our blog
Field Journal
a collection of resources, reflections, and design stories
SITES™ Overview
This overview article explores some of the fundamentals of the Sustainable Sites Initiative. From understanding a site’s characteristics and elements to designing with the nature of water, vegetation, and materials, these resources provide guidance and insight into sustainable landscape design practices.
As you’ll explore in Site Assessment, it’s important to take a layered approach when both understanding and designing for any landscape. This means observing and measuring characteristics of how water moves, how plants grow, how materials impact our experience. By incorporating natural systems into our design logic, we create spaces and places that last generations and embody meaning.
Site Assessment
In order to achieve SITES™ accreditation, a landscape intervention must (among a few other prerequisites) maximize the opportunities for beneficial site performance by conducting an accurate and detailed assessment of site conditions and exploring options for sustainable outcomes prior to design. Each project must map existing site conditions and resources, collect information about surrounding areas (including non-physical influences like policy), and explain how this information will influence the sustainable design.
Dense, Layered, Native Planting
There are many ecosystem services that can be protected, restored, and enhanced, which we’ll explore in this and other essays. Today, we’ll focus on the vegetation life-cycle and the ways in which sustainable design can leverage the functionality of native and appropriate plants, which reduce irrigation and maintenance needs, increase habitat, and promote regional identity. By replacing lawn, hardscaping, and invasive populations with native plant communities, we create a landscape that’s as beautiful as it is functional.
Materials Selection
Wood, stone, vegetation, earth, metal, brick, concrete, asphalt, glass, textiles, plastic… We position these elements and install them within a site to create spaces, surfaces, seating, shade, screening, walls, water, containers, railings, visual interest, lighting, and art. And each of these has nearly endless options for color, material, finish, size, hardware, assembly, and source. No matter the material, each has its own life-cycle.
The idea is to close the loop on as many material life-cycles as possible, minimizing extraction of virgin resources and adding to landfills. As many options there are for materials, there are just as many sustainable alternatives and techniques available.
The Generational Garden
Discover how a North Jersey front yard was transformed into a native woodland garden designed for multigenerational connection. Learn how layered plantings, reclaimed stone, and intentional design create space for ecological healing, family memory, and ongoing relationships with land.
Stewards in the Making
In a South Jersey schoolyard, a group of fifth graders co-designed a pollinator garden from the ground up. Through soil testing, wild sketches, native plant research, and muddy hands, they created more than just a garden — they built a living classroom, a shared project, and a small act of ecological care. Learn how we supported these young ecological designers in bringing their vision to life.
What the Lawn Remembers
In neighborhoods across America, the lawn is everywhere… and yet barely noticed. It’s a symbol, a surface, a habit. But what if we started seeing it differently? In this reflection from a landscape designer's balcony, we explore the emotional, ecological, and cultural story of the lawn—from Easter egg hunts and outdoor theater to monocultures, displacement, and design futures rooted in care. This is an invitation to see lawn not as default, but as decision.
From Lawn to Living Landscape
What started as a simple request—replacing a patchy, underperforming lawn—quickly became an opportunity to create something more meaningful. Instead of forcing grass to grow where it clearly didn’t want to, we reimagined the space as a thriving native garden, designed to work with the land rather than against it.
Butterflies Aren’t Picky—We Are
So how do we embrace these "messy" ecosystems—not just as acceptable, but as beautiful? How can we shift from rejecting functional, life-giving landscapes to celebrating them? By unpacking both our biological instincts and cultural conditioning, we can begin to design a new aesthetic: one that frames hope, resilience, and a thriving future.