Musings, humor, and practical advice about sustainable landscaping and related subjects by the master of the craft: Landscape architect, educator, and author Owen E. Dell
Sustainable landscaping isn’t good enough. Here’s what we need to do.
Tags: conservation, consumption, ecosystem, energy, landscape, Landscapes, landscaping, LEED, Rain Barrels, Sustainability, Sustainable, William McDonoughSanta Barbara man gets back to nature, thanks to the awesome power of social media. Heartwarming story!
Water budgeting features on conventional irrigation controllers don’t meet the needs of plants and can result in damage to the landscape. Weather changes require altering the frequency of irrigation cycles, not the run times.
Rain barrels are the de rigueur item for urban eco-hipsters these days. They’re sold in every garden catalog, subsidized or given away by water districts, and touted by virtually every garden expert in creation as a way to reduce garden water use and be more “green.” There are rain barrel community workshops, rain barrel seminars, [...]
Kobe Mulch: Artisanal, Local, Sustainable The refined estates of the Santa Barbara area are set to become the latest beneficiary of the Kobe Mulch craze that’s suddenly sweeping America. Modeled on Japan’s famed Kobe Beef, Kobe Mulch is an artisanal mulch that’s produced from specially selected wood chips and subjected to a series of complex, [...]
Speaking of monsters (see “Garden Wise Guys” below), the time has come to talk of some of the design practices that ought to go the way of the Stegosaurus. Just as this ancient dinosaur became extinct when conditions changed around it, the changing conditions of our present world are making lots of formerly accepted gardening [...]
Learn about sustainable landscaping the fast, fun way. Join Santa Barbara landscape architects Owen Dell and Billy Goodnick as they host the popular sustainable landscaping sitcom Garden Wise Guys on City TV channel 18, County TV channel 20, or on the web. In the current episode, “Lawn and Order,” the Wise Guys end up in [...]
OK, so this is me hard at work at my drafting board, designing a new garden for one of my first clients. This photo was taken a few years ago; I’ve been at this a long time. When I first started doing landscaping, I didn’t realize it would become my life’s work. But here I [...]
I’m not going to mention any names, but there’s a town in San Diego County that just did an incredibly stupid thing. Towns do stupid things all the time, of course, but for sheer obliviousness this one really stands out. Some time back a developer with a plan for developing a blighted property in the [...]
WHAT’S COMPOST? Compost is nothing more than plant parts broken down by microorganisms into stuff that looks like soil. It’s the most natural, and the most common, recycling program on earth and it’s happening in your yard right now whether you do anything about it or not. In fact, here’s a case where benign neglect [...]
