Corporate Landscaping Lets Its Hair Down
Sourced from the New York Times
At its former headquarters in eastern Pennsylvania, Air Products had a neatly manicured lawn and boxwood hedges. But when the industrial gases company moved to nearby Allentown recently and erected a new office building, it tried something different.
Rather than plant grass that would need constant watering, mowing and fertilizing, it turned to native plants that pretty much took care of themselves. Today, shoulder-high grasses wave in the wind and attract wildlife.
“One plant had yellow finches all around it,” said Patrick J. Garay, vice president of strategic projects at Air Products.
Forget the fuss. Corporate landscapes are going natural these days.
The shift — mirroring what’s happening at public parks, on university campuses and in homeowners’ backyards — is being driven by a growing awareness of the environmental costs of installing and maintaining lawns, clipped hedges and tidy flower borders. New laws ban the use of water for “useless” grass in drought-prone areas, and company sustainability programs encompass the land the buildings sit on. Apps calculate the carbon footprint of landscapes in much the same way that buildings are monitored for greenhouse gas emissions.
“There’s a lot more science and ecological rigor behind planting design,” said Michael Grove, the chair of landscape architecture, civil engineering and ecology at Sasaki, a design firm that has been involved in developing two carbon-tracking apps.
The pushback against conventional landscaping might surprise those who assume that all green plants must be equally good for the planet.
But as manicured lawns give way to meadows and borders of annuals are replaced by wild and woolly native plants, a looser, some might say messier, aesthetic is taking hold. Call it the horticultural equivalent of bedhead.
The new wave of landscape design is reacting to the image of a corporate campus from the mid-20th century. Buildings often sit in velvety emerald carpets that contribute to the more than 40 million acres of lawn in America. Can the public get used to the new look?
“It requires a significant mind-set shift,” said José Almiñana, a principal at Andropogon, the landscape architecture firm that designed Air Products’ site.
Kentucky bluegrass, a common lawn grass, draws carbon dioxide from the atmosphere. But propagating the same grass species everywhere comes at the expense of native plants that are in tune with the local climate and provide food and habitat for endangered birds, bees and butterflies. And then there’s the environmental cost of keeping lawns lush — the endless watering, weed killing, mowing and blowing.
From the Living Architecture Monitor
