This book evaluates the assumption that all built landscapes are environmentally sound, and offers practical, professional alternatives for more sustainable landscape construction, design, and maintenance. Packed with clear concepts and never before compiled resources on "green" landscape work, the book is an inspiring overview of important practices and concerns. Organized around ten key principles of sustainability, the book offers specific methods that can help accomplish those principles. Techniques and materials of landscape construction, both alternative and conventional, are evaluated, using criteria such as energy savings or non-toxicity and renewability in manufacture. Topics covered include: keeping healthy sites, healthy constructing for and with plants, working with a site's water regime, reducing the impacts of paving using local, salvaged, or recycled materials, estimating energy costs over time, respecting the need for darkness and quiet, evaluating the resource costs of conventional landscape maintenance. More than 100 projects from around the world are described and illustrated, proving that sustainable methods are viable today, economically, functionally, and aesthetically. The book's extensive lists of resources for further information are an invaluable tool for implementing the ideas discussed, and for adapting them to local and regional conditions. It is an important complement to basic landscape construction texts, and is a one of a kind reference for professionals in landscape architecture, construction, and maintenance; students in landscape construction and related design courses; and landowners, community groups, and others concerned with the health of specific sites.
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