Creating Landscapes That Balance Beauty and Sustainability - NYTimes.com

• With its combination of scrupulous planting, formal as opposed to naturalistic design elements, and responsiveness to the clients’ desires — even when they strayed from strict conservationism — the Hillan-Robertson project is typical of an emerging movement in environmentally conscious landscape and garden design.

  Over the past five years, as climate change has become more obvious and energy costs have spiraled up, a number of designers have begun to champion an approach to landscaping that marries traditional environmental concerns — sustainability, biodiversity, restoration, conservation — with a sensitivity to aesthetics and a flexibility that they said was missing from green-gardening crusades of the past.

  Movements that gained popularity in the 1970s, like xeriscaping, which introduced the creed of no added water, and the native plant movement, often got in their own way, these designers believe, by getting hung up on orthodoxies.

  “Xeriscaping as a rule tended to look horrible,” said Andrea Cochran, 54, a San Francisco landscape architect who did environmental planning for the Tennessee Valley Authority and the National Forest Service before moving on to residential gardens. “The save-the-planet message was powerful,” she added, but a lack of attention to aesthetic issues left her and other well-meaning gardeners unhappy with the results — dusty summer yards full of scrappy native species.

  And too often, Mr. Trainor said, those earlier movements were overly rigid and prescriptive. “It’s hard to make ordinary people fit into such a tight scheme,” he said.

  The main thing, these newer designers believe, is to win clients over to environmental landscaping through design that is both thoughtful and seductive.