Conservation Landscaping for Your Custom Home

In this day and age, sustainability is at the top of everyone’s mind.

That’s why, if you’re thinking of building a new custom home, you should be thinking high performance from the start.

But like sustainability, the high performance concept extends beyond the confines of a construction project.

The truth is, your yard, your gardens, and the overall landscape that cradles your house can have a huge impact on the sustainability of your custom home. And high performance landscaping can create huge benefits for more than the environment – it helps you spend less money and less effort on a gorgeous, natural aesthetic.

What is High Performance Landscaping?

What we’re talking about here is a set of landscaping practices focused on water conservation and native plant species.

There are a couple schools of thought when it comes to high performance landscaping. You may have heard of zeroscaping and/or xeriscaping. These sibling concepts share the fundamentals of high performance landscaping – a focus on water conservation and native plant species.

There are no rules about what a high performance landscape is “supposed to look like.” Working with the land around your custom home, your high performance landscaping team can create anything from a minimalist, desert-inspired rock garden, to lush greenery atop rich soil.

What Are The Benefits?

With a well-planned strategy and arrangement, high performance landscaping can harness the beauty of your natural landscape to create a unique and integrated aesthetic for your custom home.

But beyond that natural beauty, there are several valuable reasons to implement a high performance landscaping strategy in your custom home building project.

Because the high performance concept is designed to preserve your water resources by working with the natural landscape around your home, high performance landscaping creates huge benefits for the environment while saving you – the homeowner – time, money, and effort.

Here’s what you can expect from a professional high performance landscape:

• Less money spent on water bills
• Less need for fertilizer
• Less money spent on pest control and expensive chemicals
• Less maintenance
• No more wasteful trimmings
• Better conservation of native plant species

By working with (as opposed to against) the demands of your home’s natural landscape, you’re placing yourself on the winning side of a battle that costs many homeowners significant amounts of time, money, and resources.

Like your custom home building project, it’s easy to see why you should be thinking high performance landscaping from the start.

What Does It Take?

But as with your custom home, the high performance landscaping process requires significant expertise for effective strategy, planning, and implementation.

As is the case with any landscaping, high performance projects require a lot of work and planning at the outset. You’ll want a team of experts to help you design your landscape, and to help you implement the aspects of the project that make it uniquely high performance:

• Appropriate Planting: The first step to zeroscaping is finding the right plants. Typically, these are native species that require less water, and can withstand the weather conditions of your region. When you’re ready to install your vegetation, be sure to plant in groupings for better water efficiency.
• Irrigation: Conserving water is important, whether it’s your choice or a stipulation of your municipality. Buying plants that require less moisture will help, but there are other ways to preserve water as well. Consider investing in a drip-irrigation system to cut down on wasteful inaccuracy (no need to water your home’s siding and driveway) and over-watering. Drip irrigation runs along pipes throughout your lawn, slowly dripping water directly onto the vegetation, which also helps to prevent immediate evaporation into the air by high winds.
• Soil Strategy: Understanding the characteristics of your local soil is a large part of zeroscaping. It not only helps you plan for the types of vegetation you’ll plant, but it has implications for your landscape’s ability to conserve water. Zeroscaping can often require mulching, which helps dry desert-like soil hold more water, or soil re-structuring, which helps plants retain moisture for a longer period of time.

Want to learn how Clarum can bring a new level of sustainable beauty to your custom home building project with high performance landscaping? Give us a call at 650.322.7069.