Larry Cammarata is utterly evangelical about sustainable landscaping. The road to redemption, he says, is paved with three simple commandments.

By Ken Wysocky

Understanding the complexities of sustainable landscaping can feel like digging a flowerbed with a teaspoon.

But according to Larry Cammarata, all you really need to know is this six-word mantra: Right plants. Right place. Right soil.

It’s that simple.

“If you know your plants and their water requirements, and you put them in the right place in a landscape and understand the soil you’re putting them in, they’ll only need water for establishment,” says Cammarata, the green management consultant for The Brickman Group, one of the nation’s largest landscaping firms, with more than 160 branches in 29 states.

Cammarata conducts training for Landscape Sustainability Audits, here teaching how to review the pumping system at a residence where there was a “constantly clogged intake and melted pipes due to loss of prime to the pump due to a poorly planned pumping scheme.”

“After that, they’ll become self-sustaining. When you understand how these three elements work together, it can change how you do business. Those who don’t change will become obsolete,” he warns.

“When I travel around the country and go to states with water-use regulations in place, I either find people who already operate and exceed those regulations or people who do business by barely meeting those regulations while hanging on to the way they’ve always done things.”

Answering the calling

It’s no coincidence Cammarata, 53, sounds like a missionary as he riffs on sustainability and the interrelationships between plants, soil and water. After 17 years of designing water-management systems, including four years at a Brickman design-build division in Chicago, Cammarata chucked a successful horticultural water-use consulting business to attend seminary school and become a pastor.

“It’s called stepping out,” he says. “I felt like I had a calling to become a pastor…to be a minister of the gospel and a purveyor of living water.”