Tuesday, May 25, 2010, 1:49pm PDT | Modified: May 25, 2010, 1:49 PM

Three Oregon sites chosen for sustainable landscaping pilot

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A partnership to develop a certification program to do for landscape practices what LEED did for green building announced Tuesday an initial batch of sites to participate in a pilot program, including three in Oregon.

The Sustainable Sites Initiative, a partnership led by the American Society of Landscape Architects, the Lady Bird Johnson Wildflower Center at The University of Texas at Austin and the United States Botanic Garden, listed more than 150 sites in the United States, Canada, Spain and Iceland participating in the pilot program which will run for two years.

The purpose of the project is to test a national four-star rating system based on a 250-point scale designed to evaluate everything about the site — such as its use of water and plants, its design and its construction — against the goal of sustainability and ecosystem support.

The introduction to the guidelines and benchmarks for the pilot published by the Sustainable Sites Initiative states: "For purposes of the initiative, land practices are defined as sustainable if they enable natural and built systems to work together to 'meet the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs.'"

Oregon's sites in the project are:

• • The Ash Creek House in Portland (DeSantis Landscapes).
• • Collier Industrial Park in Clackamas (Terrill Collier).
• • The Headwaters at Tryon Creek (a joint effort of Winkler Development Corp.; GreenWorks PC; MGH Engineering; Valaster/Corl Architects; Portland Development Commission; Portland Bureau of Environmental Services).

Jim Figurski, principal at Greenworks, said the certification program isn't a departure from how landscape architects had been approaching sustainable development, but, just like the U.S. Green Building Council did with its Leadership in Energy & Environmental Design process, the initiative will formalize the process of certifying sites — even those without buildings.

"They decided it really belongs in the hands of landscape architects," Figurski said.

“We received hundreds of applications from an impressive array of federal agencies, international companies, major universities and nonprofit organizations among many others to participate in the pilot program,” said ASLA Executive Vice President and CEO Nancy Somerville in a press release. “The selected projects represent an elite group covering a diverse range of size, project type and geographic location.”