Peak Oil Landscape Design

“Grammy Sue…. wha’d you fine out today?”

Let’s leave aside, for the moment, the issue of how much I enjoy exploring the New York Times archives, and whether this might be some sort of obsession that requires treatment. I invite you instead to focus on a significant trend that showed up in my latest research.

First, a bit of background. Presumably the New York Times chooses to publish articles on subjects that editors believe will interest its readers. From this premise comes my theory: how often a particular term gets mentioned in print is an indicator of that term’s relevance to readers, at the time of publication.

The Times has a lovely online search option that lists the title of every article containing any selected word or phrase, during any period of time. Have you been wondering: is public interest in environmentally-friendly gardens expanding or waning? Would you like to know how this issue compares to related popular topics? Let’s go to the archives!

Note: You might argue a New York Times audience isn’t representative of the public at large, nor is it exactly “our” gardening people. Maybe so, but NYT readership is huge and spans the entire country, and its interests tell us something about the world outside our bubble.

The following table shows the number of NYT articles that mention a selected environmental-gardening search term, from January 1 to January 1, in the first and second halves of the past decade, followed by the percentage of change between the two time spans:

Beside the basic question: “Does this information actually mean anything at all?”…. which I answer with a confident but unproven, “Definitely.”…. these numbers reveal a few other puzzles, including:

• How could so many of the topics that we consider to be so important hardly get mentioned at all in the mainstream press?
• Pollinators and gardening for wildlife appear to be increasing in relevance, but wildflower meadows, wildflowers and native plants (all components of gardening for wildlife) decreased in the last five years, seeming more relevant ten years ago than now. How does that make sense?
• Is natural landscaping showing up less in the news now because it’s an old-fashioned term, or has the whole concept itself simply lost meaning?
• If the term biodiversity were removed from the tally, the change from 2001 to 2011 would be negative 3%, so…. is public awareness of biodiversity the only thing saving the native plant/wildlife garden movement from irrelevance?

You might have a few more questions of your own, but let’s move on. Consider this amazing set of numbers:

Totals for just these four energy terms dwarf the eight gardening terms. And the growth in interest, the 1735% rise in the relevance of green energy? Wow. Even if you question my choice of search terms, these figures clearly show that right now a lot more people are more interested in saving energy than in saving birds and butterflies.

There’s one place where energy conservation merges with environmental gardening: in green roofs, which (among their other benefits) save energy by lowering a building’s cooling costs. The popularity of green roofs has been rising steadily in recent years. Here’s evidence:

Of course, energy conservation has always been a component of environmentally-friendly landscape design. Two major environmental accrediting programs, LEED and SITES, include ideas for saving energy in the landscape, but their recommendations focus largely on designing landscapes to reduce the utility costs of buildings. From my point of view, there are two ways these programs come up short. First, there are many more ways to reduce heating/cooling costs than they list. And second, they fail to explain how everyday homeowners can design and care for their landscapes in ways that conserve energy, unrelated to utility bills. Landscape professionals and the public remain generally unaware of the many easy, low-cost methods to save energy in our gardens and grounds.

If our goal is to make a positive difference in the world, we should expand our definition of earth-friendly landscapes to include not just native plants and diverse habitat, but also a wide array of choices that conserve energy and/or use energy more efficiently.  Here are a few ideas, briefly described:

• It’s common knowledge that shade cools a house, but few people fully understand the best placement for shade trees (in many cases, it’s NOT directly south of the house). Even fewer realize that all foliage cools the air through evapo-transpiration, so that abundant lush vegetation – not just shade – near a house will reduce cooling costs.
• Many people know the value of mulch: by holding moisture in the soil, it can help keep plants healthy. But few realize that moister soil is cooler soil, and cool earth around a house reduces nearby air temperatures, allowing fans and AC to run for shorter times.
• Most people think that mulch is something to be purchased at a garden center. Few appreciate the value of fallen leaves as the ideal mulch for the trees and shrubs that they came from, nature’s free gift, requiring no energy-input at all except raking (by hand, of course!)
• Many people assume that all gardening requires soil amendments. Few realize that the manufacture of fertilizer requires astounding millions of Btu’s of heat energy. Fewer still consider the countless tankers full of diesel spent on transporting all those towering pallets of “garden supplies” back and forth across the country. (And let’s not even talk about the disaster of using peat moss.)
• The idea of reducing or replacing lawn makes sense in so many ways, and the lawn-alternative movement is growing fast. Yet there remain many people who care not at all about providing habitat or welcoming wildlife, who dismiss the claims of harm from lawn-chemicals and don’t mind the weekend din of mowers. Even these people might be motivated to mow smaller amounts of lawn, or less often, simply to save on gas money.
• Saving water has been a good idea for decades, but many people outside of drought-prone areas feel that it’s not important. Yet most hose-water comes from the ground via pumps that are run by electricity. And the more demand we place on public water supply systems, the more energy-intensive upkeep these systems require. Even in rain-rich regions, we should design landscapes to conserve water.

I could go on and on. Actually, come to think of it… I already did, in my book Energy-Wise Landscape Design!

One final note. I’m not suggesting we should only care about topics that seem important to the rest of the world. Lord knows many of us have been leaning into heavy headwinds for a long time, and that’s been our choice. But if we want to reach as many people as possible, with as compelling an argument as possible, doesn’t it make sense to explain how the things we care about also matter for reasons that the public cares about?  Our landscapes are chock full of opportunities to save energy. We will help our clients and the environment when we point them out.

P.S. All the photos in this post illustrate energy-saving choices. Do you see them?

© 2011 – 2012, Sue Reed. All rights reserved. This article is the property of Native Plants and Wildlife Gardens. If you are reading this at another site, please report that to us