Orem, UT Landscaping Rules: Native Plants (2026)

The section frames xeriscape as one path to compliance rather than a separate mandatory category: an owner can still meet the landscaping chapter's living-coverage rule with traditional lawn, but City Code 22-14-13 specifically calls out combining native, low-maintenance, drought-tolerant plants with non-living, moisture-retaining materials like mulch and decorative gravel as an encouraged option, and directs owners to Appendix VV of the City Code for a non-exhaustive list of qualifying native and drought-tolerant species. The code also builds in an incentive tied to trees rather than turf choice: where a lot maintains three or more trees in the front yard, or in a side yard adjacent to a street, beyond whatever number of trees the City Code already requires there, the minimum share of the landscaped area that must be living coverage drops from fifty percent to forty-five percent.

Native and xeriscape plantings still have to satisfy the general coverage rule that at least half (or forty-five percent, with the tree bonus) of each contiguous landscaped area, measured excluding anything taller than twenty-four inches, be living plant material or an approved non-living substitute, so a xeriscape bed of gravel alone without any of the listed native species would not by itself satisfy the standard.