How Green Does Your Garden Grow?

How green is your garden? How often do you need to water your lawn? Are your plants native? Are they drought-tolerant? These are questions all homeowners should ask themselves, and questions that developers and landscapers will probably be required to ask in the future if they want their projects to be LEED-Certified.

According to a recent press release, the American Society of Landscape Architects (ASLA), the University of Texas at Austin’s Lady Bird Johnson Wildflower Center, and the United States Botanic Garden are collaborating to develop a rating system for sustainable landscape design, called the Sustainable Sites Initiative.

The initiative will resemble the rating systems developed by the U.S. Green Building Council as part of their LEED programs, and will measure the sustainability of commercial, residential, and public landscape projects.

So what's the big news that ASLA plans to announce tomorrow during a press conference at its Annual Expo? The USGBC is supporting the project and plans to adopt the Sustainable Sites metrics into its LEED system once the initiative is finished.

This means that sustainable landscaping will take its place alongside green building materials, insulation, energy conservation, and all the other highly-prioritized LEED mandates.

Currently there is no rating system to guide landscape development in a green project -- and, according to ASLA, "sustainable landscape design can save billions of dollars in infrastructure and environmental costs while reducing individual maintenance and utility bills."

Image via daniel wildman; sxc.hu