Ecological Landscapes: Manage Maintain Monitor!

As design-forward landscape architects, many of us have spent countless hours designing ecologically inspired planting plans, only to see them wither and decline from lack of attention after they are installed. Our design and planning lays the groundwork for each project's success or failure, and we as designers have the ability to envision a successful future for our projects far beyond construction completion.  At Assemblage we are questioning the status quo of landscape maintenance by rethinking how we can better plan during design for the challenges of first-year plant establishment. We are exploring ways to remain involved in the care of our newly installed planting projects by managing, maintaining, and monitoring them (the 3 M’s). This will allow us to gain familiarity with all the dynamic variables so we can resolve establishment challenges and better forecast those challenges in the future. 

Although landscapes can benefit from the 3 M’s at any stage of life, the first year of establishment is a critical stage, when neglect can cause a turn for the worst. If we rethink the 3 M’s as a part of the planting design process, we are actually designing a more resilient planting plan from the outset: a plan that can stand up to aggressive weeds and weather the summer droughts with our stewardship. Monitoring planting during establishment can help catch unforeseen circumstances that if addressed early can be fixed easier than once they become a problem. A repositioning of maintenance planning from “afterwards” to “during design” will integrate the care into the overall design budget as a resiliency strategy for establishment success.

No matter how much we rely on blind faith for our planting plans to succeed, ultimately our projects lie in the hands of those who care for them, and in dynamic urban conditions, plants usually need more than faith. Assemblage believes that we, as landscape architects, can advocate for having a continued presence on site post-construction to manage, maintain, and monitor our planting plans. While we’ve only scratched the surface of this potentially impactful idea, we see it as a critical step towards defining a new planting design paradigm for the design profession.