STEWARDSHIP + PROCESS
We don’t just plant; we manage living systems. Our process ensures your investment thrives through every season of its evolution.
OUR CORE PHILOSOPHY
We believe that a strong relationship between people and landscapes is essential for the long-term health of both. Stewardship means actively caring for a landscape—responding to its natural rhythm and changes over time.
At Agrario, we put your landscape goals, aesthetics, and capacity first. Our stewardship strategies improve plant success, increase biodiversity, enhance soils, manage erosion and runoff, reduce invasive species, and soften the impacts of development.
Our stewardship approach combines design implementation with the landscape management and maintenance. This allows us to implement new installations and make edits over time which can help spread out costs, ensure we establish areas thoroughly as we go, and allow us to make adaptive decisions for your property. Think of it as doing design, implementation, and maintenance in a cyclical approach to meet phasing of a longer term vision.
Our stewardship and design process both start with a free phone consultation followed by a Site Audit to coordinate the best plan for you to achieve your landscape goals.
3 PHASES OF OUR PROCESS
ECOLOGICAL DESIGN | BEAUTIFUL LANDSCAPE DESIGN THAT WORKS WITH NATURE
Our designs and strategic decisions for your landscape combine aesthetics and outdoor living needs, and incorporate them with the local ecosystems — choosing plants that thrive in your climate, soil, and site conditions. Our designs work to enhance:
Soil Health
Water run-off and erosion
Carbon Sequestration
Biodiversity and native pollinator habitat
Our aesthetic approach starts with you and your goals and incorporates them with patterns we find in nature. These patterns take advantage of site conditions, seasonal changes, and improve over time.
SITE ESTABLISHMENT | ACTIVE MANAGEMENT
The first 24 months are the most critical. We don't just "plant and walk away." During this window, we move into Adaptive Management—high-frequency oversight to ensure 1:1 plant survival, pruning and dead heading to promote desirable plant growth and training, troubleshoot site challenges, maintain soil coverage and manage weed competition.
We protect your financial investment by ensuring the biology of the site is working for you, not against you.
LONG-TERM SITE STEWARDSHIP | THE EVOLUTION
Every landscape evolves. Our stewardship approach allows us to implement installations and make adaptive edits over time. This includes pruning, invasive species management, managing spread and reseeding of species, species additions or replacements, and adapting to other design and site considerations. This spreads out costs and ensures that as your property matures, it requires fewer inputs and provides greater resilience.
STEWARDSHIP VS. MAINTENANCE
ECOLOGIAL STEWARDSHIP
is a "responsive" approach. We guide the landscape as it matures, increasing soil vitality and habitat. Stewardship means your landscape actually improves and becomes more valuable as it ages. While regular maintenance decreases over time, our landscapes are still created and associated with human development. It is important to monitor their evolution and ensure they continue to meet design and site goals over time.
TRADITIONAL MAINTENANCE
is often a "static" approach—mowing and hedging to keep a landscape looking exactly the same. This requires more chemicals and labor every year as the system struggles to stay frozen in time. Fighting against the natural rhythm of a landscapes eventually causes plant failure, depleted soils, and a space that doesn’t inspire people to engage with it.