The landscaping at The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints’ Temple Square looks different now than it did before renovations on the Salt Lake Temple started in 2019.
Plant beds are now dotted with shrubs and short trees, and there’s less grass. Jay Warnick, ground services manager for Church Headquarters Facilities, pointed out plants like viburnums, yews and dogwoods.
They’ve gotten rid of about 60% of the lawn and areas for more thirsty plants like flowers that have to be replanted every year, Warnick said, to make way for species that use less water. That means more perennials, shrubs and trees.
Utah is deep in drought. What’s worse, the state is in for a hot summer and the soil is dry. That means the ground could soak up water before it gets to rivers.
So the state is asking people to save water, and the LDS Church wants to be an example in landscaping.
Warnick stooped to touch a blue spruce about a foot tall that won’t grow any higher. As it spreads, it will turn into ground cover.
“I don't feel though, that we have to say we're giving up any portion of aesthetics. We're just adjusting. So it's getting used to the beauty of this type of plant versus what you may have seen in the past,” Warnick said. “Both were beautiful. They’re just different, and one uses water differently.”
There are plants here that might be new to some people. Take the contorted filbert shrub with its twisted, corkscrew branches — it’s striking in its gnarly way. They added more shrubs because, collectively, they use less water than the plants that were in the square before.
With changes to how they water plants, the church is now saving 8 million gallons of water a year at Temple Square, he said.
The renovation construction provided a good opportunity to make the switch, but Warnick also explained that they’re doing this now because of growth in Utah and a greater concern for water.
“We've had some wake-up calls with some pretty lean years in the last five or so. Years of reduced snowpack and reduced amounts of water for irrigation and our needs.”
Jenica Sedgwick, the church’s sustainability manager, said they need to be an example and live what they preach when it comes to stewarding the land.
“I think especially with the density of membership that we have in the state, there's so many of us that have these shared values,” she said. “And so from the church headquarters standpoint, where we can really give visual demonstrations of what that looks like, that's our great opportunity.”
The church donated over 5,700 water shares, or 20,000 acre-feet, to the Great Salt Lake in 2023, about the size of Little Dell Reservoir. In a speech days after the donation at the Wallace Stegner Center Symposium, the church’s Bishop W. Christopher Waddell said that care of the earth was “an integral part of discipleship.” He also added, “Though our efforts have not been and are still not perfect, there is a continual and ongoing churchwide effort to improve our care of natural resources.”
The church is exploring different ways to address water issues and make them scalable, Sedgwick said.
“Some of that comes down to what's feasible, what's possible. And removing lawn, surprisingly, is one of the greatest costs in those kind of projects. So, can we transition lawn without that cost?”
Sedgwick said they also have pilot projects going in Northern Utah right now to test out transitioning lawns to more drought-tolerant species, and the church is implementing some of the techniques used at Temple Square in different areas around the state.
“We're learning more about what kind of solutions are needed to help it be sustainable,” she said. “And so we're trying to improve as our knowledge and technology grows and affords us the opportunity.”
One scalable technology, she said, is a smart irrigation controller. Warnick is using it at Temple Square to monitor how much water a plant uses and how much is lost in the atmosphere. It can make sure that a plant gets just the right amount of moisture so that none is wasted.
The controller can also detect malfunctions. In the past, he said they could be losing hundreds of thousands of gallons of water because of a leak they didn’t know about. Now, the technology can warn when part of the irrigation system puts out more water than it should.
Plus, Warnick said, they’ve gotten rid of spray irrigation in many areas — think of the typical pop-up sprinkler that comes out of the ground. Those lose water into the atmosphere as they spray. Many parts of Temple Square now use microirrigation with hoses that run along the plant beds and water the base of the plant directly. Instead of gallons per minute, he said microirrigation distributes water in gallons per hour.
They’re also grouping plants with similar water needs, called hydrozoning. Warnick said they put in more trees for cooling and preserved as many as they could during construction. Some of those trees were even planted by original Latter-day Saint settlers and are older than the Salt Lake Temple.
Even though the grounds might look different, Warnick believes people are starting to adapt to this vision of waterwise landscaping.
“The future is very bright because that education will continue to grow. There'll be a greater understanding that we can still have both beauty while we're still managing resources at the same time,” he said. “It's not gloom and doom.”
And Warnick said they’re not done yet — saving water is a journey, not a destination.
