The Ultimate Guide to Sustainable Commercial Landscaping

You can hardly go a day without hearing the word “sustainable.”

When it comes to your commercial property landscaping, what does sustainability mean? Why should you care? What can you do on your property to make a difference? What’s in it for you?

All good questions. You’re about to get the answers.

Sustainable landscaping is an approach to designing, installing, and maintaining outdoor spaces in a way that minimizes harm to the environment. Nobody wants to hurt the environment, right? It’s beautiful out there.

Sustainable landscaping focuses on conserving resources like water and energy; reducing waste; minimizing pollution and the amount of chemicals used; and creating landscapes that support nature. That includes being friendly to pollinators and wildlife.

That sounds like a lot. How do you achieve all this? It’s OK to start small.

You might replace high-maintenance annual flowers with low-maintenance native plants. Or install a smart irrigation system that adjusts based on weather, saving lots of water. You might install rain gardens that help filter and manage stormwater.

We’ll share lots of good examples here of green landscaping practices for businesses

In DC, Maryland and Virginia.

But sustainable commercial landscaping isn’t just about being eco-friendly. It’s actually a smart, cost-effective strategy to create outdoor spaces that are easier to maintain, compliant with regulations, and line up with environmental expectations, which are getting bigger by the day.

All while making your property look great and attract tenants and visitors. It’s a win-win-win.

Let’s get to it.

Table of Contents:

• Sustainable Commercial Landscaping: Why Should You Care?

• Sustainable Landscape Enhancements That Add Value

• Environmentally Friendly Landscape Maintenance

• Don’t Make These Sustainable Commercial Landscaping Mistakes

• Real World Examples: Level Green Customers Who Do Sustainability Well

• Choosing a Sustainable Commercial Landscaping Partner

Sustainable Commercial Landscaping: Why Should You Care?

Sometimes commercial property managers have no choice when it comes to sustainable landscape design or maintenance.

Increasingly, cities and states are introducing stricter regulations when it comes to water usage, pesticide and fertilizer use, noise pollution, stormwater runoff and other environmental concerns. You’ve probably noticed. Sustainable landscaping helps you stay ahead of these requirements and avoid penalties.

But there are lots of financial and operational advantages to

incorporating eco-friendly commercial landscaping in DC, Maryland or Virginia, too, even if nobody is requiring you to get on board.

What’s in it for you? Take a look:

1. Lower Operating Costs

Sustainable landscaping uses native plants and efficient irrigation, which reduces your water, fertilizer, and maintenance expenses over time.

2. Increased Property Value

Properties that use eco-friendly landscape features are often more attractive to buyers and investors, especially as sustainability becomes a standard expectation.

3. Better Tenant Attraction and Retention

Let’s face it, sustainability is popular. And everybody loves access to greener, more natural outdoor spaces. Your Washington DC sustainable landscaping efforts can attract tenants and encourage them to stay.

4. Stormwater Management Benefits

Sustainable landscaping solutions like rain gardens and permeable pavers reduce runoff and flooding risks. That benefits both your own property and the greater environment.

5. You Get a Brand Boost

When you have sustainable landscaping, it shows you’re responsible and forward thinking. This boosts your property’s reputation with tenants, customers, and the community. Sustainability makes you look good. If your goal is LEED certification, sustainable landscaping is part of the requirements.

6. Easier Maintenance Over Time

While initial sustainable landscape design requires planning and expense, these landscapes typically need less mowing, watering, and chemical treatments once they’re established.

7. You Might Get Money Back

Your eco-friendly commercial landscaping might qualify for rebates or tax incentives.

8. Sustainability Improves Your Land

Green landscaping practices for businesses lead to healthier soil, better drainage, and reduced erosion. All this helps preserve the structural integrity of your property over time. Think of it as an investment in your property that will continue to pay off.

So eco-friendly commercial landscaping isn’t just the right thing to do, or something municipalities make you do. It’s good for your budget, your reputation, tenant satisfaction, and the value of your property.

Sustainable Landscape Enhancements That Add Value

When you’re adding features to improve your commercial property landscaping, think for a minute: can you boost your property and help the environment at the same time?

Everybody loves bonus points, right?

Check out a few sustainable landscape design ideas that help you and the earth:

1. Rain Gardens

This attractive sustainable landscaping solution is a shallow depression that’s planted with deep-rooted native plants and grasses. It encourages stormwater to soak slowly into the ground — not rush into the nearest storm drain.

A rain garden’s soil filters oil, grease, and other pollutants before slowly releasing the cleaner water into the water table.

Water soaks into the garden rather than gushing straight into the stormwater system. Meanwhile, its flowers and plants beautify your property.

2. Green Roofs

Why create a garden on your roof? It saves energy, minimizes stormwater runoff, helps cool the city, and offers a bit of beautiful green calm.

A green roof is a great sustainable landscape solution because the soil in green roof systems acts like a sponge and absorbs excess rainwater. The plants naturally filter out pollution before returning the water to the groundwater system.

They also soak up annoying noise. Plants, soil, and air trapped in the soil are great acoustic insulators.

Green roofs help cool buildings and surrounding air, too. Plants release cooling water vapor and act as natural insulation. This not only reduces building heat but also helps reduce the urban heat island effect, where cities become hotter than rural areas.

3. Perennials

Annual flowers often top the list of commercial property enhancements, but don’t forget about perennial flowers. They’re sustainable landscaping superstars.

Plant perennials once, and they return every year.

Replace fussier annual flowers with lower maintenance pretty perennials like daylilies, hosta, sedum and graceful ornamental grasses. They’ll still attract attention to your property, with less maintenance and expense.

Perennials don’t need as much water or fertilizer as thirsty, high-maintenance annuals. So, they help the environment while going easier on your budget than annuals, which need replacing two or three times a year.

Go one step further and choose native perennial plants for an even bigger sustainable commercial landscaping boost.

Native plants, which originated here, naturally resist diseases and pests. They’re happier and healthier, needing less water than non-natives.

And you’ll be helping out a host of wild critters, who love native plants. They offer a free buffet of berries, nuts and seeds. Some native flowers provide nectar for hummingbirds and insects. Use native plants to create a pollinator garden on your property for extra sustainable landscaping bonus points.

A few of our favorites:

Serviceberry

A great four-season tree, it offers lots of pretty white flowers in the spring, berries birds love in the summer, vibrant leaves in fall, and silvery bark in winter.

Virginia Sweetspire

This compact shrub starts out the summer with a beautiful blanket of fragrant white flowers. In autumn, its foliage turns a stunning garnet-red, especially in full sun.

Switchgrass ‘Heavy Metal’ or ‘North Wind’

This native prairie grass adapts well in the landscape. It blooms in the summer, offering airy pink flower spikes. Its seed heads are pretty and provide food for birds in the fall.

Black-Eyed Susan

This is an American classic, a member of the sunflower family. Cheerful and hardy, it’s happy in all kinds of soil, from loam to clay.

4. Permeable Pavers

This eco-friendly landscape feature allows rainwater to seep through your hardscape, rather than pool and flood your property.

Pollutants build up on solid surfaces like concrete and asphalt. Petroleum products, chemicals, fertilizers, and other contaminants accumulate on the surface. Then, when it rains, these pollutants wash off and enter the stormwater system and the environment.

Permeable pavers reduce the overall runoff of storm water on your property.

Bonus: in many counties and municipalities, commercial property owners can apply for a credit to their property taxes if they implement stormwater management techniques like permeable pavers.

Environmentally Friendly Landscape Maintenance

Sustainable landscaping might start with design, but what happens out there on your property week after week is a crucial part of the mix.

What maintenance strategies should you embrace when you make a commitment to environmentally friendly landscape maintenance

in Maryland or Virginia? What should you expect from your landscaping company partner?

A few key practices:

Smart Irrigation

Smart irrigation provides a high-tech approach to watering your landscaping, combining cost savings with eco-friendly commercial landscaping by making every drop of water count.

Smart controllers adjust watering schedules automatically, preventing water waste.

You save water because your smart controller is monitoring weather conditions all the time. If it’s raining, it won’t turn on. If it’s too cold, and the water might freeze, it won’t turn on.

Another benefit to smart irrigation: it senses if there’s a problem with your irrigation system, and alerts you. If there’s an electrical issue, a leak, or if anything isn’t quite right, you and your landscaping company find out about it, and can initiate repairs, before your grass has a chance to dry up and die, or you waste valuable water.

Smart irrigation is a key part of sustainable landscape maintenance for commercial properties in DC, Maryland and Virginia.

Brine for Snow and Ice Management

The environmental impact of using too much salt for snow and ice management is a big concern.

Salt makes its way into area waterways, creating a hostile environment for the crabs, fish and other creatures who live there.

At Level Green, we limit our use of straight rock salt by using other methods, too, including an engineered ice melt mixture that’s less corrosive than straight salt and friendlier to the environment for sustainable landscape maintenance.

Level Green also uses brine as part of its de-icing strategy, Brine is a precisely-measured liquid mixture of water and salt that’s sprayed on roads, parking lots and walkways to prevent snow and ice from sticking.

Brine uses one quarter of the amount of salt as traditional rock salt, which means it’s better for the environment.

And liquid brine sticks to the pavement, instead of scattering into surrounding vegetation, which protects plants and soil from excessive salt damage.

Targeted Turf Care for Sustainable Landscape Maintenance

Traditional turf programs tend to focus on fertilizer and weed killer, but there are ways to reduce their use and still achieve a healthy lawn.

Proper irrigation and more frequent aeration and overseeding encourages grass to grow thick and healthy enough to crowd out weeds. That’s a smarter strategy than depending on organic lawn products, which cost a lot more and don’t work well. (More on this sustainability mistake in a bit.)

Integrated Pest Management

This strategy for pest control, often called IPM for short, is a smart, sustainable approach to controlling pests by combining multiple strategies, rather than relying only on chemicals.

Pesticides are used only when necessary and in targeted ways, minimizing risks to people, the environment, and beneficial bugs. Remember, not all insects are harmful to plants.

IPM includes using spot treatments instead of broad chemical applications that blanket a tree or shrub.

A good example here at Level Green: our treatment of Crape Myrtle bark scale. This invasive sap-sucking insect leaves an unsightly thick black fungus covering the tree bark and branches, feeding on the sugary substance produced by the scale.

But the chemical that kills the scale also kills beneficial insects like bees.

So we evaluate before we spray. Scale doesn’t always kill the tree. Your Crape Myrtle can often survive. Meanwhile, landscape maintenance crews can clean off the ugly black fungus, so your commercial property landscaping looks great again.

Recycling Green Waste

Recycling green waste instead of sending it to landfills is part of environmentally friendly landscape maintenance.

Environmentally responsible landscaping companies take the lead in recycling the tons of green waste produced by their work.

Here at Level Green, we recycle all of our green waste. Shrub clippings, limbs pruned from trees, and perennial cuttings are all hauled away, where a company turns the green material into compost and mulch. We buy the compost back, and use it to enrich planting beds. That makes it a win-win when it comes to sustainable landscaping solutions.

In addition, Level Green saves the thousands of plastic plant pots crews use and returns them to the nurseries that sold them the plants. Most pots can be used three or four times. They reuse them, and they give us financial credit for returning them.

Battery-Powered Landscaping Equipment

Level Green has long been a leader in switching from gas-powered landscaping equipment to battery-powered mowers, blowers, weed-eaters and shears that are better for the environment.

Electric tools, especially battery-powered ones, produce zero emissions, contributing to cleaner air and a healthier environment. They’re also much quieter than gas-powered tools, reducing annoying noise pollution.

Our lawn mowers are equipped with electronic ignitions, too, which means fewer polluting emissions enter the atmosphere.

Don’t Make These Sustainable Commercial Landscaping Mistakes

Even the best sustainability intentions can go wrong. It’s actually easy to make mistakes:

Don’t Do This: Assume Organic Lawn Care Is a Good Idea

As we mentioned earlier, organic lawn care costs considerably more than a traditional turf care program, and it doesn’t work nearly as well.

Do This Instead: Partner with a landscaping company that limits the use of chemicals, applying the minimal amount possible to still be effective.

Meanwhile, focus on eco-friendly commercial landscaping strategies that encourage a thick, healthy lawn that naturally crowds out weeds, including aeration and overseeding; proper irrigation; mowing grass taller and adding beneficial organic material.

Don’t Do This: Use Old, Outdated Irrigation

You’re probably wasting a lot of water without even realizing it if your irrigation system is older and outdated.

Do This Instead: Update Your System with New Components or a Smart Controller

Some of your irrigation system’s components can probably be swapped for new, more efficient ones. Updated sprayers use less water and spray water more efficiently.

Smart irrigation systems save even more water, using local weather forecasts and your property’s landscape conditions to tailor watering schedules without waste. They’re among the smartest sustainable landscaping solutions.

Don’t Do This: Install a Green Roof Then Ignore Its Care

Green roofs are a popular sustainability solution in DC. The rooftop vegetation acts as a natural layer of insulation, reducing energy costs, managing stormwater runoff, and fighting urban heat islands.

But too many properties install them, then forget about crucial maintenance, which means many of those beneficial plants die without water and weeding. That’s a real waste of great sustainable landscape design.

Do This Instead: Pair that green roof installation with a maintenance plan, so the plants get the water, weeding, drainage inspections and other attention they need to thrive and give you the benefits you paid for and deserve.

Don’t Do This: Hire Unqualified Crews to Maintain Your Stormwater Pond

Your hardworking retention basin or stormwater pond that manages runoff on your property needs specialized care to work properly and pass inspections. But not all landscaping crews are qualified to do the precise upkeep to keep ponds from getting clogged or failing.

Don’t let uncertified workers tackle this important element of your sustainable commercial landscaping.

Do This Instead: Hire skilled landscaping crews certified by the Chesapeake Conservation Landscaping Council, a non-profit dedicated to conservation landscaping to protect the Chesapeake Bay. They offer training and certification that teaches landscaping professionals how to properly maintain stormwater ponds, preventing damaging runoff from entering waterways like the Chesapeake Bay.

The training includes both classroom instruction and field training. Participants visit retention and detention ponds and rain gardens, all designed to filter pollution from urban and suburban stormwater to keep pollutants from making their way into the Chesapeake Bay.

Several Level Green team members are certified, and our goal is to have all our managers certified.

Real World Examples: Level Green Customers Who Do Sustainability Well

Sustainable commercial landscaping isn’t just a wish list of good intentions. The Level Green Landscaping team helps clients achieve it every day, tending to rain gardens, planting native plants, improving struggling lawns with more aeration and seeding and fewer chemicals.

Check out a few impressive real world examples of sustainable landscaping solutions in Maryland and Washington DC:

The Golden Triangle

This vibrant, high-visibility 44-block business district in downtown Washington DC may be known for its massive median flower displays on Connecticut Avenue but behind the scenes, the bustling district is LEED certified, committed to sustainability and environmentally responsible landscaping practices.

In fact, The Golden Triangle is the first business improvement district in the world to be named a LEED-certified community.

The district has created 19 rain gardens in the neighborhood, shallow, landscaped depressions that capture and filter stormwater. They converted 13,000 square feet of asphalt and concrete to green space. They also use a sustainable rainwater harvesting system.

The Avenue

Formerly referred to as Square 54 and 2200 Pennsylvania Avenue, this dynamic development six blocks northwest of the White House is home to innovative stormwater management strategies that are great examples of sustainable landscape design.

A central courtyard water feature functions as part of the development’s larger stormwater management system that collects all rainwater that falls within the property. The water then drains through a stormwater filter to a 7,500-gallon cistern located in the five-story parking garage below the courtyard.

This water is continuously recirculated and treated by the water feature that includes aquatic plantings, which offer supplemental filtration. The stored water is also used to provide all irrigation for the courtyard plantings throughout the growing seasons.

In addition, the development features 8,000 square feet of extensive green roof, which forms a microclimate that reduces the local heat island effect, provides habitat for birds, insulates the building, and minimizes the roof’s runoff.

Excess rainwater is filtered through the green roof layers before being collected in the water feature and cistern below.

Columbia Association

This famous planned community in central Maryland was created in 1967 as a model for cities of the future, and sustainable landscape maintenance is a key part of its operation.

The community’s much-used lakefront lawn gets occasional weed control and fertilizer as part of landscape maintenance, but not at the frequency of a traditional turf care program.

That means plenty of irrigation and more frequent aeration and overseeding than most lawns get, to encourage grass thick and healthy enough to crowd out weeds with environmentally friendly landscape maintenance in Maryland.

A long walking path around the association’s man-made lake is a popular scenic stroll for residents, but helps pollinators, too. It’s planted with ornamental grasses and plants like milkweed that pollinators love.

Choosing a Sustainable Commercial Landscaping Partner

If you’ve read this far, you now know what to look for in a landscaping company if sustainability matters to you.

Do they use as few chemicals as possible, and use them carefully? Have they invested in battery-powered mowers and hand tools? Do they use brine as part of snow and ice management? Do they recycle their green waste? Are they trained and certified in protecting the precious Chesapeake Bay?

All of this is important if you care about sustainable landscaping solutions.

But something else matters, too. Ask them why they do these things. Why do they care?

Ask us. We’d love to tell you about our passion for the land and why we care about protecting it.

Many of us here at Level Green are gardeners. Or we spend time on the water, fishing and boating.

We pursued careers in landscaping because we love the outdoors. We don’t want anything we do during our work on your property to harm it.

We have turf experts on our team who know how to nurture healthy lawns with natural practices like aeration and overseeding. We have certified arborists skilled in caring for trees without coating them with chemicals. We have managers who are specifically trained and certified in stormwater maintenance methods to keep the Chesapeake Bay safe.

We have moms and dads on our staff who love taking their kids wading in streams and walking through the woods. We have personal reasons for protecting our environment for our children and for future generations.

Sure, ask your potential commercial landscaping company what they do to protect the environment. You absolutely should. We can give you a long list of our eco-friendly landscaping practices and procedures.

We’d love to tell you about our passion, too.

We’ve got you covered, with sustainable commercial landscaping in DC, Maryland, and Virginia that stands out from the rest.

If you’re not already a Level Green Landscaping client, we’d love to add you to our growing list of happy customers. Our focus is on commercial properties like offices, mixed-use sites, HOAs, municipalities and institutions in Maryland, Washington DC and parts of Virginia.

Contact us at 202-544-0968. You can also request a free consultation online to meet with us one-on-one.

We’d love to hear from you.