I visited the builders of SunGarden Houses, lovely passive-solar homes

A SunGarden House under construction. Landscaping is added when construction is finished. Note the durable steel roof and exterior walls covered with low-maintenance stucco.

I spent most of this past week in Chapel Hill and Durham on business, and I stayed the nights with my friends Kathleen Jardine and Jim Cameron. We had a blast. On Wednesday I toured one of the homes that their company SunGarden Houses is currently building.

Kathleen and Jim are my hero homebuilders. They build highly durable, gorgeous, passive-solar homes in Pittsboro NC and thereabouts. They also offer their blueprints and step-by-step building instructions for sale on their web site, www.sungardenhouses.com.

Their homes use far less energy for heating, cooling, and lighting than conventional homes. They have all the charm of a French cottage, but require almost no maintenance, with their long-lasting steel roofs and tinted-concrete floors that need no polish or re-finishing ever. Because of the durability of the roof, floors, and AAC walls, these houses use fewer materials over the life of the house, and keep waste materials like shingles out of the waste stream.

The floors of tinted, scored concrete look like handsome stone or tile but are maintenance-free. A concrete floor is the best thermal mass for absorbing heat during winter days and emitting it during cold nights to help heat the home.

I love to brag about their houses because I think Kathleen and Jim are both conservation geniuses. Heating and cooling homes is one of the top 3 ways American consumers use energy, according to the Union of Concerned Scientists. But Jim and Kathleen are living and propagating an affordable, beautiful, and green solution.

Co-designer Kathleen Jardine (right) chats with Echo, a member of the SunGarden work crew. Note again the steel roof and tinted stucco on the exterior walls. Homeowners can choose different colors for roofing, stucco, and floors.

Jim gives a final trim to a piece of piece of wood.

A lovely tile backsplash, and in the background, the wide expanse of south-facing windows that are essential for a passive-solar design.

An inviting front porch, from the built-in benches to the hand-painted tile by the window corners (click on photos to enlarge).

The front porch and optional eave decorations of the house.

One of dozens of aesthetic options for the interior.

Solar thermal panels on the south-facing roof, to heat water for domestic use and to provide radiant floor heat, via water pipes embedded in the concrete floors.


Later, after we went back to Kathleen and Jim's own SunGarden home, Kathleen and I enjoyed a glass of Malbec by the garden and burbling pond. SunGarden Houses are designed to annex the great outdoors, to increase the sense of living space.


And after THAT, we got down to some serious jammin', on Jim's guitar, keyboard, and bongos.

I love my long-time buddies Jim and Kathleen. I'm proud to know them too. Because, unlike most of us, they've found a way to make a livelihood out of protecting the planet and the atmosphere, by promoting passive-solar & durable housing. I hope Obama will get the picture and offer strong incentives for passive-solar design for everyone in this country.

To read more about Jim and Kathleen's constructions and their philosophy of green-building, check out our book Going Green or their web site, www.sungardenhouses.com.

Photos and text by Sally Kneidel, PhD

Keywords:: SunGarden Houses passive solar Kathleen Jardine Jim Cameron durable houses steel roof AAC block concrete floors

Kathleen's Tips on Mulching

My friends Kathleen Jardine and Jim Cameron are the most practiced long-term gardeners I know. Kathleen was the first organic gardener I ever met, back when we were students in Oklahoma, and then again when we shared a collective household in Charlotte. Now she and Jim are designers and builders of passive-solar homes (SunGarden Houses) in Chapel Hill, NC. Around their own beautiful home in Chapel Hill, they have one of the most luscious gardens I've ever seen. After we visited them a couple of months ago, my son said, "I'd give anything to live in a place like that," and he meant it. I told him I felt the same way.

But we don't. We live in a squat and homely little house in Charlotte, on a very ordinary little suburban street. We used to have some woods out back, but developers turned it into a subdivision. I'm worried that we might lose some of the big oaks on our street because of our long drought combined with the horrible city-wide cankerworm infestation. The trees are the street's primary asset, and there aren't that many to begin with. If they go, I will be very sad. One massive tulip poplar has already fallen. It just cracked one day and fell over. There wasn't even any wind, although the main trunk had always been leaning, like the leaning Tower of Pisa. I was at the computer and heard a loud crack and then a crash, and then the power went out. I ran outside, and the huge tree had taken down 3 other trees on its way down. Plus, it blocked the street and knocked the utility pole down. The tree had been weakened I think by the drought and the dadgum worms.

In spite of development and drought and cankerworms, we do still have our little raised-bed garden in the side yard. Ken has already got the cool weather plants going, the lettuce and chard and spinach and onions. But it's about time to plant the warm-weather veggies - the tomatoes, okra, beans, peppers. April 15 is the customary date in the Piedmont of NC when another frost is considered unlikely.

Which leads to the subject of mulching. We've been in this drought situation for eight months or longer. Watering is allowed only once a week now. Mulching drastically reduces the amount of water loss from garden soil.

I called Kathleen this morning to ask her about mulching. She said she puts dead leaves around her plants, 3 to 5 inches deep. Any deeper and the water from above can't penetrate. The leaves don't have to be chopped up leaves, but chopped up is good. Then on top of the 3 to 5 inches of leaves, she puts shredded hardwood mulch. She said the hardwood mulch will not wash or float away, so it anchors the leaves. She arranged with the municipal government of a small town near her to deliver the hardwood mulch to their home. The town makes mulch from collected yard waste.

We have plenty of leaves, and that's generally all we use. For our flat and relatively sheltered garden, anchoring is not really necessary. We can, though, get free mulch from Charlotte's recycling center on Hickory Grove Road. It's made of shredded yard waste, much of it shredded wood. Might have some grass seed in it. But still...using it recycles the stuff, keeps it out of the landfill, plus it's free.

I'm leery of buying shredded hardwood mulch, given the deforestation that's going on in the Southeast at the hands of the timber industry. I know that some trees are cut expressly for the purpose of creating mulch to sell in retail outlets; for example, cypress trees in a swath across southern Louisiana.

I'm definitely not buying any dyed mulch, regardless of the source. I learned the hard way about mulch dyed red, after our neighbors laid out a ton of red mulch right next to our organic vegetable garden. I hate confrontation....but I had to do it. Read the story.

Key words: red mulch cankerworms drought April 15 vegetable garden hardwood mulch leaf mulch development gardening Sungarden Houses Kathleen Jardine Jim Cameron cypress mulch