Wellnesscapes Design serves the Solar industry in many ways.
We design the ground surface under and around the solar arrays and along the fence lines and edges. Always with site permitting in mind, our ground level solar landscape design emphasizes rapid revegetation cover of disturbed areas with diverse native grass, wildflower, ferns and other low growing species that greatly reduce soil erosion risk.
We design cost-effective drainage approaches.
We include attractive visual vegetative screens or buffers to solar fields that facilitate project permitting.
We are uniquely positioned to help resolve permitting delays due to abutter grievances related to viewshed impacts. We have helped many solar projects move forward to obtain necessary permits by providing effective and responsive buffer planting designs.
We also help guide solar landscape design projects through construction, monitoring and post-construction management of landscaped areas including visual buffers, solar field meadows and woodland edges.
This video provides an example of how we help manage a solar field visual buffer that we designed following construction:
“Hello, Tom Benjamin, Landscape Architect with Wellnesscapes Design at a community scale solar field landscape design project in Southeastern, MA that required significant permitting from the town mainly because of its proximity to a number of neighbors who were not exactly thrilled to have a big solar field across the street. In addition to building this 7 foot high fence on a berm I did an extensive planting of trees, shrubs and perennials, grasses, flowers and ground covers to help screen this in a very beautiful way that is also very ecologically productive and beneficial. This project was planted last December and I’m here in September and my firm is doing the management of this area. We are doing the landscape maintenance to allow our solar field landscape design client to get a certificate of compliance which everyone wants to get so they can transfer title to the permanent owners. This work was all done by hand in one long day by one person, namely me, using hand tools. This was one big field of weeds about a day ago when I got here. It is now wonderful and the differentiation and diversity is hopefully much more visible now. Folks can see it on the road driving by as well as from our neighbors across the street who are just about 70 feet from the fence. This is not unskilled labor. It requires great knowledge of plants and great caution and care when using the cutters and hand tools to not cut desirable plants and to effectively remove to the extent possible the invasives. Hopefully we’ll get our certificate of compliance this week for doing this work and look forward to helping my solar field clients with more work of this kind: managing edges, particularly visual buffers.”