Green landscaping generally uses native plant materials to help wildlife, improve local character, and reduce maintenance efforts. More specifically, it focuses on reducing herbicides, pesticides, fertilizers, and watering to help the environment while reducing maintenance costs.

According to the Pennsylvania Green Building Operations and Maintenance Manual, native plants are desirable because they can offer habitat and food that native wildlife can use. It is common to encounter the need for using non-invasive exotic plants due to costs, limited availability of native materials, and vivid colors of some non-native materials. Many non-native plants also do well on a wide range of site conditions.

Begin by writing down site conditions in terms of dryness, slope, shadiness, soil texture (clay, loam, or sand), estimated soil depth, and direction of exposure. Then develop a list of native plants suitable for the site conditions and list which species naturally occur together as groups for your site(s) and plant according to these groupings.

In landscaping, work toward developing lots of summer shade, barriers to wind, and a layer of leaves or mulch. This helps the right native species grow and helps keeps weeds to a minimum.

For lowest maintenance, use native plants that tend to form into dense clumps or do well on heavily disturbed soils.

Some areas of the country are now publicizing lists of native species appropriate for landscaping. They may even list common exotic plant materials and offer native substitutes to achieve more environmental benefit. Gather a list of these native plants suitable for your area. You will find it a very handy reference over time.

Consider the following six steps when establishing a green landscaping program: 1. Describing site conditions is helpful when seeking assistance in identifying appropriate native and non-native species to plant. These conditions include slope, direction of expose, amount of moisture, shadiness, general type of soil (clay, loam, or sandy), and an idea of how deep the soil is. Other factors include nutrition status and acidity. This can be determined using kits available from some garden stores or by sending soil samples to the local Cooperative Extension Service. Usually a minimum of seven to eight samples is required using sampling procedures described by the Extension Service. The information gained is quite valuable for minimizing chemical applications and costs.

2. Developing lists of three or four groups of plants that naturally occur together helps grounds maintenance personnel understand what plants should occur together in landscapes. These lists will vary with site conditions. That is why the description of the site conditions is the first step. The best sources for these lists of plant groupings is from university ecology, botany, and forestry departments. Private and university associated botanical gardens or arboretums are also good.

Most exotic or non-native species are not invasive and do not pose a problem for the natural environment. Non-native INVASIVE plants are to be rigorously avoided or eliminated. Examples are Ailanthus altissima (tree-of-heaven), Paulownia tomentosa (royal paulownia or princess tree), Berberis thunbergii(Japanese barberry), Miscanthus (Japanese silvergrass), and selected species of Ligustrum.

3. Knowing exotic invasive plants and controlling them properly are two of the most crucial elements of green landscaping. They affect ecological issues (crowd out native plants in natural areas), chemical applications, and, of course, maintenance costs. Weatherproof flashcards of perhaps the worst 10 or 12 offending pest plants works extremely well in helping groundskeepers learn these species.

4. Learn what is needed to control weeds. Staying ahead of invasive species problems is absolutely crucial. An ounce of grounds keeping prevention is worth a pound of catching up once invasive species have become a problem. This is covered under management guidelines. Recognizing the early onset of an exotic invasive plant problem is a vital step.

Treatment of pest plants varies with the particular pest plant, its stage of development, and the environment in which it occurs. It is an excellent idea to identify pest plant control methods on the backside of the plant identification flash cards.

5. Work toward establishing shady, mulched landscapes. A shady, moist, wind-protected environment with a layer of leaves is the fastest disappearing important environmental condition besides wetlands. It is also the condition that harbors the most diverse and unusual native species besides wetlands.

These include plants, lichens, mosses, reptiles, amphibians, birds, insects, soil organisms. Grounds keeping approaches may not be able to restore federally-and state-listed threatened, endangered, and sensitive species but conditions can certainly be improved to help them.

6. Encourage plant combinations that form dense clumps. Shady conditions lead to low maintenance, including less fertilizing, watering, weeding and other tending. Given low maintenance objectives, the hardiest of plant materials are mandatory. This is especially true on disturbed soils.

It is more important to get plant materials to survive and be healthy with abundant leaves than it is to have more attractive materials that are struggling to survive, wind up looking bad, and may need to be replaced. This situation may also require more weed control.

Preparation of soil for planting on many sites is an important factor. Soil cultivation, subsoiling, removal of pest plants, improvement of soil texture and nutrition by working in mulches and fertilizers, and use of surface mulches will help plant survival and vigor. This means much less maintenance later and a much more attractive landscape. ❑ Source: Pennsylvania Green Building Operations and Maintenance Manual.