Landscape Management
While we encourage our clients to become actively engaged in their properties with the hope that they will develop a deeper reverence, or at least, greater appreciation and awareness of the surrounding landscapes, we also understand the degree that can be realized is often mitigated by available time, ability, and knowledge.
Land Stewards offers customized and comprehensive management services for diverse project sites that range from naturalistic gardens to natural areas. Land Stewards also reveres management as an inextricable component of design and that the success of any project is dependent on how well both reflect desired outcomes.
Our Work: Holistic Garden Management
Customized management programs are developed to not only meet individual client needs but visits are also scheduled based on plant growth, reproductive cycles and other time sensitive considerations. Nutrient cycling, soil building, and integrated pest/disease management are emphasized, while the need for linear material and energy flows, such as annual mulching and leaf removal, is reduced.
Our Work: Natural Lands Management
As urban and other land use development continues to fragment the landscape and compromise ecological functions, it is critical that natural areas, both public and private, be managed in a manner that helps to preserve and restore some of those ecological responsibilities. Land Stewards can advise, plan, and implement strategies for large landowners aimed to protect habitat, mitigate stormwater, and enhance biodiversity and resiliency, and can identify and assist with potential funding sources related to meeting those goals.
Meadow Management priortitizes species competitiveness guided with annual/strategic mowing along with selective herbicide application.
Woodland Management aims to estabish multi-layered plant communities by controlling invasive species, protecting against deer herbivory, and diversifying species.
* Invasive Species
Invasive plants are those which have typically been introduced from other parts of the world which, lacking any natural control, spread aggressively through our landscapes, out-compete native populations and ultimately reduce biodiversity. Understanding the direct correlation between biodiversity and ecosystem health, the establishment and subsequent proliferation of these invasive plants, pose serious threats to maintaining healthy ecosystem functions including provison of habitat, stormwater mitigation, and erosion control among others.
While some species are easily recognizable in their ability to form dense stands like multiflora rose and bamboo species, others continue to be promoted and distributed by landscape contractors and garden centers as desirable ornamental plants. Species, including Japanese Barberry (Berberis thunbergii), Burning Bush (Euonymus alatus), Butterfly Bush, (Buddleia sp.), Doublefile Viburnum (Viburnum plicatum) and Japanese ornamental grasses (ie. Miscanthus sp.) among others, which are often marketed to possess coveted aesthetic attributes are also escaping from their intended planting areas to adjacent lands where they compromise native plant communities.
For more information regarding invasive species and their effects in the landscape, please visit the PA DCNR website.
