Landscaping Design with the SITES Framework

A little bit of grass, some rose bushes and daisies, and perhaps a fruit tree or two: for many homeowners, designing the landscape around their homes requires little more than walking through Lowe’s or Home Depot and searching for whichever flowers and bushes are on sale. In many cases, the contractors who build our homes will include a prefabricated landscape system that is mass-produced and repeated in the hundreds of homes they build. Walking through urban or suburban neighborhoods reveals cookie-cutter yards of well-manicured lawns and bushes. Not only does this monoculture require an enormous amount of agrochemicals to sustain, but it is also dull, ecologically barren, and not all that attractive.

Most of us have grown accustomed to calling the physical space around the homes we live in “our yards.” This semantic description further reveals our disconnection from the landscapes that used to sustain us. Throughout Mesoamerica, where ancestral agrarian traditions abound, rural and even suburban homesteads are surrounded by incredible diverse “home gardens.” Eric Toensmeier, the author of The Carbon Farming Solution, describes these home gardens as “one of the oldest agroforestry systems in the world.” They are constituted as a “highly diverse planting near and around the house on an intimate scale with trees, shrubs, vines, herbs, annual crops, and often small livestock — what is often known in the United States as a food forest or forest garden.” These home gardens might not look as “neat” as a monoculture of green grass. Still, they provide high levels of carbon sequestration, excellent levels of biodiversity, and an abundance of food.

Might it be possible for the typical American yard to transform to become more like the Central American home garden? The SITES framework is the most comprehensive system for creating sustainable and resilient land development projects.