Sustainable Landscape

Look to your own back yard to make life more sustainable and beautiful. Your landscape can reduce the cost of heating and cooling your home. Your roof can irrigate the trees, shrubs, and perennials that create a welcoming garden for family and friends. Gather breakfast, lunch, and dinner from a landscape that is also a comfortable area for relaxing and entertaining.

Gardenworks, Inc. has over 20 years experience in designing and building landscapes as if our planet mattered. It's why we got into this business!  Take a step towards sustainability. Call 503-709-7866 for a FREE initial consultation.

Food and Beauty.

Incorporate food bearing shrubs, vines and trees into your landscape to create a garden that feeds the body and the soul. Grapes on an arbor will cool your patio and provide dessert for a garden party. Plant dwarf apples, plums, cherries and pears for structure, color, and a permanent supply of organic  fruit. Mix blueberries and evergreen huckleberries into a planting of rhododendrons and azaleas for a new twist on a traditional Northwest landscape. Add colorful plantings of salad greens to a display of annuals in containers or in a planting bed - a new way to serve lunch to your friends or to the butterflies. 

Planting for color, wildlife, and conservation.  

A home landscape can be an ecological niche that enhances the natural capital of the neighborhood, or it can be a resource-wasting  source of chemical pollution. The key is to design with environmental principles so that human and natural needs work together.

Many of our customers tell us that they are seeing new birds, butterflies, and other wildlife after we help them to renovate their yards. Design for year-round color and interest with perennials, shrubs and small trees, use non-toxic organic soil amendments, conserve soil moisture with natural mulches, and work with the natural drainage patterns of a landscape. These are the fundamental tools that invite nature back into your garden.

Energy conservation and resource recycling.

Your landscape can help you to save energy and resources. Planting a wind break can significantly reduce heating bills. Deciduous trees can cool your home in the summer and let in light during the dark months. The much-maligned lawn, if properly maintained with organic methods, is an effective way to lower the temperature of a south-facing hot spot, counter soil erosion, and reduce rapid water run-off.

Even the water that falls on your roof and be captured to irrigate your landscape, and to save your community the expense of dealing with storm water run-off. Roof collection systems can be as simple as a downspout re-routing water into a ‘rain garden' that collects water beneath the soil surface. Or it can be an ‘active system' that collects water in cisterns for re-use in the dry months.

One of the simplest ways to preserve the water that falls from the sky is through the use of mulches. We use yard-debris compost for planting mix, a product valued by large nurseries for its water-holding properties. Yard-debris compost and bark mulch is also extremely valuable as a surface much to reduce evaporation in the summer, soil compaction from winter rains, and as a way to feed acid-loving plants like rhododendrons and blueberries. Gravel, spread around the base of plants has been shown to dramatically reduce water needs, and to help the absorption or irrigation water.

A local economy is part of the environment.

Natural gardening is the art of recycling organic nutrients to create a beautiful outdoor living space. And by investing in your own back yard, you help close the loop to build a local economy. We base our work on  local products such as recycled yard debris compost, Oregon-grown plant material, and rock products from the Pacific Northwest. It's part of a larger effort to create a sustainable local culture, from the ground up.