strictly speaking, hardiness refers only to ability to survive minimum temperatures, but the practice of indicating a range serves as shorthand for the overall temperatures in which a plant will grow. The American Horticultural Society (2012) has also prepared a map of heat zones for the United States, indicating the number of days above 86°F that a region experiences on average per year. Catalog descriptions of landscape plants may include reference to these heat zones and to the more common hardiness zones. Given the wide acceptance of hardiness zones, it is somewhat surprising that similar thinking applied to water requirements for plants has developed only within the past few decades. Perhaps this is because of the ease of meeting the needs of some plants for more water with irrigation. Or perhaps it is because of the deep influence of English gardening traditions in the United States and expectations of what a cultivated landscape should look like. Regardless of local conditions, our nationwide default residential landscape is water-hungry lawns and summerflowering borders. Many regions of North America are in fact too dry, or receive precipitation too unevenly, to support this kind of designed landscape without major Landscape and Irrigation 15