I sure get frustrated seeing social media post after social media post proclaiming how a garden or plant is beautiful (sure, I'm guilty of it, too). I predict I'll be frustrated the rest of my life. A human proclaiming a space as beautiful is just one phase of many phases in what makes that space beautiful. What's beautiful to spiders and caterpillars and beetles and birds? What's beautiful to air, water, and soil?

Beauty from the human aesthetic standpoint is a judgement based on emotion. And there's nothing wrong with it per se. We are part of nature, part of what is alive both animate and inanimate, and our spiritual bonds to wildness are necessary to our psychical and psychological survival. What is less a judgment, what is less subjective, is how a space is beautiful on a much deeper and more profound level. When we say a garden is pretty, we are treating the space as something to consume -- it's on the same level as most art, a momentary engagement, even if we have MANY momentary engagements that cultivate new responses. Our understanding of the art is limited, perhaps willfully limited, to what we perceive in the blink of an eye or the grazing of a hand over soft leaves. Our environmental crisis demands more than this simple engagement.

Again, those perceptions are good and powerful, but it's only the perception of one species -- a dominate species that seldom considers the perceptions or needs of others. We proclaim to act on nature's behalf simply by having a garden, as if any assemblage of plants -- particularly if it wakes in us a sense of awe -- is the only or primary goal of a garden or wild space.

How can we hope to garden ethically for all life if we don't comprehend even one additional aspect of a space, if we don't redefine beauty in a time of climate change and mass extinction? We may find an exotic plant beautiful and functional, but it may be ugly to wildlife. We may find a plant cleans water or stabilizes an embankment, but why can't or why isn't it doing more? We limit our response to life when we stop at calling a space beautiful simply because we find it so -- a culmination of our culture and our family's expectation passed down to and through us. A freshly mowed lawn is beautiful, but it seldom benefits the kind of biodiversity and ecological function we force upon it to defend our aesthetic choices. A butterfly bush is beautiful, but it supports no larvae and a very limited number of adult insects.

What is a new garden ethic? How do we get there? Why is it important? What do we defend about our perceptions and beliefs, and why do we defend them so fervently? Is that garden beautiful? To whom? How are gardens an act of social justice that awakens or builds a new compassion and resolve to honor all life and cultivate equality?

Don't clean up your fall garden. It's not the living room after the kids have gone to bed, strewn with foot-impaling LEGO pieces. Butterflies and caterpillars will be overwintering in leaf litter, as will some bee larvae in hollow stems. Countless other creatures will be doing the same, while birds will come for shelter and seeds on the snowiest winter days. Plus, all those plants look gooooood in winter -- way better than a moonscape.

Over the years I've written several pieces tackling our penchant to clean up the garden, as well as to assume fall isn't the ideal time for planting. Why is fall so perfect for new plants? Cooler weather puts less stress on them and you, and we tend to see more rains. Mid to late fall is also ideal tree and shrubbery time, especially once the leaves fall off (no leaves = far less stress). Come spring your fall-dug plants will be better rooted while likely flowering sooner than if you planted them in the spring.

7 Reasons Not to Clean Up Your Fall Garden

Get Year-Round Good Looks With Matrix Gardening

Why Fall is the Best Time for Planting

10 Native Flowers to Beautify Your Winter Garden

I posted this over at Milk the Weed on Facebook, but it deserves being permanently enshrined in this space, I think. Tell me what you think and what you might add.

If you want to win over neighbors with your front yard wildlife garden (or at least not totally cheese them off) while avoiding county weed control, there are a few key strategies to take:

1) Do not just let your lawn or landscape "go."
2) Create structure in garden beds and the landscape. That can most easily mean plant tiers -- short stuff in front, tall stuff in back or in the middle.
3) Plant flowers in masses or drifts. 3 or 5 of a kind together. Do not just toss a bag of seed out there.
4) Have a mulch or lawn pathway that's plenty wide and accessible. This helps frame the landscape and welcomes folks in.
5) Don't let plant material droop onto sidewalks or driveways or impede viewing angles at street corners.
6) Include a bench or table or sitting area.
7) Keep it weeded. Thin seedlings that could get out of hand (hello, Rudbeckia) and to maintain tiers / massing, aka the designed or intentional look. You don't have to go crazy doing this, just a little TLC can go a long way.
8) Be able to name every single plant in your landscape using the common AND Latin names. Using the Latin name helps you come off as an authority (which you should be, anyway) to both neighbors and weed ordinance folks.

All that being said, if you're like me you take even more risks in the backyard behind the fence. Case in point:

I've sure been enjoying Liatris ligulistylis, meadow blazingstar, this last week or two. I don't really see monarchs in significant numbers until it starts blooming. Native to the northern Great Plains and Midwest, it purportedly mimics the scent of monarch pheromones. All I know is the flower buds are pretty, the blooms are pretty, the seed heads will be pretty (if brief), and the winter stalks add stellar vertical interest as the snow flies. When our plants can celebrate all the dimensions of garden making -- from art to sensory stimulation to ecological importance -- they become elevated and deeply meaningful places to rediscover wildness. 

Meadow blazingstar has a corm -- a bulb-like mass -- that transplants easily when the plant is dormant. I find it takes about 3 years to get a mature plant with many stalks, but after that it declines quickly and may last only 4-5 years in the landscape. I'd be interested to hear from those who have observed it in the wild and how it performs over time.

The first advanced copies of my book appeared this week on my doorstep. Publication is officially 9/11. You should be able to find it most anywhere books are sold in a month, but if you can't, please ask for the business to place an order. Amazon (I know...) has them on sale for just $13 right now, but who knows for how long.

I can't believe this book happened. Or that a press gave me the green light in every way imaginable. It all started 4 years ago with a wildly contentious post on Garden Rant, then years of blogging, then a fury of manuscript writing over two months last fall that followed three months of research annotations. I'm deeply thankful to everyone who has encouraged, challenged, loved, and even been angry with me -- it all helped.

I'll be speaking on this topic in Madison WI (September), Chicago (October), Tampa (January), and Seattle (February). Working on a few more spring dates, as well.

“A powerful and transformative work, written with honesty and grace.”
-- Susan J. Tweit, plant biologist and ward-winning author
 
“Vogt’s call to be conscious about what we plant in our gardens, and to respect the beauty and resilience of species that have been in our communities for millennia, is clear and urgent.”
-- Dr. Peter Robinson, CEO, David Suzuki Foundation

A nice fall morning begs for a stroll -- when usually a stroll this time of year would mean sweating buckets. It's 52 right now!

For the most part, it's common thinking that exotic plants (from other global regions) won't support as much wildlife as native plants -- even if they are adapted to the local conditions and so are low care for humans. Humans may also find them pretty, and the plants could provide other services like cleaning the air, water, and soil. But there are always trade offs, and we have to rely on ourselves to make informed decisions. Horticulture as a field in general has to do that for consumers, especially.

"Native and adapted" is an oft-used term to promote plants that thrive in local sites and ecoregions. "Adapted" will commonly mean both exotic plants and plants native to other regions of the United States. My genuine question is this: if one significant goal is wildlife support, particularly pollinators (adults and larvae), how far can we reach to nearby states or regions for "native" plants before we lose a plethora of ecosystem services? And if the argument is anticipating climate change and species migration, how can we predict the effects and results of both? Shouldn't our goal be to increase indigenous wildlife populations so they theoretically have the chance to build numbers, adapt, and just maybe a few will evolve? Should we keep bringing in new plants to make the region even more altered? And if the "native" plants are in the same ecoregion, does that mean they are part of functioning biodiversity in the place they're being brought to? In what ways?

I'll be even more candid, knowing I'm dipping into some very hot water. But keep in mind my goal is not to undermine but to question and try to think more critically (even if it's uncomfortable), so that we can grow as stewards of life. This is a conversation. So to be candid, if we bring in a plant from the other side of a state next door, is it helping wildlife? What role does it have in this ecosystem? Even if that ecosystem is urban and highly altered -- or rural and highly altered -- many studies show pollinators flock to urban areas for increased numbers of blooms in home landscapes and vacant lots. What species are using what plants -- native, exotic, and next-door native? Are we bringing in plants because it provides us joy and aesthetic delight, or because we're working off of research that shows species currently and / or will need this plant in the near future?

These are genuine questions: I welcome thoughts and answers from those who are far more knowledgeable and experienced than me. I believe it's critical to have these types of conversations as the field of horticulture and landscape design evolves this century amid the pressures of climate change, mass extinction, and urbanization. More and more plants are being called upon to perform on many levels at once, from just surviving and providing aesthetic delight, to sequestering carbon, filtering runoff, and helping birds and pollinators thrive. If we don't ask questions, we'll never grow and adapt with the world we're altering at breakneck speed. 

I walk the garden almost every morning before the sun fully crests a birch tree at the far end. It's not cool -- the air is thick and the weekly forecast of temps near 100 weighs heavily on my thin skin. I'm not the only one taking advantage of this time. Dragonflies abound, resting on every sinew of grass and flower stem, tree branch and seed head. They often point their wings forward like pointer dogs, but I know it's to balance and buffet themselves against a sudden breeze. Although no breeze comes.

It's easy to hear bumble bees from a dozen feet away, especially on the wild senna where they furiously pulse their bodies to shake out pollen. I counted six on just one stem, and their must be thirty stems out here. In the new meadow the young bluestem and sideoats grama are covered in dew that dazzles sharply as light is refracted from inside each droplet. Blossoms of coneflower, blazingstar, black-eyed susan, nodding onion, and verbena hold still in this heavy morning air.

I won't come back out today -- any temperature above 80 starts to make me falter. But I'll listen from a cracked window for a few moments. The bees. The cardinals and finches. I'll catch a blur of black or orange or yellow as butterflies traverse the path from old garden to new with a desert of concrete patio between. Soon it will be autumn, that most glorious season, and we will be frenetic together in our preparations and joy as the chilled garden explodes in bloom one last time.

A long time ago I argued (er, ranted) against the new coneflower cultivars. Most especially those with pompom blooms that allowed no access to pollen and this provided no seed development for birds. When we alter a plant's ornamental features, often through hybridization and genetic selection, we're changing the chemistry of the planet's nectar, pollen, and leaves. Will insects that evolved to use it, both adults and larvae, be able to identify it? How has its role changed in the environment above and below the soil line when it has orange petals?

This morning Prairie Moon Nursery posted on their Facebook page about a freak white Echinacea pallida in their fields. I'm quoting just the last paragraph:

"It is possible to isolate these flowers and cultivate them to be "true to seed" meaning a seed from a white flower will also be white. However, this cultivation requires artificial selection, and reduces the genetic diversity of the plant population. Since genetic diversity is crucial to a population's survival, we choose to not cultivate these genetic anomalies by breeding out this novel trait, but instead, we just enjoy this curious wonder of the natural world."

So there's another issue right there -- genetic diversity. A lot of plants in the nursery trade are produced from cuttings. What this means is a person in Atlanta could be buying the same exact coneflower as a person in Detroit. Growers, sellers, and buyers demand uniformity so the product is guaranteed to be how it's described on the plant tag. And depending on the origin of that plant, it may bloom earlier or later than when local wildlife have evolved to use it. Plus, it might not do as well in a vastly different climate. When you hear of plants being trialed it's often in one region, or if we're lucky, a few different ones. But the U.S. is a very diverse place, and even if the climate zone is the same, the ecoregion is not.

Right now about the best any consumer can do is getting a straight species plant from a similar latitude. Out here in eastern Nebraska we share a lot of the same native plants as folks in Wisconsin, Ohio, New York, and Tennessee, so getting a plant that was grown and sourced in Ohio means it might do ok out here. Or, it might not, given our drier summers. Ideally, we'd get plants of genetic origin within 30 miles, others would say 100 or 200. And if you get one from a state north or south it will bloom at a different time than the same local plants.

Regardless, the horticulture industry has a lot of challenges to face when promoting pollinator-friendly plants. We don't know what we're doing when we alter plants, but keep making new plants anyway, seemingly disregarding the quality of nectar and pollen as well as co-evolution with fauna.

If you're looking for the best books on sustainable, wildlife friendly, low management garden design, here's your list. I've broken it down into user-friendly categories.

Why
Bringing Nature Home -- Doug Tallamy -- The science of why native plants are critical for wildlife, especially insects.
The Living Landscape -- Doug Tallamy and Rick Darke -- Thoughts and examples of resilient landscapes for wildlife.

How
Planting in a Post-Wild World -- Thomas Rainer and Claudia West -- It starts with the why, that get more theoretical and practical. This is a more advanced book, so you might want to read the "why" first, and even the next book.
The Know Maintenance Perennial Garden -- Roy Diblik -- How to create sustainable, layered, lush, seasonal gardens that look good year round and require less inputs over time. Complete with plants lists and blueprints.

Deeper Why
Principles of Ecological Landscape Design -- Travis Beck -- Principles and strategies for creating resilient landscapes. The way we've been to taught to garden and landscape isn't working, not for us, wildlife, or our cities.

For Whom
Pollinators of Native Plants -- Heather Holm -- A list of common forbs east of the Rockies and the pollinators that both use and rely on them.

Even Deeper Why
A New Garden Ethic -- Benjamin Vogt (hey that's me!) -- Urban and suburban gardens need a radical change for wildlife, climate change, and our own physical / mental health. Nature is crying for us to come back home.

And because we need pictures, have recent shots of a truly radical backyard that's sequestering carbon, improving soil, cleaning water, and providing functional beauty for wildlife and two humans:

It's National Pollinator Week starting June 19 and I wanted to show you more from home base. Here on my 1/4 acre lot I experiment with different plants, plant combinations, and various ways to establish gardens. If you follow me on my social media channels like Instagram and Milk the Weed (Facebook), you'll have seen some of these images. I want to focus on the back lawn, which was a space I never watered, that burned bad each summer, and was simply a wasted space. As the years went by I felt ridiculous for having lawn. Just a few feet away was a 1,500' garden full of pollinators, spiders, frogs, birds, etc. I began to see the unused lawn as lazy and selfish, a place no one could call home, a place that did not amend the soil or sequester carbon or cool the air around my home. Besides, I'm a gardener. Give me more plants!

Instead of a needy fescue lawn, one that suprisingly got patchier if I let it go to seed, let me tell you what I did. In the fall of 2015 I scalped the lawn, raked up as much thatch as I could (about 3-4 passes with a manual rake), exposed soil, and sowed flower seeds I'd saved from the previous year. I then put in about 150 seedlings I'd grown, as well as some 3" pots and plugs, and let it sit. In the spring of 2016 I kept it mowed at the highest setting until about mid June. Ideally, I would have mowed it the entire year because boy oh boy did the foxtail get bad, and I ended up manually deadheading seed on hundreds of plants just so I could have some prairie flowers blooming.

This spring, 2017, I mowed until about early to Mid may and have since let it do its thing. Little bluestem and sideoats grama are now by far the prominent grass, which is all the bright green in the above images. I sowed some pioneer forbs that I thought I'd need to shade out the fescue -- mexican hat coneflower and black-eyed susan mostly -- but the short prairie grasses are doing the job for me. Yes, the fescue lawn has bloomed and gone to seed, but I don't believe it will be able to procreate.

Over time I will:
1) Mow a path through the space (I'd like some things to set seed this year)
2) Remove / thin more aggressive species like wild senna
3) Deadhead indian grass and big bluestem so they don't take over (I only have a few of each for winter structure)
4) Thin seedlings of some more architectural and seasonal-blooming plants to preserve a slight sense of order and rhythm that even in a wilder space our eyes look for. Clumps and drifts. Think about a prairie, and how the plants guide you, how we look for patterns to connect to and navigate the landscape. It doesn't take much editing, and in the end, the plants are still allowed to move and do their thing -- to show me what they want and need.
5) Mow it all down each March (I'd love to burn).

Stay tuned to see this space for progress week by week. The asters will be especially spectacular this year. Come on, fall!

And below are a few more shots from out front, where some 400' of unused lawn that burned even worse was taken out in favor of two more designed beds. The landscape had a blueprint and allows for some plants to self sow to fill in the gaps over time. Not that the hellstrip was left to blend into the neighborhood, and a 6' wide lawn path bisects the two beds, showing purpose and human use while tying into the rest of the neighborhood. Both the front and back areas are never watered. Both provide winter habitat. Both represent a wildlife refuge and an island that connects to a tallgrass prairie one mile south.

And in case you forgot here's the 10 year old main garden, which is about 75% native plants:

I stumbled upon David Orr's wonderful essay "Love It or Lose It," which I think I stumbled upon years ago and forgot. The guy is speaking my language, and the language of my forthcoming book A New Garden Ethic. His focus is certainly on rewilding our daily lives -- cities, suburbia -- and lamenting our role as stewards who don't know much. His call is not for a technological revolution, but a spiritual, moral, and cultural revolution of the likes seldom or never seen before. Choosing and cultivating life is as constant an exercise as love.

"Beyond efficiency, we need another revolution that transforms our ideas of what it means to live decently and how little is actually necessary for a decent life: a sufficiency revolution. The first revolution is mostly about technology and economics. The second revolution is about morality and human purposes. The biophilia revolution is about the combination of reverence for life and purely rational calculation by which we will want to both be efficient and live sufficiently. It is about finding our rightful place on earth and in the community of life, and it is about citizenship, duties, obligations, and celebration.

There are two formidable barriers standing in our way. The first is the problem of denial. We have not yet faced up to the magnitude of the trap we have created for ourselves. We are still thinking of the crisis as a set of problems that are, by definition, solvable with technology and money. In fact we face a series of dilemmas that can be avoided only through wisdom and a higher and more comprehensive level of rationality than we have yet shown. Better technology would certainly help; however, our crisis is not fundamentally one of technology but one of mind, will, and spirit. Denial must be met by something like a worldwide ecological “perestroika,” predicated on the admission of failure: the failure of our economics, which became disconnected from life; the failure of our politics, which lost sight of the moral roots of our commonwealth; the failure of our science, which lost sight of the essential wholeness of things; and the failures of all of us as moral beings, who allowed these things to happen because we did not love deeply and intelligently enough. The biophilia revolution must come as an ecological enlightenment that sweeps out the modern superstition that we are knowledgeable enough and good enough to manage the earth and to direct evolution."

from "Love It or Lose It: The Coming Biophilia Revolution"

Thought I'd show a few images of some projects that are in year one and year two. The first is a private residence. Several acres around the home have been seeded in a high-diverse prairie mix by Prairie Plains Resource Institute, which will provide wonderful wildlife habitat and, eventually, mitigate a lot of runoff issues. But for the very front of the house we went with a slightly more designed prairie look. Modest drifts and masses of various native flowers and grasses will mingle and ultimately fuse with a sedge area near the home's walls, and plants will self sow over time ensuring evocative stands of blooms from April through October.

This garden is about 3,000 square feet, and with the house, sits atop a hill that slopes down to a pond, so sight lines from within the home outward to the wonderful landscape are preserved with generally shorter plants that will melt into the seeded tallgrass going down the hill. Several of the flowering perennials were chosen for their high attractiveness to both diverse and charismatic insect species, this way the family could just step out the front door and be engulfed in nature taking flight all around them.

All of the planting areas will be sown with sideoats grama, a low bunch grass with ornamental orange blooms and solid seed head action in fall. This will create a calm, modern base layer which should take well to future flower self sowing. Clumps of sedge are also scattered in the beds -- in a pointillist fashion -- further out from the home to add early-season green, increase plant diversity, and help tie areas together.

Below is an update of the Cornhusker Council Boy Scout's of America headquarters east of Lincoln, planted last fall. It's about 2,000 square feet of developing sedge meadow in a challenging space where portions get a lot of shade half the day, then blistering afternoon sun. Weeds out in the country have been a problem, but they are primarily the annual variety, so the goal is simply to keep them from blooming and setting seed. What this means is cutting them down to the ground with minimal pulling, the latter which would disturb the soil, bring more seeds to the surface, and create open soil for new blown-in seeds to establish. The sedge, Carex brevior, is looking very strong as forbs and some sweeps of grasses slowly establish this first year.

And just for kicks, another image of our front meadow beds at home base -- converted in fall 2014 from lawn that burned every summer. Last year I added a lot of sedge, and some flowers like nodding onion, to bulk up open areas. But the sideoats grama, prairie dropseed, and little bluestem are filling in the gaps fairly quickly. This spring I put in a few more rattlesnake master, some blue hyssop, and soon a drift of our native heuchera prairie alumroot (great foliage contrast and stellar spring flower stalks when massed).

I do some light deadheading and pinching back of plants this time of year. Asters like aromatic and New England might get sheered 50% back (before July 4) to control size and increase blooms, while other asters have growing tips nipped for more fall flowers. I deadhead all Zizia aurea, golden alexanders, that I can easily see and get to, in order to limit my garden becoming a Zizia garden. That being said, I'd be happy if they spread like the dickens out in the lawn-to-meadow garden. 

My clay soil is cracking with some deep chasms forming in open areas, which just goes to show that open areas are bad news. Exposed clay soil can open up roots to dry air and sunlight. So we need to think about layering and planting densely where we can to shade soil, increase water penetration, enrich soil, compete against weeds and make for a better looking space overall.

All this being said, of my 5,000' only a few news plants get a drink in these hot days. Besides, out front, both of my neighbor's sprinkler systems shoot way over into my drought-tolerant prairie beds, and the one waters twice a day in high wind about late afternoon. I tell you what. You shouldn't have to plan a garden taking into account neighborhood over watering.

I often just show images of the backyard gardens because, well, they are in the back where I can be a cloistered introvert. And I'm also enamored with the lawn to meadow business going on. But the front beds deserve an update because they are another big suburban paradigm shift. You can tell just how big by noticing how many neighbors were watering this morning when I was checking on things. (All three of my nearest neighbors were watering and one goes twice a day.)

Plants are filling in. Last year I added about 50 Carex brevior plugs to beef things up and to provide more spring green when neighborhood lawns are also greening up. Black-eyed susans are a bit thuggy so I have to thin their seedlings, and so far the grasses are simply filling in vs. taking over. But that may change. Little bluestem and especially sideoats grama are on the move, but also doing well fighting weeds (very well this spring!).

In the images below you'll see several forbs, including: purple prairie clover, nodding onion, stiff goldenrod, aromatic aster, purple coneflower, pale purple coneflower, meadow blazingstar. and hidden in there somewhere a lead plant, dwarf baptisia, butterflyweed, and purple poppy mallow. I added blue hyssop this spring to a very bare, large-ish area where it can reseed itself in a nice grouping.

Other plants not making an appearance below are rattlesnake master and smooth aster. There is a 6' wide lawn pathway that divides the two beds, which are in total about 450 square feet. Nothing is taller than 2' within several feet of the sidewalk or driveway, and there is always something in bloom starting about mid May into late October.