“Don’t throw it away. There is not ‘away”.
This waste-conscious message was written on the back of a decades-old pickup truck in the Nebraska town where Martha Kean grew up. The doctor who drove it could have bought a new one, but no: The truck had a lot of life in it. Forward.
The phrase “there is no far” has become a guiding principle Beekeeping Studio, a Philadelphia landscape company founded in 2015 by Ms. Keen’s partner, Hans Hesselein, a landscape architect. Ms Keen joined soon after, and now the pair design and build outdoor urban spaces, many of them residential, using as light an environmental touch as possible and creatively reusing what each site has to offer.
Yes, even slabs of old concrete, as well as what passes for dirt in those urban environments. Really, it’s more like the stuff of a landfill, Mr. Hesselein said, or a post-industrial dump.
Common practice in the trade would be to dig them all up, remove them and bring in clean soil that would be easier on the plants. But contributing to the waste stream is no match for the Apiary team. Their design intent is to be regenerative, not to convey – or compound – the problem.
“From an environmental standpoint, we wanted to leave the soils at the site, not make it some other community’s problem, wherever the landfill is going to be sent to,” said Mr. Hesselein, 42, a former Gowanus Canal manager. Conservancy, in Brooklyn. “And so we had to figure out what kinds of plants can handle the steep drainage, the alkalinity, any pollution, the lack of organic matter.”
Aside from the flower beds and vegetable planters, where they use new, clean soil, they try to work with what’s available.
The pair, who describe themselves as “concerned environmentalists”, said their determination was strengthened early on by watching how waste was managed on construction sites. “We saw building these landscapes as an opportunity to turn that around,” said Ms. Keen, 38, a graduate of the professional horticulture program at Longwood Gardens, Pennsylvania.
Also, he said, “I don’t necessarily want to build landscapes that look like everything else.”
What they’re building instead—by draining key areas to open up planting beds and turning excavated pieces into new walls or mosaic hardscapes underfoot—seems to work visually in Philadelphia, too.
“The aesthetic of this city is gritty, punk, improvised, layered with history,” Mr. Hesselein said. “Using recycled materials the way we do, especially rubble, might not seem appropriate anywhere. But in the urban environments where we work, they feel at home aesthetically. That’s another thing that allows our work to be what it is.”
What it is, they hasten to point out, is not something they invented: They gratefully acknowledge pioneering regenerative landscape designers like Julie Bargmann, professor emeritus at the University of Virginia School of Architecture and founder of DIRT Studio (for Dump It Right There ); as well as François Vadepied and Mathieu Gontier, of Landscaping of wagonsin Paris.
Apiary Studio received some recognition of its own in March, claiming a best show award at the Philadelphia Flower Show for “Right of Way,” an exhibit celebrating the beauty and habitat-restoring power of plants that grow along the edges of freeways — “an underrated green garland alongside the fact of road disruption,” as Ms. Keen said it.
But when working with such unconventional materials, there’s always the risk of the result looking too DIY How does what their website describes as “adaptive reuse of urban decay” translate into a garden?
The environmental cost of concrete
It’s not unusual for Apiary’s team to arrive at a prospective client’s home for a consultation to find the entire place paved—a common situation, they said, in urban Philadelphia or New York.
The first instinct may be to get rid of it all. But the modest budgets of the company’s early jobs meant that was prohibitive, even apart from Mr. Hesselein and Ms. Keen’s convictions about sustainability. However, it is hard to ignore the environmental impact of a material like concrete.
“Concrete has a large carbon footprint, both as a global consumer of industrial energy and as an emitter of carbon dioxide,” Ms Keen said. “It also relies on reducing natural resources for production, such as sand and gravel.”
Faced with so much waste, he said, Apiary’s strategy “is to intercept and build with it and limit our reliance on new concrete.”
That’s where another of the company’s tenets – “addition by subtraction” – comes into play.
A diamond-blade circular wheel demolition saw allows designers to cut “very clean, purposeful and geometric patterns into the existing paving,” Mr. Hesselein said, doing “surgical removal” to create clean-edged beds and “doing very precise way that elevates this remaining concrete.”
The goal: to create something that looks more purposeful—even elegant—and then develop an equally thoughtful new life for the concrete slabs and other rubble that are lifted and set aside, roughly sorted by size.
“When we start storing these things, you start imagining things and let them incubate in your mind while you’re working on other tasks — while you’re finishing the demolition, while you’re preparing the paver base,” Mr. Hesselein said. “So inevitably, you’re always thinking about these things and imagining these scenarios of different patterns.”
A series of mock-ups help them and their clients find their way to a design that turns piles of debris into “a mosaic of mixed coatings,” he said.
Other artifacts the site might cough up—old bricks, cobblestones, and rocks, sometimes accompanied by unwieldy projectiles recovered from the transfer station—become part of the makeshift mosaics. Think of it as terrazzo with a twist.
“When you put in crushed concrete, those broken pieces of pavement, it looks a bit like terrazzo,” Ms Keen said. “Rubble terrazzo, a funny imitation.”
Thanks to customers who are open to exploration, the couple’s designs are becoming more and more sophisticated. Among the tricks they’ve learned: making sure many pieces of rubble — up to 25 percent of the design — are as large as possible, to contrast with all the smaller ones.
“Big, big, big chunks. Big like a huge cushion sofa, or the whole slab of a pavement,” Ms Keen said.
“We call them shiny,” he added, because they catch the eye. Trash became treasure.
A palette of urban plants appears
With paths in place and beds defined and ready for plants, the question is: Which ones?
To figure that out, designers envision places in nature with similar conditions, the “commensurate ecosystems and plants that can handle that kind of terrain — with soil in quotes,” Mr. Hesselein said, referring to areas with chalky dirt or shale outcrops. or where industry has left behind an altered landscape, like slag heaps.
These are not gardens that welcome heathers – acid lovers like azaleas and other rhododendrons or blueberries. Instead, Ms. Keen said, she and Mr. Hesselein use “plants that have a bold texture and take up space.”
A real workhorse is the sea cabbage (Crambe maritima), a giant perennial Brassica with silvery-blue leaves, sprinkled with small white flowers. “It seems to be happy and become huge in almost any urban situation we put it in,” Ms. Keen said. “Like the size of a three-by-three-foot rhubarb.”
Another perennial they turn to is cardoon (Cynara cardunculus), a cousin of the artichoke. “I have a real penchant for luscious plant material,” he said. “The blue-gray tones seem to marry well with the concrete and rubble material.”
Herbs such as common sage, rosemary, lavender and sandalwood also fit the profile, thriving without irrigation or nutrient-rich soil. Other hardy Mediterranean favourites: donkey’s tail (Euphorbia myrsinites), wood sorrel (Euphorbia amygdaloides var. robbiae) and bronze fennel.
A striking color contrast that also finds its way into almost every design is the native butterfly milkweed (Asclepias tuberosa).
These are unexpected, experimental landscapes, the pair admit, but they are determined to keep experimenting — for the creative challenge they thrive on, to pursue their environmental goals and to provoke new thinking about our built landscapes.
“Only one person came to us and said, ‘I want that recycled landscape aesthetic in my garden,'” Mr. Hesselein said. “Only one customer ever.”
But they like to imagine a day when people will have seen enough examples in the world to start demanding such sustainable thinking in garden design.
“I think the people who hire us want to get out of the convention,” Ms. Keen said. “And, like us, understand that even building a garden is not exempt from carbon footprint. And that, like us, they like the way recycled landscapes look.”
Margaret Roach is the creator of the website and podcast A way to gardenand a book of the same name.
If you have a question about gardening, email it to Margaret Roach at gardenqanda@nytimes.com and she can answer it in a future column.