Landscape Architect Articles

"Water Conserving Landscapes ??" A Revolutionary Image"11-01-88 | News

“Water Conserving Landscapes –
A Revolutionary Image”

by Robert L. Thayer, Jr., and Thomas Richman

A vestige of our English heritage – the suburban front lawn.

Historical Background

Much of the designed landscape in the United States today owes its aesthetic origins to the romantic traditions of the eighteenth century English landscape revolutionaries like Lancelot Brown and Humphrey Repton. The English pastoral image, elaborated in the U.S. by Fredrick LawOlmsted and other nineteenth century landscape architects persists to this day in our dependence upon lawn and informal groupings of trees and shrubs. Derived from the picturesque treatment of English country estates with ample greenswards and informal vistas of distant scenery, the typical residential and recreational landscape has shrunk considerably but has maintained much of the character of its cultural predecessors. House or buildings are set in the center of an expanse of turfgrass, highlighted by groves and specimen trees, and punctuated with foundation plantings, focal shrubs and bedding plants. The expansive front lawn has become a prestige symbol, romantically harkening to past eras of conspicuous status and wealth. Although more climatically adaptable to the eastern United States with its ample rainfall, the idealized pastoral landscape has been transported to the arid west, where it is far less appropriate. This romantic water-loving landscape has taken root in places like Colorado, California and Arizona, where it survives only with the support of extensive water development and delivery systems, cheap energy, and large numbers of recent migrants from the East Coast who bring their landscape, aesthetic expectations to the new region. Even in the East, where significantly less irrigation is required to support this ideal landscape, the facade of the English landscape tradition is beginning to wear a little thin. People are questioning the suitability of irrigating, fertilizing, mowing, pruning and manicuring a landscape image that seems more a relic of the past than a bellwether of the future.

An unfortunate stereotype of a drought tolerant garden – excessive use of inert materials with minimum vegetation.

Maintaining the vestigial organ of Anglo-Saxon landscape heritage – the suburban front lawn has become a symbol-based subculture. For the work-harried executive mowing the lawn on Saturday, it provides both a visible concrete achievement (in contrast to work’s often intangible frustrations) as well as a visual indicator of “keeping one’s life in order”. A trim, healthy lawn represents a well-maintained self-image for the suburbanite and his family. Lawn mowing seems often to be a masculine endeavor. Perhaps this too is a cultural holdover from the days of the country gentleman tending his estate. Since most suburban lot sizes are somewhat regulated, it is no longer the area of turfgrass in front of the house but the degree of its manicure that evokes an image of status and sparks the Saturday morning lawn mowing ritual.

Weeds, brown spots, grasses going to seed, and heterogeneous groundcover areas have no place in such a landscape. Mowers, trimmers, pesticides, herbicides, sprinkler irrigation hardware, fertilizers, and even occasional green dyes are enlisted to maintain the turf garden ideal Energy and water inputs are not only acceptable, but essential supplements, for this is a landscape of conspicuous consumption. In addition to homeowners with their front lawns, corporations with their symbolic headquarters and communities with their neighborhood parks embrace the “clean and green” convention, which is perpetuated and exalted by the landscape industry and suppliers as the only desirable landscape alternative.

A better drought tolerant landscape image – more plants, greater diversity and minimal water consumption.

There do exist, however, individuals and groups who are working to overcome the inertia of this landscape tradition and create a more appropriate and satisfying landscape image. Originally, these included the native plant societies, some ecologists, horticulturists, landscape architects and urban agriculturists. Recently, others have seen the light. Forward-thinking water districts and landscape industry representatives have joined the earlier landscape water conservation “radicals”. Today, this alliance is alive and well in the fledgling Xeriscape movement. Whatever their professional affiliation or discipline, these people are innovators – people whom communication scientist E. F. Rogers describes as venturesome, eager to try new ideas, and willing to take the risks of public rejection, disapproval, or even financial loss. Today’s landscape innovators have one thing in common: a desire to reverse the trend toward excessive resource consumption (i.e., water and energy) necessitated by “maladapted” landscape treatments.

With this positive approach, a countermovement of “conspicuous nonconsumption” has begun these attempts to visibly and publicly demonstrate alternatives to the status quo in hopes of contributing to the general public welfare. This process of altering landscape design to create more resource-conservation landscapes is easily described by borrowing from theories of environmental aesthetics, innovation diffusion, and landscape history.

Aesthetics, Innovation, and Revolution

The landscape has many “meanings”, from simple abstract form, texture and color composition to the heavily symbolic overtones previously discussed. Much of the way designed landscape appears can be attributed to its role in elaborating the idealized way people view the world. These landscapes historically owe their existence to the romantic fantasies and whims of aristocratic clients who hired landscape architects and designers to make their landscape dreams come true. The everyday, “real” image one has of the world is fluid, functional, often ugly, and apt to change rapidly or even violently due to technological, economic, or political influences. The ideal image we all seem to hold, however, is a vision of how the world should be, not how it actually is. The ideal image is grounded in tradition and nostalgia, and is a protection against the harsh experiences of the uncertain and often painful real image. The ideal image is grounded in tradition and nostalgia, and is a protection against the harsh experiences of the uncertain and often painful real image. The ideal image provides support and security against the shock and discomfort of everyday life. The tension between the ideal and the real is exemplified by the large fountains gracing a Phoenix subdivision. These fountains, with their enormous plumes of water evaporating in the desert air, testify to the landscape ideals of the new homeowners, while the reality of the dams, aqueducts, pumping stations, and energy expenditures necessary to provide this water remains hidden from view. Although out of sight, this dependence on a complex water system cannot totally escape the homeowner’s mind: The ideal and real images strike an uneasy dissonance.

The ideal image we all hold is a vision of how the world should be, not how it actually is.

Periodically throughout history, what people know as visual reality and what they hold as visually ideal grow so divergent that a state of cognitive dissonance occurs and the public senses the impotence of traditional idealized images. New forms created by innovative artists and designers revolutionize the aesthetic norms and move the ideal image into closer congruence with reality. Examples of this type of design revolution can easily be seen in the breakdown of the French Baroque garden as exemplified by Versailles. The English Landscape School was largely a style of landscape design intended to be more respectful of “nature” and to replace the elaborate, costly, and pompous French formality, thus bringing the idea image of the landscape more into harmony with the realities of the undulant English topography. In architecture, the Bauhaus movement of Gropius and his colleagues was a radical aesthetic departure from archaic neoclassicism in an attempt to bring building design into closer harmonywith the advancing industrial and economic realities.

Present Crisis and Innovation Diffusion

The present and growing water crisis represents another dramatic shift in the real image. We acknowledge that our current technological lifestyles and attitudes will severely tax our water systems, but we persistently cling to nostalgic land-use patterns and landscape designs. Parks and subdivisions glorify a clean, green, water-intensive appearance. Irrigation heads are a turf-like green color and pop out of sight when not in use. Power lines are buried, and air conditioners are hidden in an attempt to disguise or visually minimize in the landscape the technologies we somehow dislike, but can’t seem to live without. These attempts to mitigate the visual impact of technology on the landscape derive from a desire to preserve the integrity of our aesthetic images in spite of sweeping technological and cultural change. Yet even though the visual constituents are preserved, the symbolic meanings of these traditional resource-dependent landscapes are unable to eliminate the uneasy dissonance we feel between our ideals and our impressions of reality. The images must change: An aesthetic revolution is necessary and is already underway ??? one that will renovate our ideal image to one more compatible with the realities of our present culture and its finite water supply.

A fenced off water treatment plant – Lots of lawn but no one using it.

How does this aesthetic revolution work? What role do landscape architects play? The aesthetic revolution begins with physical innovations created by designerswho are unafraid to take visual”risks”. These innovators experiment with physical design alternatives that actually save water. They consider not only functional operation and practical implementation, but they also concern themselves with the aesthetic nuances implied by their ideas. Some design approaches may fail to achieve public acceptance, but just as the fledgling solar industry’s first houses were often crude and visually awkward, the water-conserving landscape will follow a predictable pattern of diffusion into the social framework:

It will be visibly differentiable from traditional landscape styles.
It will function to save water and energy.
It can be tested and adopted by the public on a trial basis.
It will ultimately begin to symbolize a new attitude toward resources.

Rogers has identified groups within society according to their willingness and ability to accept innovations. First are the innovators, who experiment with the problem and develop initial alternatives. Soon to join them and adopt their innovations are the early adopters, who are somewhat more traditional, yet flexible. These are the opinion leaders in the community where views are respected and emulated by the next group, the majority, who approach the innovation with varying degrees of deliberateness (early majority) or skepticism (late majority). Sooner or later, however, if an innovation is to be successfully diffused into society, the majority follow the lead of the early adopters and themselves adopt the innovation. Last to accept the innovation are the laggards. This group is conservative, oriented to the past, and suspicious of change. By the time the laggards adopt an innovation, it has become part of the mainstream.

Landscape designers and planners will achieve greater results when proposing water-conserving plans if they are aware of their clients’ attitudes toward innovation. Imagine three scenarios for water-conserving landscapes appropriate for various clients ranging from early adopters to laggards. Although some water savings are possible through minor manipulations of a traditional landscape image, this approach serves only the most conservative client. It will have little or no visible impact on aesthetics and will do the least to diffuse water conserving innovations into common practice. Although a radically different scenario may initially seem extreme, it is necessary as a visual indicator and stimulant of change, just as the gardens of Stowe in 1750 or the architecture of Le Corbusier in the 1930’s were critical to their respective aesthetic movements. Without a physical, imageable manifestation in the landscape, water conservation has little chance of helping to influence public opinion and alter resource-wasting habits.

Visual Meanings

Just as any new visual stimulus acquires “meaning” in terms of its use and context, new approaches to water-conserving landscape design will result in new symbolic meaning for landscape elements. For example, the drought of 1976-77 in California was felt no worse than in Marin County, which managed to reduce its water consumption by a dramatic 53%. During this crisis lawns were allowed to die and turn brown out of the necessity to direct water for more critical uses. Subsequently, a brown lawn became a symbol of its owner’s environmental and social consciousness, while homeowners still irrigating their lawns were treated with disdain. This is a most extreme example, one representing an abrupt and perhaps overly rapid change in aesthetics. Nevertheless, the process of transferring symbolic status from lawns and other water intensive landscape forms to new water-conserving alternatives is a major goal worthy of the landscape architect’s attention. By advocating water conserving residential, recreational, commercial, corporate, and public landscapes, the designer can not only help to save a significant amount of water and energy but can also embody and visually express the values of “conspicuous non-consumption” in a thoughtful, innovative, and publicly acceptable manner.

Better technology does not guarantee a more useful nor water conservative landscape.

Major hurdles facing landscape architects include unrealistic water pricing, lagging public opinion, and inadequate education. As a profession, landscape architects have hesitated to take visual risks in the landscape for fear of negative public response. Public preconceptions of drought-tolerant landscapes are far more extreme and formidable than the actual alternatives the profession can generate, but the risk is seldom taken – turfgrass and exotics are often chose and the issues of water conservation and client education are ignored. Landscape architects must remember that even Olmsted, the great champion of the English landscape tradition, rejected turfgrass and exotics when designing for a arid environment. His design of Stanford University in 1890 featured oases of tropical and subtropical plantings, surrounded by a gravel courtyard. Olmsted reasoned that in the Mediterranean climate of California irrigated lawn areas were inappropriate and, in spite of pressure from his clients, he insisted on a planting plan in harmony with the environmental realities. Landscape architects need to emulate this attitude of flexibility and innovation if they are to succeed in replacing the common misconception of water-conserving landscapes – cacti, gravel and boulders – with a new aesthetic imagery. In February’s issue, we will introduce a new concept – hydrozoning – as a tool for the design of water-conserving landscapes.

Robert Thayer is Professor of Landscape Architecture and Chair of the Department of Environmental Design at the University of California, Davis. His research and professional practice emphasizes resource-conserving practices in landscape planning and design. He has published numerous articles and won several a wards for his research work.

Thomas Richman is a landscape architect and campus planner for Stanford University. His previous professional work includes design of landscape developments in California and northern India. He received degrees in classical literature from Stanford University and in landscape architecture from the University of California, Davis.

Thayer and Richman are authors of “Water-Conserving Landscape Design”: Chapter 10 in Energy Conserving Site Design, E.G. McPherson, editor, published in 1984 by the American Society of Landscape Architects, Washington, DC. This edited version is reproduced with permission.