References for Sustainable Landscaping

The Climate-Conscious Landscape: As the weather continues to become hotter and drier, learning how to create beautiful landscapes while becoming a good steward of your property is more important than ever before.  On July 14, 2023, the Mayflower Point Association Ecology Committee and The Orleans Pond Coalition hosted a seminar at Snow Library in Orleans on how to make your home landscape more sustainable.  Our speaker, Kristin Andres, Education Director at the Association to Preserve Cape Cod, discussed how you can make climate-conscious choices to reduce your carbon footprint, support biodiversity, and adapt to extreme weather events of drought and deluge.  View the Presentation.

Bringing Nature Home: How You Can Sustain Wildlife with Native Plants by Douglas Tallamy

As development and habitat destruction accelerate, there are increasing pressures on wildlife populations. Bringing Nature Home reveals the unbreakable link between native plant species and native wildlife—native insects cannot, or will not, eat alien plants. When native plants disappear, the insects disappear, impoverishing the food source for birds and other animals. But there is an important and simple step we can all take to help reverse this alarming trend: everyone with access to a patch of earth can make a significant contribution toward sustaining biodiversity by simply choosing native plants.

Design with Nature on Cape Cod and the Islands by Jack Ahern

Cape Cod and the islands of Martha’s Vineyard and Nantucket are special places known for their distinctive flora. Unfortunately, this unique sense of place is under threat. In recent decades, contemporary landscape practices have come to depend on environmentally stressful fertilizers and irrigation systems, replacing this sensitive ecoregion’s native flora with generic turfgrasses and popular commercial nursery trees and shrubs that could exist anywhere.  This book  offers landscape professionals, local officials, and homeowners a sustainable approach to landscape design based on the ecoregion’s native plants and plant communities.

Guidelines for Cape-Friendly Landscapes

This 40-page illustrated booklet by the Association to Preserve Cape Cod, provides steps you can take to make your Cape Cod landscape more supportive of nature in its design and maintenance, as well as some practical advice on purchasing native plants and hiring a landscape contractor, and an extensive list of resources to learn more.  You can order this guide directly from the APCC.