Soft Tactics, Hard Code

Work in progress…

To meet the Conditional Use Permit requirements for a site in South LA, we designed a 5-foot-wide planted buffer along the public edge. It’s a code-driven move—but we saw it as a chance to do more than just tick boxes.

Using a tight palette of native and drought-tolerant trees, shrubs, perennials, and wildflowers, the buffer is both a regulatory threshold and a real landscape. The planting provides shade, habitat, softness, and scale, even as it meets strict spacing and visibility rules.

It’s proof that even the most bureaucratic landscapes can be alive, layered, and ecologically considered.