Originally published in AIA New Hampshire Forum Magazine, Spring 2025.
It’s a choice
We’ve all been there—standing on a site, envisioning the perfect outdoor space and contemplating the countless material options available to us. Material selection in landscape design is more than an aesthetic or functional or economic choice; it’s a series of crucial decisions that create mood and style, suggest status and taste, and integrate elements with their surroundings. It shapes the entire project’s success.
Wood?
An interesting option to consider is one perfect, universal, natural hunk of carbon mixed with hydrogen and oxygen: wood, nature’s best, cleanest, most versatile building material.
Wood offers a sterling solution to so many challenges in landscape architecture. Its versatility allows us to solve for issues well on both horizontal and vertical planes with a natural connection to the environment. For those who steer away from Azek or other vinyl, who care about the quality of materials with which they surround themselves and breath and eventually discard, who are concerned with toxicity factors versus the ability to recycle easily without guilt of filling landfills with synthetic garbage, wood is a beautiful choice. After its useful life, we can, with a clear conscience, shred wood (except for the PT variety) into the compost pile to feed our personal vegetable patch or used to heat our homes, keeping, of course, CO2’s place as a critical part of life on our planet.
Real staying power
We sometimes joke that wood is the only partner that gets better-looking with age, unlike our manufactured or living-plant installations that can hit their midlife crisis rather early! Wood’s ability to develop a deeper character over time is a genuine advantage.
Technically, wood brings remarkable properties to the table. Its natural thermal qualities make it comfortable to grasp and sit on in both hot and cold weather—great for benches and handrails in our latitudes. Modern stains and sealants improve wood’s durability with control over a sustained aesthetic, making it practical even in challenging conditions.
Applications
From graceful pergolas and other outdoor enclosures that offer dappled shade, to detailed arbors and gateways between outdoor places, to sculptural boundary markers and icons, wood serves the accomplished client with sustainable ipe, teak, and mahogany, and other clients with SPF, oak, maple, and poplar—cedar is the bastard child somewhere in between. Whether for privacy screens or fencing, decks, or blinds, the ability to mill wood to almost any shape renders it able to meet an infinite breadth of uses and remain available in a manageable range of costs for any project budget.
Adaptability
While this adaptability allows us to craft everything from simple spans across streams and ditches to complex follies in the landscape, wood isn’t always the answer. Sometimes, concrete, stone, metal, or another material alone or in conjunction might better serve the project’s needs. The key lies in understanding each material’s strengths and limitations in the outdoor environment and how we compose them for best result, one of the unique values that landscape architects bring to projects. Especially when integrating these composed materials with living, growing elements in the landscape, over time, as each species that shares these spaces grows in its own way.
Adaptability
Wood isn’t always the answer, despite that its adaptability allows us to craft everything from simple spans across streams and ditches to complex follies in the landscape. Sometimes, concrete, stone, metal, or another material alone or in conjunction might better serve the project’s needs. The key lies in understanding each material’s strengths and limitations in the outdoor environment and how we compose them for the best result, one of the unique values that landscape architects bring to projects. Especially when integrating these composed materials with living, growing elements in the landscape, over time, as each species that shares these spaces grows in its own way.
It’s extraordinary
The limitless applications of wood to the design of our built outdoors bring us a clean and natural material that offers invaluable opportunities to our projects—one that allows us to transform everyday spaces into extraordinary places.
