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Southern California is billed as a tropical paradise to outsiders. They see our palm trees, exotic plants, and green lawns as far as the eye can see, but what SoCal residents know is that this is only a half truth; true, sure, that’s how our landscape looks, but our climate is far from tropical. Southern California has a ‘Mediterranean Climate’, which basically means it’s very dry and that there really aren’t extreme temperature changes, so temperature stays pretty moderate year-round. Tropical places typically get enormous amounts of rainfall year-round, especially in the spring and summer months, which creates high humidity. On the opposite end of the spectrum, SoCal’s rainy season is typically in the late winter months, and rainfall totals vary dramatically from nearly zero inches to 40 to 80 inches year to year; typically more on the dry side. This amount of rain is not enough to sustain most of the plants that we grow in SoCal, so we have to add supplemental water year-round. Grass is an excellent example of this. It is the most water hungry plant on earth; in fact, plant water need calculations use grass as a unit of measure, with 100 being the max (grass) and 0 being no water needed.

For years, SoCal municipalities have been trying to find ways to reduce supplemental landscape irrigation and more recently many residents have jumped on board with water conservation. Take a look at a pretty dramatic example of this going on in a pretty climatically dramatic part of SoCal; Palm Springs International Airport in Palm Springs, CA.

When airport officials decided to make improvements to the property, they put landscape improvements at the top of the list. The site currently has 10 acres of lawn, shrub and tree planting areas, though the majority of the areas consist of lawn. That means that most of those 10 acres are rated 100, in terms of water needs, while a very tiny area is rated around 40. Officials hired a local landscape architect to come up with a new plan to help conserve water, bring down costs, and retain the beauty you’d expect when arriving in Palm Springs. His approved proposal consists of removing eight acres of existing lawn, shrubs, and tree planting areas in insignificant and unimportant areas of the property and replacing them with drought tolerant plants that thrive in the Mediterranean and desert environment. These new plants will provide dramatic color and texture that the existing landscape was missing, all while requiring dramatically less water and maintenance. On the maintenance side of things, the airport will be paying for fewer man-hours for labor, less in equipment usage/wear-&-tear, as well as use less gasoline to power the equipment. This new landscape will use less water, less money, provide cleaner air, and a more beautiful landscape.

Currently the airport uses around 50 to 60 gallons per square foot of lawn and currently pays $100,000 each year on landscape irrigation water costs alone. With this new plan they’re expecting to cut 17.4 million gallons out of their water budget and cut their water costs in half at the very least. Now that’s a sound investment that will pay off huge.

To read more about the project, please visit:

http://www.landscapeonline.com/research/article/18036

http://www.mydesert.com/article/20130630/BUSINESS0302/306300014/Palm-Springs-airport-plans-save-money-desert-landscaping