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.
Managing Precipitation on Site
For hundreds of years, industrial, agricultural, and urban development have degraded and disrupted natural systems, increased impervious surfaces, polluted watersheds, and emitted greenhouse gasses which have resulted in the climate crisis and its alarmingly destructive weather events we experience today.
A raindrop hits the ground of a parking lot, slicks off with accelerating speed towards a gutter, collecting pollutants and litter along the way. It enters a series of concrete tubes and eventually to the ocean: never to pass through a plant’s roots or an animal’s lips all while toxifying everything downstream.
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.
12 Native Plants of Lenapehoking
Native plants are species and communities of plants that have lived in relationship with the land and its inhabitants, long before European settlers arrived. Not only do native species “come from here” (wherever you are), their very DNA has been shaped by the regional and local environment. From the amount of annual rain to how long a growing season lasts, plants not introduced by colonists (on purpose or accidentally) have adapted characteristics alongside the land and other living organisms over thousands of years.
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.
The Quiet Winter Garden
The leaves have fallen, the days grow short, and the garden takes on an air of quiet stillness. Frost creeps across the landscape, softening edges and lending the world a crystalline beauty. For many, winter is the season when the garden sleeps—but beneath the surface, life is bustling. The winter garden is a paradox: the apparent dormancy hums with hidden activity, and simplicity reveals profound complexity.