Organic Landscape Design

I have a client who happens to live about a ½ mile from another client. I don't have that many clients yet so I find this story rather amazing.

Carmen owns a house on a corner lot with 150 feet of curve along the street. She has sheet mulched the front yard and built it out as part xeriscape and part flower garden. She had two problems when she called me. First, her partial drip line was not working right and second, she had grasses sprouting all along the boundary between the sheet mulch and the sidewalk – 150 feet of weeding nightmare.

Solving the first problem was easy but involved some expense. It does not work to combine sprinklers and drip line on the same zone due to the difference in operating pressures. We solved her first problem by replacing the entire zone with a drip system which will save her water, and money, over time.

The second problem results from nature's desire to cover the earth with plant life. Bare ground, or landscape fabric covered with rocks, or the edge between our cardboard and the sidewalk will be filled with nature's pioneer plants, as soon as she can manage it, unless we provide an alternative. In this case, hardy perennials such as day lilies and iris make a nice border to the beds and crowd out the grasses. Because we now have a drip system, we can run that border right along the outside edge of the xeriscape beds – that would be over watered with a sprinkler system.

Which brings me to the amazing part. My other client, Barbara, has an established flower garden with overgrown day lilies and iris. I have been telling her that those beds should be thinned out for the health of the plants. In a win-win-win situation, Carmen and I went over to Barbara's and thinned her beds at no charge to Barbara. Carmen got all the plants she needed to complete her border that would have cost her $5.00 a piece at the garden center. And now Carmen has the money she would have used to buy the plants to hire me to help her.

It is this ability to share abundance that we have lost in our commercial culture.