A Landscaper Rethinks East Bay Gardens

My family has owned and operated a landscape maintenance company, Dinwoodie Landscape Services, in the East Bay Area since 1985.  We see firsthand how climate change is driving change in the landscaping industry, in plant choices, landscaping practices, and client and crew interactions.  At the most basic level, the USDA’s plant hardiness map — a useful resource that classifies each U.S. region based on its lowest winter temperature to help gardeners make smarter planting choices — has now reclassified many regions across the country whose winters have become several degrees warmer over the last decade. For the Bay Area, and our clients in East Bay cities like El Cerrito, Berkeley, Oakland, Orinda, Moraga, and Lafayette, the changes may be more subtle, but they are certainly obvious to our company almost every day. They require us to rethink our plants and our practices – and sometimes, that’s not what our clients want to hear.   

Changing Plants

Though most of the East Bay cities we work in have not been formally reclassified by the USDA, climate change is evident in the regions’ older, legacy gardens. Their plant palettes commonly include lawns, camellias, rhododendrons, azaleas, and lots of spring bulbs — all very water-intensive plants. These gardens thrived when the temperature was cooler, the winters were reliably wet, the summers were often fog-filled, and supplemental water for irrigation was cheap and abundant due to the consistently snowy winter months in the Sierras. 

Gardens with these plant palettes are now suffering. These once-happy plants experience heat and water stress more frequently, not only decreasing bloom times and bloom quantity but also making them more susceptible to disease and insect predation. Spring bulbs that once provided reliably vibrant color remain dormant for years at a time due to lack of winter rains. Rhododendrons become more susceptible to predation from insects such as thrips and they, along with camellias, often fail to bloom at all. 

Rethinking the home garden plant palette is a good way to mitigate these problems. With proper plant selection, a garden can withstand prolonged periods of high heat and use much less water while still being beautiful and colorful. Water-wise gardens have been growing in popularity in the East Bay, especially in the last 10 years, as people want to conserve water and achieve more with the water they use. If appropriately planted, one’s garden can thrive in the new, warmer climate we are living in. 

Changing Practices

Responsible landscape practices in the era of climate change are not just about how we treat our outdoor spaces. We must also consider how we treat our workers and protect their health and dignity.

Over the years, we have needed to shift our work days earlier and earlier to limit our crews’ exposure to the hottest part of the day and reduce the risk of heat-related illnesses. When exposure to heat is unavoidable, as it is in certain regions, we visit our crews and provide them with chilled water, sports drinks, and cooling towels, as well as direct them to avoid sunny areas and return to them on subsequent cooler visits.

The most drastic change that has occurred in the past decade, however, is needing to cancel work entirely to protect crews. Canceling work is a critical decision for a small business such as ours and was an exceedingly rare occurrence as recently as 10 years ago. However, with climate change, the frequency of canceled days has increased over time as the frequency of dangerously high temperatures, debilitating wildfire smoke, and brutal rainstorms continue to increase. While work stoppages create financial difficulty for both our crews and the business as a whole, the health and well-being of our workers has to be our top priority.

Changing Minds

Changing practices has been somewhat difficult and changing plants not at all – it is changing minds that is a challenge. When homeowners lack awareness or acceptance of the ways that climate change impacts their garden, they expect the same results from the same or even fewer resources. And often, they expect the same resources to yield consistent outcomes in drastically varying circumstances — an appropriate amount of irrigation one week may be inadequate the next.

This is a mindset divorced from the reality of the natural world. As the climate changes and warms, humans need to change and adapt our practices for the environment that we are experiencing, not the environment we are used to (and likely prefer). As climate-conscious landscape professionals, it is our job to inform and educate others about what is best for the health of their plants’ and the environment.