The Deep Middle

Converting a Small Front Yard to Prairie Beds -- 2014-2019

6/26/2019

What are some of the challenges bringing nature back to suburbia? As a designer I've learned a lot from experimenting in my home landscape, and these lessons have improved my knowledge and success for clients. We all have to start somewhere, and it's often messy at first -- which is ok.

In autumn of 2014 I had a friend bring a sod cutter and remove much of our 600ft front yard. Part of the impetus was I hated to mow and water -- the lawn always burned in summer anyway -- and because a dozen dandelions provoked a neighbor to report me to weed control. So the two driving impulses were 1) I hate mowing and 2) you ain't seen nothing yet. In the nearly five years since, I have received no weed control violation notices for the front yard (but I did for the back meadow).

There have been a lot of ups and down in managing the space for both functional and aesthetic success. After we removed the sod I discovered, to no surprise, compacted clay which resulted in my spending almost a week trying to dig in the hundreds of plugs I had. In the first 2 years I had nothing but a mulch bed, and by year three black-eyed susans -- while stunning in bloom -- had colonized so much of one bed I had to weed out 50% of them.

Below is my original plan from the earliest days of my tinkering with garden design on a semi-professional level -- oh what I've learned since!

I was trying to mass and repeat, drift and repeat, but I did not take into adequate account how long it would take some species to establish (Baptisia, Amorpha) and how others naturally colonize naturally, especially in the early years (Rudbeckia, Schizachyrium). What I've learned here is that species like Rudbeckia, which self sow in open areas liberally, should be used as an early succession species to help combat weeds. That first year I had tons of weed pressure, even in 3" of wood mulch, along with remaining grass roots spreading quickly. But in the areas where Rudbeckia was taking hold there were far fewer weeds. I employed the Rudbeckia strategy to 2,000ft out back with great success -- especially since I direct sowed it into the fescue lawn which had no chance beneath Rudbeckia hirta and Ratibida columnifera.

One fall I tried adding Carex brevior to the grass matrix (which would replace the mulch over time) of little bluestem, sideoats grama, and prairie dropseed. In winter #1 I lost a lot of sideoats grama and dropseed, which taught me that warm season grasses don't enjoy being planted toward the end of October unless it's going to be an unseasonably warm fall -- they just don't have enough time to get rooted in. Luckily, the Carex immediately got out competed by little bluestem, and I say luckily because the sedge would have been too tall, too early for the small space.

It's taken 4.5 summers now to get a sort of balance among the plants as they've taught me what they want or how they need to order themselves. The neighbor's every-morning water schedule means half of the west bed remains too damp for drought tolerant plants that struggle and grow smaller than their counterparts on the east bed, so I've had to adjust and replace species, careful to keep some sort of aesthetic balance. Little bluestem has probably colonized a bit too much, but the autumn show is spectacular and the taprooted plants don't mind since they plow down below the fibrous roots of little blue. That same thinking applies to bulbs (Allium) and corms (Liatris)

I still have plenty of gaps, especially where our burgeoning vole population has had an autumn / winter snack, as is the case with any Liatris species. Last fall I added a lot of Heuchera richardsonii for May blooms and to add a clump of texture to areas that were becoming too grass dominated. I also added Eryngium yuccifolium for some height, replaced Liatris (I'm stubborn), and tossed in another Callirhoe involucrata groundcover since it looks stunning weaving among grasses and keeps blooming almost all summer long. I'll be adding some Geranium maculatum this fall for April bunches of color, and then it will naturally give way to the summer perennials.

What has this conversion taught me? Plans are only best guesses -- sites vary, weather changes, plants teach as they die or proliferate. I've edited out plants and tried to bolster others that provide the right color or texture at the right time. Every July I have to trim back grasses along the sidewalk so pedestrians don't get brushed by strangers, and I keep up on weekly mowing (even though it's down to 10 minutes or less I still despise it).

What's next? I have a growing love / hate relationship with the "small" dogwood cultivars along the sidewalk. I coppice them every winter but it makes no difference as they easily put on 6ft of growth every season when I want them at the advertised 3-4' on the plant tag. They provide superb privacy and bird habitat, but they also make the front yard look too overgrown; in contrast their winter red twigs are just phenomenal in a sunset or snowfall. What resulted from the great Rudbeckia cull was a dearth of flowers in early and mid summer, so each fall I add forbs where there are gaps, and am constantly fighting an invasion of black medic which has overtaken the central lawn pathway. I want to remove and replace the lawn with fresh sod; and yes I left some lawn on purpose to tie into the neighborhood because it provides both a sense of connectivity and helps frame the wilder spaces.

That's my story.... what's yours?

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Examples of Young Lawn-to-Meadow Gardens

6/11/2019

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I want to share with you a few of our projects at various stages and describe some of the methodology, impediments, and successes of each. Every landscape is different, from start to management, and each requires different strategies for success. There is never one blanket solution or application, however there is often a common thread.

First up is a project from the fall of 2017. I crated a plan for the client and they installed some 1,500 plants. The soil was a mix of clay and loess (loam, silt, clay). Below are images from the summer of 2018 and early June 2019.

In the first image you can see our matrix -- the mulch replacement -- plains oval sedge (Carex brevior) looking good and growing up fast. The forbs will take a few years to develop, fill in, and then spread. In the second image you can see the sedge at full maturity, about 2-3 feet tall with the seed heads early this summer. The look, I think, is pretty cool, and the sedge is doing a superb job shading the soil and reducing weed competition. However, in places -- especially near the house where there's morning shade -- the sedge flopped over and smothered some plants. A 30 minute haircut of 50% will bring the sedge back into control, provide the look and weed management we want, and be all the work it takes until the same time next year. That's better than weekly lawn mowing in my book, or annual wood mulch applications. While the landscape probably needs an infusion of 100 flowers to bring it where it needs to be aesthetically and functionally for pollinators, my hope is that the species now present will reproduce soon.

The next project is also from 2017 and installed both by the client and myself in early summer (we used forb plugs and sowed in a bunchgrass, sideoats grama). The lawn was removed with a sodcutter and the soil was very intense clay -- not a surprise as lawn isn't the best soil ammender due to shallow roots. Once the sod was removed, however, a plethora of weed seeds where exposed and I felt like the garden was a goner in 2018 when the client sent images for advice (crab grass galore, among others). But they were incredibly diligent pulling some weeds and ensuring others never set seed, and in early June of 2019 the front yard looked like this and just about to bloom:

Finally, here's a new design and install from May of 2019 in an established downtown neighborhood. We spray-killed the lawn to double the size of the garden -- one the client wanted to feature a variety of sedge species and that would support pollinators in three seasons. The soil was very rich and loamy, thanks to decades of tree roots working their magic, so I expect this garden to take off quickly in 2020. Since it's a mostly shade location we chose a variety of shade and half shade forb species that, combined with a sunny corner, will provide pollen resources throughout the growing season. I enjoy the challenge of shade gardens since they force me to stretch my plant palette a bit. Here there are interweaving masses of 5-6 sedge species with drifts and clumps of flowers among them; I know it's hard to tell with just-planted plugs, but it helps illustrate the process a bit.

Well, you know what, let's also look at HQ where I do a lot of experimenting that I apply to client spaces. For example, the front yard prairie beds. Those spaces require constant tweaking and plants self sow too much or not enough, die out, or otherwise require me to add plugs or remove seedlings at a twice-annual rate. In early summer both the front beds and the back meadow (second image) already provide textural interest. And thanks to some color theory my friend Claudia West shared during a spring event we presented at together, I learned that in order for a "wilder" space to appear more organized and accepting, it's important to use plants with similar shades of green. Don't plant a bright green plant alongside a dark green plant, for example, as that will appear messy to our eyes. I think the same logic would apply to red or bronze foliage, like we see in the ninebark cultivars (which also makes the leaves toxic to insect larvae).

So there you go, a look at a variety of spaces with a little bit of context. They are all different but share the same goal -- to create an ecologically thriving, low maintenance, aesthetically pleasing space that brings Nebraska home. Each will require TLC over the years just like any garden, but in the end are a healthier option to high-input lawns and mulch beds filled with exotic plants wildlife can't use. Stay tuned for some exciting fall projects and meadow making....

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How to Tastefully Prairie a Small Garden Bed

3/25/2019

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If you don't have 40 acres, let alone 1/4 acre, but yearn to bring an echo of prairie home to a tiny space, all is not lost. There are a few key strategies to use when you have something like 100 square feet or less.

Limit you species list. Trying to cram 15 or 20 varieties into a small space will make it look wild and messy in short order. Aim for around 5 species.
Those species should be behaved clumpers -- they don't run rampant by roots or toss out tons of seed that germinates easily even asphalt shingles.
Select a base layer or living green mulch; I suggest sedge since there is always a species for sun or shade or wet or dry or clay or sand. If you've got 100 feet to work with you might try 50 sedge to start.
That leaves you with 4 plants of the 5 in your small garden, and these will be ornamental flowers most likely. Look for 1-2 that bloom in each season -- spring, summer, fall. With each flower place them in groups of 3-5 or so, assuming they don't get too big (it's ok to have one that gets wider, but only one in the whole bed). Grouping makes the garden seem more together and creates a brighter beacon for pollinators.
Keep those plants short. A small garden that's super tall is just begging for a mower, but one that's 2-3 feet tall looks more approachable and intentional.

So let's say you have 100 feet in half sun to full sun with clay soil that's dry in summer but moist in spring and fall. What might your plant selection look like?

50 plains oval sedge (Carex brevior) -- green mulch (plant on a grid 12 inches apart)
15 nodding onion (Allium cernuum) -- bulb that slowly duplicates in drifts, blooms mid summer (three clumps of 5)
9-15 prairie alumroot (Heuchera richardsonii) -- superb contrasting foliage, blooms in mid to late spring (groups of 3-5)
9 pale purple coneflower (Echinacea pallida) -- small footprint with fuzzy leaves and outstanding winter seed heads, blooms in early summer (groups of 3)
3 meadow or rough blazingstar (Liatris ligulistylis or aspera) -- architectural spikes with winter interest, blooms in late summer to early fall (group of three / two and one)
1 aromatic aster (Symphyotrichum oblongifolium) -- shrubby aster, blooms in mid to late fall

Something else you may notice about this plant list are the bloom colors -- they are essentially different hues of one another. That will help tie the space together and not visually overwhelm while still providing a succession of blooms in the growing season, and yet each one will appeal to a different set of adult pollinators while most are also host plants for larvae.

So there you go, a designed pocket prairie that's better than daylily or lawn or wood mulch and will get you ready for that winning lotto ticket and a new 40 or 400.

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Stop Gardening by Hardiness Zone

3/18/2019

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If our goal is to garden for wildlife and the ecosystems they depend on, then we need to eschew hardiness zones on plant tags. But if we do that, how can we know if a plant is suitable for our landscape? We can garden by ecoregion.

The USDA not only offers a hardiness zone map, but several ecoregion maps. Ecoregions focus on plant communities, and this will mostly if not entirely mean the use of native plants adapted to your region and the wildlife that live there. Let's compare two maps -- first what we're used to, then where we probably need to go.

Above is the map we're all familiar with. It's incredibly helpful when matching plants from other parts of the world to our gardens, but as a lot of us know these plants may not be recognizable (or of use) to local fauna like pollinator adults and insect young. Another obvious issue is what's native, even in the U.S.? A native plant from South Carolina has the same zone as a native from Oregon, but the two regions -- their weather, their wildlife, their ecological communities -- will be radically different for the most part. When we're trying to garden with plants best adapted to our locale and the wildlife, we need a different map.

The USDA provides several ecoregion maps, from level 1 to level 4, the latter which is pictured above (it's far more detailed and specific than level 1). If we look at eastern Nebraska where we're located, there are a few ecoregions. When we try to use plants endemic from one ecoregion we'll be more likely to have success not only in plant health and performance, but in wildlife support; this will be especially true if we can find plants grown from local ecotype seed -- that's seed gathered from within the ecoregion, sometimes even well inside that ecoregion on a hyper-local level of less than 50 miles.

You're maybe thinking, ok great, now how do I find what's native to me? Here's what we suggest, which is based on the more in-depth presentation Starting Your Native Plant Garden:

1) Consult with regional plant lists created by The Xerces Society, Pollinator Partnership, and Audubon.
2) Once you have some plants you think might work on your site, further match them on the county level via a search at either BONAP or the USDA.
3) Then learn how the plants reproduce and their further cultural information. For much of the Plains and Midwest, we rely on a few sources to gather and collate horticultural details: Prairie Moon Nursery, Illinois Wildflowers, MOBOT, and the Lady Bird Johnson Wildflower Center. There are many others, for sure, including regional native plant societies, nurseries, county extensions, and books, like Field Guide to Wildflowers of Nebraska and the Great Plains as well as Jewels of the Plains.

So that's how you start, and if the journey seems complicated or long then that is ideal since you will learn so much more about your region and climate and wildlife than you ever dreamed possible -- and applying that knowledge to garden design and management will be a very good thing, indeed. Prairie up.

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Can Exotic Plants Help Pollinators Adapt to Climate Change?

3/6/2019

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Climate change is altering our world in massively unpredictable ways, which will lead to severe cascade effects eroding biodiversity and ecosystem function. Earth will look and act differently thanks to our privilege and short shortsightedness. Plants already bloom at different times, and insects who sync their life cycles around those plants will soon be left with less food to feed themselves and their young.

But using exotic plants to extend the bloom season is a strategy rife with issues that got us into this whole climate change / mass extinction scenario in the first place. When I hear a designer promoting exotics as a way to help pollinators, I know they're missing information. Here are some issues that come up for me:

1) Exotic plants help both invasive insects and primarily generalist pollinators (native or not). Chances are invasive insect thugs evolved with the exotic plants we're using in our gardens, so all we're doing is helping them out, either with the plant being a host for their young or for the nectar and pollen they need. Exotic plants also appeal primarily to generalist adult native pollinators, like bumble bees or many butterflies. Often someone will say something like "I saw a bee on my snowdrops or hosta or russian sage" without knowing what the species is, and in turn what role that species has in the ecosystem.

2) Take oligolectic bees, which evolved to use the pollen of specific native plants to feed their young. Without that plant's pollen we don't have that bee. As an ecosystem loses these specialist bees other specialists are forced to become generalists, which reduces pollination rates of plants. Further, climate change is reducing the pollen protein levels, among other nutrients, so even if the right plants are available at the right time, they may not be as valuable.

3) Helping pollinators by extending the bloom season with exotic plants ignores the plant's critical role as a host for larvae. Exotic plants may help some generalist adult native insects adapt, for a time anyway, but they won't help plant-dependent species or the ecosystem adapt. Simply put, climate change is happening so fast now most life can't and won't adapt. We're looking at a 50% total planetary species loss by 2100. You can't assume exotic plants are going to make much of a difference, especially when they aren't supporting young. Native plants support many times the insect biomass as compared to exotics. But should you be using native plants from an ecoregion south or downhill of you? I don't know. Again, the climate is altering so quickly and unpredictably that the help you may be doing could be short-lived at best.

4) Predicting the future isn't easy, and while we can make some logical guesses, how do we know if / when an exotic plant will become a problem plant? Especially in the face of really unpredictable climate and weather fluctuations? Isn't assuming we know better what got us into this mess in the first place?

I think when we hear that any flowering plant can help pollinators what we're really hearing is a defense of human supremacism; the idea that in whatever garden choices we make will do SOME good on SOME level, so let's pick what's pretty or functional to us as the primary or sole motivation. We are so far beyond this limited viewpoint which eschews empathy, compassion, and scientific knowledge of how the world works. If we keep defending our plant choices in distorted ways, we're simply continuing to feed the system and conditions that have fostered the sixth mass extinction. Our privilege doesn't give us the right to use any plant we want -- it gives us the wisdom and responsibility to see beyond ourselves into the ecosystem and the thousands of lives interacting with our homes (and us) every day. The real world is not a human one, culturally or biologically, and until we start to see nature and landscapes as something part of us -- not just a tool or an artscape -- gardens will fail to wake us to a more profound community of nature, to compassion, and to empowerment.

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Honey Bees Compete With Native Bees

2/25/2019

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Honey bees may harm native bees. This is the sentence that launched a thousand arguments on social. For years media has brainwashed us into beekeeping as a means to help pollinators, primarily because honey bees are so easily identified and so well studied. Just consider, as well, how much the honey bee serves as an icon for pollinators and bees in general -- most every "bee" image you see is one that's gold and black, with dripping honey and honey comb hexagons. But it's not fair or ecologically correct to equate a foreign species with 4,000 native species. As our awareness grows about how ecosystems work, we're having to think in different, uncomfortable ways as we challenge comfortable preconceptions. Honey bees are livestock, part of an agricultural machine and so are an agricultural issue; native bees are an ecological issue.

Below are resources on the above subject so that you can become empowered and educate others. In the very least it's a list and a link you can give to people when the conversation turns deeper.

1) The Bee Apocalypse Was Never Real
Honey bees are not under threat of vanishing. Colony collapse disorder isn't what we think it is.

2) Competition Between Managed Honey Bee and Wild Bumble Bees Depends On Landscape Context

This one's behind a paywall, but you'll see links to other related articles down the page to broaden the discussion. From the abstract that explored two generalist groups (honey and bumble):

Honeybees might outcompete wild bees by depleting common resources, possibly more so in simplified landscapes where flower-rich habitats have been lost....Adding honeybees suppressed bumblebee densities in field borders and road verges in homogeneous landscapes whereas no such effect was detected in heterogeneous landscapes. The proportional abundance of bumblebee species with small foraging ranges was lower at honeybee sites than at control sites in heterogeneous landscape, whereas bumblebee communities in homogeneous landscapes were dominated by a single species with long foraging range irrespective of if honeybees were added or not.

3) An Overview of the Potential Impacts of Honey Bees to Native Bees, Plant Communities, & Ecosystems...

This is from the Xerces Society. Solid summary of all the issues that focuses on working with beekeepers for the best apiary placement.

4) Massively Introduced Managed Species & Their Consequences for Plant-Pollinator Interactions

From the abstract: First, we review the impacts of major insect and plant MIMS on natural comm-unities by identifying how they affect other species through competition (direct andapparent competition) or facilitation (attraction, spillover). Second, we show how MIMScan alter the structure of plant–pollinator networks. We specifically analysed the posi-tion ofA. melliferafrom 63 published plant–pollinator webs to illustrate that MIMS canoccupy a central position in the networks, leading to functional consequences. Finally,we present the features of MIMS in sensitive environments ranging from oceanicislands to protected areas, as a basis to discuss the impacts of MIMS in urban contextand agrosystems.

5) Bees Gone Wild: Feral Honey Bees Pose a Danger to Native Bees and the Ecosystems That Depend on Them

A professor of entomology looks at what happens when honey bees go rogue: "It’s these feral honeybees, especially, that pose a challenge to nearly all native pollinators since honeybees forage throughout the growing season for nectar and pollen from a wide array of flowers, building up vast numbers. When honeybee competition reduces the number and diversity of native pollinators, native plants also can suffer since they may receive less efficient pollination."

6) You're Worrying About the Wrong Bees

Another intro for those dipping their toes into the topic, complete with source material cited at the end.

7) Foreign Bees Monopolize Prized Resources in Biodiversity Hotspot

Here's a study that focuses on southern California -- as you may know, California is one of if not the richest state in native plant diversity. For this study keep in mind that many native bees have evolved to uses specific native plants for pollen to feed their young. "New research from the same team found that honey bees focus their foraging on the most abundantly flowering native plant species, where they often account for more than 90 percent of pollinators observed visiting flowers."

8) The Role of Honey Bees in Natural Areas

A recoreded video webinar with The Xerces Society and Pollinator Partnership. Non-native managed and feral honey bees negatively affect native plant communities by disrupting the co-evolved pollinator networks, and reducing seed set in native plants. They also preferentially forage on non-native plants (which they likely co-evolved with in countries of their origin) and thereby encourage invasiveness. Honey bee interference with native plant communities and their pollinators are found to therefore have compounding ecosystem effects.

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Our Gardens Are at the Center of Vanishing Bees and Butterflies — and in Saving Nature.

2/8/2019

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I can’t remember the last summer when I had to clean off my windshield with a squeegee at the gas station. It seems like a decade since I had to make an emergency pit stop, making the seven hour drive to my folks two states away every July 4, to clean bug guts off the front of my car. Perhaps worse, as an avid gardener with over 5,000 square feet of lush beds filled with dozens of flower varieties, I’ve noticed a steady decline in buzzing visitors — especially since 2012 when my area received roughly half an inch of rain over the summer.
Undoubtedly, you’ve seen the articles about monarch butterfly populations dropping and the insect apocalypse, and maybe you’ve added more blooms to whatever small spit of land you have. While the issues we face are much larger than what’s happening in our urban and suburban gardens, the insect die off starts with the cultural mentality of human supremacism made evident just on your drive to work or the grocery store.

Every city looks pretty much the same. We start our day in homes where lawn makes up the vast majority of landscaping, then make our way past businesses and schools and churches where lawn makes up the vast majority of landscaping. And snug tight against the walls of most structures is a thin line of defense — scattered shrubs and a few flowers marooned in unnatural oceans of wood mulch. If you were a pollinator all of this habitat would be useless. It fact, it’d be lethal — there’s almost no source of food or a place to raise your young.
Humans are superb colonizers — we’ve made urban landscapes efficient for our uses. But we’ve left out the nature that pollinators need, and without pollinators we’d soon find ourselves without blueberries, squash, melons, apples, oranges, strawberries, almonds, and a seemingly unending list of food. We’d also find ourselves without many flowers we enjoy in parks or right out the front door.

There are some 4,000 species of native bee in the U.S. and a significant portion are specialists who time their emergence from nests to coincide with the bloom appearance of specific flowers. These bees forage for pollen from native plants they evolved with over millennia, caching egg-filled holes in the ground or in old wood with pollen for their future progeny. Without specialist bees — who depend on specific plants just as those plants depend on these specific bees to reproduce — ecosystems begin to falter. As flowers don’t receive pollination they set less seed, and entire fields lose diversity and gaps open up, potentially paving the way for invasive weeds to move in or for less beneficial flowers to take over.

The case of bees is only one example of tens of thousands of insects that invisibly swarm our world. We know of monarchs — how they require milkweed since their caterpillars can only eat this one plant. As farm fields have grown and as prairie has been plowed away, milkweed and the grassland habitat monarchs and a plethora of other insects rely on has helped clean up our windshields but also starved the environment.
Just take songbirds. While their young are in the nest for roughly two weeks the parents are feeding the chicks a steady diet of spiders, beetles, moths, butterflies, bees, caterpillars, and more. Some bird species may require hundreds of insects a day while they are growing up. If you haven’t noticed, our cities are becoming quieter — the spring songs once so loud and diverse just a decade or two ago have become muted and more subtle.

What do home gardens or business landscapes have to do with any of this? In a time when wildlife is vanishing in perceptible fashion every spit of land matters, just as every plant matters. Native plants support many times more insect biomass than exotic plants imported from Asia or Europe because native plants have a shared evolutionary history with insects and other wildlife. Further, when we use lawn as default landscape mode we might as well be paving over everything with asphalt, because lawn has no flowers — and it certainly has no shrubs or small trees which create hedgerows, perhaps some of the best bee nesting habitat around.

In my neighborhood front yards are small and most families kick a ball around in the back, so that front lawn goes unused. Every week someone mows it down, making sure not a dandelion blooms or a milkweed takes root. What if we took even half of these small spaces and made our garden beds twice as large? What if we had drifts of short meadow flowers and grasses? What if instead of street after street of monochrome flat green, we created networks of wildlife refuges, islands of habitat and freeways of food and shelter? Our smallest native bees can travel only a few blocks before needing to refuel on nectar — and where can they find it when the landscape is lawn or hosta or wood mulch?

If we can’t provide for the nature that literally sustains us at home, how can we ever hope to steward that nature beyond our front door into parks and farm fields and marshes and deserts and forests and prairies? Our urban gardens matter — maybe not because they can prevent an “insectageddon,” but because our gardens reflect what we think of our natural world and how we see ourselves either as a part of the wild web, or as a near-sighted species who lacks compassion for the smallest among us.

My son is six months old and every day I think about the world I’m giving to him. While he’s smiling at me, rattle in hand, I’m apologizing to him in words he can’t yet understand but that, unfortunately, he will one day comprehend in more ways than my heart can bear. But soon enough we’ll walk the garden and identify as many insects as we can, learning about the plants they need for pollen or to lay their eggs upon. We’ll plant the flowers. We’ll listen to whatever birds we can, naming them and singing back. We’ll understand together that conservation, compassion, activism, and faith begin at home and quickly spill out on the backs and legs of insects making their way home, too. We choose the world we want to live in, and for better or worse, each choice affects every other human and non human life around us. I don’t know about you, but as much as my heart breaks under that sense of responsibility, it also feels amazingly liberating and empowering — especially when I’m down on my knees watching a butterfly dance around the center of an aster bloom.

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Native Plant Cultivars 101

1/26/2019

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Should you be using native plant cultivars? Are they as robust or as beneficial to wildlife as straight species natives? Oh my, what are straight species? As you plan your garden for climate resilience, wildlife benefit (pollinators and birds especially), and low maintenance design, here is some information to keep in mind.

What is a Straight Species Native Plant?
A plant that is found in the wild and has not been grown to produce specific ornamental traits. It's evolved naturally in the wild and reproduces via open pollinated seed (wind blown or insect produced pollination without the help of humans). That's the super simple definition, which is what we're going for throughout this piece.

What Is a Cultivar?
A native plant cultivar (or nativar) is a plant that differs from the straight species in some regard -- usually height, bloom color, bloom size, or leaf color. There are two main types of cultivars:

Selection -- A plant sport, showing any of the aforementioned differences, that's found in the wild or a garden then is humanly reproduced to maintain that different trait. So a plant hunter might find an aromatic aster in a prairie with a different bloom color or overall size than the more prominent straight species. The plant tag will read something like Asclepias tuberosa 'Holy Flower Batman.' Something like that. :)

Hybrid -- Purposely crossing two related plants, via human pollination, to produce a desired trait in a new plant. So think about orange coneflowers or pompom coneflowers. The plant tag will read something like Echinacea x 'Shiver Me Timbers.'

How Are Cultivars Problematic?
Overall, the first issue is one that's not just about native plants, but growing and selling all plants (native or not) in general.

Tissue Culture -- This is the process of reproducing plants for the mass market on a large scale; basically it's cloning. You take a physical piece of a live plant you wish to reproduce and get it to root and grow into a full-sized specimen. The problem here is that even if it's a native plant -- straight species, selection, or hybrid -- you're producing the same exact plant over and over thousands if not millions of times. One issue could be this: that if you reproduce a genetically identical plant native to the south, and then place it in the north, it may have a harder time thriving in the climate and / or have its bloom time out of sync with local pollinators. While many native plants have large ranges across the U.S., those ranges include many distinct genetic populations adapted with and evolved to the local climate and wildlife. Even a big bluestem in eastern Nebraska is different than one in western Iowa.

Pollinator Support -- When we alter bloom colors or shapes we're altering far more than what humans can see. We're also changing: UV runways that bees use to find flowers and access pollen; nectar (sugar) and pollen (protein) amounts and quality; and other ques insects use to find or assess the value of flowers, from electric charges to sounds. Until we fully study the thousands and tens of thousands of interactions occurring in even just a small locale between plants and insects, we can never know how cultivars compare to straight species. And if you ever see a cultivar that shows no pollen when the straight species does, know that we've effectively made the plant useless for bees even if we find the new form attractive.

Larval Host -- Different blooms are appealing to gardeners and designers (as well as the breeders and nurseries that sell them), but so are various leaf colors. But as you can imagine, similar issues arise when we alter leaf color as when we alter bloom color. For example, the straight species of ninebark and elderberry have green leaves, whereas several cultivars of both have purple or plum. What happens now is that the insects who evolved to use these native plants to lay eggs and rear their young (caterpillars are one example), can no longer recognize the leaves when they taste them to lay eggs. And even if those eggs hatch, the leaves are now toxic to the larvae who starve. Two issues here are that if you want more butterflies and moths, you'll need to have more larvae; and if you want more birds, you'll need more insect larvae, since over 90% of songbirds feed exclusively insects to their young while they are in the nest (and we're talking hundreds of insects a day, both larvae and adults as well as spiders and beetles).

What it Comes Down To
Trusting nature seems like a more sound option than trusting ourselves when we still know so very little. A few early studies have shown that changing the height or mature size of a native plant have minimal impact on supporting pollinators, but changing flower color and shape have more significant drawbacks. But even still, if we're going to buy a cultivar that is only somewhat different than the straight species, it's more often than not been cloned, and that's going to diminish the genetic diversity of the species -- especially if those plants breed with nearby wild (straight species) populations.

What's the Best Option?
Just as with human food systems, local may be best. In a perfect world we'd all have local and regional plant producers who grow their plants from responsibly collected wild seed of local remnant populations. This is called local ecotype or local genotype. These plants come from open pollinated seed and may be better able to withstand local weather and climate extremes while providing more resources for local wildlife (think about bloom times being in sync with pollinators who may use only the pollen from that species to feed their young, as is the case with ologolectic bees... and don't even get started about climate change altering bloom times so flowers appear weeks before the insect species that use them do). Of course, it's hard -- but not impossible -- to find nurseries selling local ecotype seeds and plants, but more and more are popping up in every state; I can think of several in Nebraska and Kansas, for example.

What About Climate Change?
That's the kicker. Plants and animals are trying to move uphill and north in order to keep pace with the ecosystems and weather they evolved with -- such is the case for bumble bees who evolved in a cooler climate. But they'll eventually run out of habitat. Do we use plant species from a state south of us? Do we assist in migration? Do we just try to use any plant material from any region that can survive in the new climatic uncertainty? The answers to the above will be varied depending on profession, beliefs, and practical experience.

Personally, I fall on this line of reasoning -- we need to give local plant and animal populations as much chance to evolve and adapt as possible for as long as we can (this might be only decades or centuries, even so it's not enough time for most species to evolve). This means using local native plants with immediate or nearby genetic origins, plants wildlife and insects can recognize. Further, it means gardening in a different way -- reducing high input lawn, not using fertilizer or chemical sprays, keeping as much water on site as possible, using more plants period, and using plants to reduce the amount of energy my home uses (think shade in summer and wind block in winter).

If you'd like to help discover the roles cultivars play for pollinators, consider becoming a citizen scientist. Project BudBurst has an ongoing nativars research project you can join in on.

And if you'd like to get going on your native plant garden -- learning about your local ecoregion and the native plants that thrive there -- consider the online class Starting Your Native Plant Garden.

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Modular Matrix Design

1/8/2019

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I posted an image to Instagram that got some folks asking good questions. It's a 15x15 foot garden plan, a draft for a section of a much larger garden area that's several thousand square feet. The curve ball is that this section will be repeated until the entire garden area is covered; this is modular planting. Not only does it simplify the drafting process, but it helps installers move along while providing visual repetition for onlookers -- that last point is important when a wilder garden might otherwise be brushed aside as weedy or messy.

As you can see from the plan (and my chicken scratch handwriting), there's a plant list to the left; let me type that out for you:

Aromatic Aster (Symphyotrichum oblongifolium) SO
Butterfly Weed (Asclepias tuberosa) AT
Bluestar (Amsonia hubrichtii) AH
Showy Goldenrod (Solidago speciosa) SS
Purple Poppy Mallow (Callirhoe involucrata) CI
Rough Blazingstar (Liatris aspera) LA
Pale Coneflower (Echinacea pallida) EP
Rattlesnake Master (Eryngium yuccifolium) EY
White Prairie Clover (Dalea candida) DC
Golden Alexanders (Zizia aurea) ZA
Prairie Coreopsis (Coreopsis palmata) CP
Blue Hyssop (Agastache foeniculum) AF
Black-Eyed Susan (Rudbeckia hirta) RH

On the bottom are seasonal bloom lists, and on the right some percentages I was trying to work out. The latter is key and site specific; since I anticipate weed competition on a dry slope, our goal is to cover the site quickly with plants and seed, then to manage for weeds the first year when their pressure will be the greatest. Some of the plants are aggressive spreaders, by runners or seeding, while others are behaved clumpers. I'm trying to find the right balance between clumpers and spreaders -- the former will give us more formal definition, appealing to a traditional expectation of what a garden looks like (think anchor or architectural plants), and the latter will help us replace mulch while providing seasonal color. How the roots compete with and support surrounding plants was also part of the thinking. I'm still playing around and have several iterations of the grid.

You could take this plan and make a 15x15 foot garden. Or you could treat it as a test plot for future expansion, repeating the plan in the years ahead around the initial plot. The key here is lots of plants. Under and around the forbs will be sown 1-2 short grasses (sideoats grama, prairie dropseed, etc), which in a year will fill in creating the matrix, base layer, or groundcover which will replace the need for wood mulch. The plant density -- on one foot centers or less -- will provide multiple environmental benefits: competing against weeds above and below the soil line, providing pollinator habitat year round, amending soil, slowing runoff, and providing seasonal color for us to enjoy. What do you think?

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How Horticulture Normalizes Human Supremacy as Wildness Vanishes

12/30/2018

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If climate change and mass extinction aren't the first subjects we're addressing in garden design and horticulture, then perhaps these fields are a waste of time.

For years and years the older version of this blog featured bold statements (see, I just provided one) via many thinking pieces, short essays that challenged our preconceptions of self and gardening. This post is going to revive that tradition as we plunge into the winter months where I know many of us are reading and reflecting.

I was recently inspired by an excerpt that the superb environmental philosopher and activist Derrick Jensen shared from his book Dreams. What I appreciate about Jensen is that he opens up doorways to the cross pollination that occurs between human and non human cultures -- and the reflections that ensue can be uncomfortable but also liberating. In the end it's the latter we're after, to be liberated from a culture of oppression, and to see how the oppression of other species is the oppression of ourselves and each other -- and for gardeners our managed spaces out the back door reflect a daily experience with nature that reflects our core values. The questions that arose while I read Jensen's excerpt where many:

In what ways does horticulture silence the voices of others? How does horticulture privilege one species over others? How is horticulture a form of colonialism? What tools or language or social constructs (capitalism, freedom, individual rights) do we use to help us feel better or accept the exploitation of other species, especially for purely ornamental reasons? How do we normalize human supremacy in horticulture so we hardly notice it, or when we do notice it, work even harder to defend it because our identity is wrapped up or based on that supremacy? I want to move through some of these ideas step by step based on excerpts from Jensen. Are you ready?

-------

1)
"Before you can exploit some others you must silence them, or rather deafen yourself to their suffering, and more fundamentally their subjective existence. As I wrote in “A Language Older Than Words,” “The staunch refusal to hear the voices of those we exploit is crucial to our domination of them. Religion, science, philosophy, politics, education, psychology, medicine, literature, linguistics, and art have all been pressed into service as tools to rationalize the silencing and degradation of women, children, other races, other cultures, the natural world and its members, our emotions, our consciences, our experiences, and our cultural and personal histories.” Another way to say this is that it would be extremely difficult to rape (or enslave, dispossess, exploit, and so on) someone if you were to in any meaningful way attend to the suffering you are causing, if you were to perceive this other as a subject worthy of consideration, and not as a resource. Yet another way to say this is that objectification is a necessary precondition and precursor to exploitation. "

For years I've argued that nature is not a resource. When I hear someone mentioning "natural resources" I hear a code phrase for exploitation of nature for the benefit of one species. Nature is not a resource for us to use how we see fit; nature is an independent organism made up of diverse cultures and individuals who have rights equal to our own. What rights does a river have to flow where it wants vs. being diverted for hydro power or to irrigate crops? What right does a tree have to grow where its seed has landed? What right does a bee have to nest where it has chosen, a home it perceives as safe for its young? What right does a flower have to not be plucked from its stem and rendered useless to the ecosystem? Jensen makes me reconsider how we use ornamental horticulture as a way, at times, to ignore the individuality of plants and their natural inclination to do what they want. Consider how we remove unwanted seedlings from a bed, or manipulate plants to create hybrids with ornamental features we desire without understanding the ramifications for larval or adult pollinators attempting to feed on that plant; for example, what happens to palatibility when we change leaf color, or the nutrient make up of nectar or pollen when we alter flower size or color?

2)
"This culture is based on exploitation, and the more invisible and normalized a society (or you as an individual) can make the objectification of others—through religion; philosophy; epistemology epistemology; folklore; social conventions; economics; law; government—the more difficult it becomes for members of this society (or you as an individual) to even attempt to perceive (and help members of this culture to perceive) the subjective existence of others, to see that these others actually exist."

While it is likely our intent in making gardens is to honor nature, to get closer to it, to understand it better, it's also true that the act of making a garden is an act of domination, exploitation, and objectification. We're taught, ideally, that women aren't to be objectified or seen as objects to be exploited based on their physical appearance, and yet we do the same to plants and even large natural vistas. I suppose the line between appreciation / celebration and objectification / exploitation is very fine or at least very murky. And that's understandable -- that' s part of a dominate species like ours working its self out, working out its role in the ecosystem, living our dichotomies which help us think critically through hard realities. Do plants exist apart from our placing them in our landscapes? Do plants exist separately from how we present them in combination with one another in an artistic representation above the ground plane? What about animals that inhabit and use our gardens?

One of the most contentious points of discussion I discover in conversations like this is the apparent incompatibility of a culture that values individual freedom and rights, and the reality of culture that jerks its knee hard when those practicing those rights don't conform to the idealized definition or examples of individual freedom and rights. For example, you are free to plant what you like in foundation beds around your home, but those beds must be narrow and mulched while the lawn constitutes a significant majority of the landscape. Another example not wholly unrelated is that we encourage one another to follow our passion and voices, but not to do so if those passions or voices ask us to think more critically about who we are, this is why we use labels like "radical activist" to dismiss those who challenge us. Racial and gender equality, environmentalism, and a myriad of social justice issues are all umbrellas under which fall voices that ask us to rethink who we are as we work toward a better and just culture -- a journey that will never be easy but is obviously necessary.

Here's the deeper question -- how do we transfer our idealized rights of equality to other species, thereby granting them the ability to pursue their own liberty and right to existence unencumbered by us? When we grant liberty to other species, we don't become less liberated or less free ourselves; when we list the sage grouse as threatened with extinction and create land management practices to preserve their species, we're not limiting human freedom. We're ensuring humans continue to have the ability to exist by maintaining an ecosystem that is healthy, diverse, and fully functional -- because our comfortable 21st century lives are based on the diversity and health of a thriving planet, not on thriving commerce. Freedom is predicated on a healthy, working, biologically diverse world. If we're cloning plants we're not adding to diversity. If we're using plants local wildlife can't recognize, we're not adding diversity -- we're erasing it by erasing entire cultures.

We deny the rights of others when we deny they have language, or a way to communicate or act separatly from our own conceptions of what language is or what actions are valuable or not. This act of denial is an act of superiority -- if we say others don't have will or language or subjective desire, we can use them how we want with no harm done.

3)
"It’s the same arrogance (and ignorance) that somehow finds human superiority in the fact that chimpanzees who have been kidnapped and held in prison by scientists are able to learn only a certain number of American Sign Language symbols; these scientists insist that this means that humans are the only creatures who have language, and “that the chimpanzees are not using language, but rather simply using these signs as a means to an outcome, rather than to express meanings or ideas.” None of these scientists ever asks the question: if a bunch of chimpanzees kidnapped you, isolated you from your entire community, and started performing experiments on you, how long would it take you to learn chimpanzee? And more to the point, none of these genius scientists ever asks the question, “Between the kidnapped chimpanzees and the scientists, which of these creatures is bilingual?”

It’s actually much worse than this. Not only must we, when trying to comprehend the preferences of others, deal with the difficulty of speaking entirely different languages, and not only must we deal with the fact that the intelligence of these others are entirely foreign to us, but we also must deal with, as I’ve been discussing in this book, a several-thousand-year history of systematically deafening ourselves to the voices of these others in order to facilitate our exploitation or murder of them. So given all that, it’s extraordinary that I or any of us can routinely perceive the preferences of others at all. It’s so much easier (and more flattering) to just pretend these others are not subjects, and in fact to build up entire religions, economies, philosophies, epistemologies, and so on that buttress this conceit. Where do you draw the line, and why do you draw it?"

In the last chapter of my book A New Garden Ethic I briefly touch on the way plants communicate with one another, and how they interact with the environment and other species around them. From volatile organic compounds released in the air, to electrochemical signals in their roots, to ultraviolet markings on their petals and positively or negatively charged flowers, plants communicate. Whether that's enough language to grant them inalienable rights is something for philosophers to debate and scientists to discover, but what happens if we just say a plant or an animal has equal rights to us? What about a mountain or a prairie or a lake? I'll tell you what happens -- our entire culture makes a radical shift from seeing humans at the top of the evolutionary ladder and instead part of the web. When you are part of something larger than yourself you can either feel small and insignificant and powerless, or you can feel worthy and integral and connected in ways that are comforting and consoling (and empowering).

We have a horticulture system that tends to celebrate plants like they are designer clothes or shiny new cars -- models wearing our desire that's only skin deep. We manipulate life, we reproduce life as part of an industrial capitalist machine that sees nature as a commodity and a product. Does that mean the practice of gardening or finding plants pretty is bad? Of course not. But doesn't it depend on where that impulse comes from and how it's enacted? If our first priority it to create gardens people swoon over, and then champion we saw a generalist bees species or common bird using the plants, we've missed the point entirely and are simply trying to adjust our optics without making powerful and fundamental changes (aka greenwashing). If we're making garden choices based on how plants work together to form an ecosystem, considering how plants work with one another and how they support specific fauna, then we're elevating garden making by fostering greater understanding and appreciation for nature. I don't think you can plop the newest coneflower hybrid into a landscape and say you're helping nature because it's a native plant. Unfortunately, the kind of rewiring and rethinking I'm calling for is hard work -- it taxes us to not only read more and be more considerate in our actions, but it means we can't simply always follow our impulses at the nursery or in a shiny new catalog arriving in January.

Horticulture can and should lead us into an environmental awakening that reconnects us to the web of life and that ends our tendency to exploit nature for our own aesthetic desires only. Gardening is not just about pleasuring or honoring ourselves -- it is about addressing human supremacy by redressing wrongs we've forced upon the natural world (lawn, impermeable surfaces, CO2, deforestation, mining, climate change, etc). I'm not saying gardens are penance, and I'm not even saying they are necessarily places for social activism -- they can be both of those for sure. I'm saying gardens are not paintings, they are not sculptures, they are not composed for just one species. When the practice of horticulture is navigated with critical thinking -- what is being impacted when I do x, who am I effecting when I do y -- then we become empowered liberators of all life and ultimately ourselves. That's when horticulture becomes the instrument of hope meeting action that we all wish it to be.

Is that too much to carry or consider? I don't think so -- not in a world of climate change and mass extinction. Not in a world we have now remade as one giant garden we must tend to for the survival of all us together.

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Gifts for Serious Gardeners

11/25/2018

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Tired of cheap trowels that don't work in clay soil? Looking for a book to revolutionize how you landscape? I've got some ideas for ya.

TOOLS

Soil Knife
Slices and dices through clay, roots, plastic, burlap, and twine while never rusting or pitting. You won't need another gardening tool, even if you're in the Swiss Army. I prefer this A.M. Leonard version but you may like others, just make sure you get one with a brightly-colored handle.

Hose Nozzle
Let's quit sprayers with handles that break off when cut on a branch or stem, or get brittle in sun and cold; I've got a bucket of them in my garage I can't stand to throw away. Fireman style nozzles are where it's at, and this Bon-Aire offering has remained functioning and durable as I sling it on the ground with reckless abandon.

Dutch Hoe or Push Pull Hoe
Choosing this type of tool is more about how you work and what you prefer, just forget the traditional hoe; there are many brands and styles so you might have to experiment. Use this tool in a gliding motion to easily pull up weeds from beds with looser soil (think veg, loam, or sand) without bending over or stabbing the ground.

BOOKS

Climate-Wise Landscaping: Practical Actions for a Sustainable Future -- Sue Reed and Ginny Stibolt
Learn how to shrink your carbon footprint, clean air and water, provide habitat, cool your home, and much more. Lots of inspiring quotes throughout by noted authorities in garden design and environmental thinking to punctuate this easy how-to guide.

Planting in a Post-Wild World: Designing Plant Communities for Resilient Landscapes --Thomas Rainer and Claudia West
Geared toward intermediate and advanced gardeners, this book will show you why and how to think of plants not as objets d'art but as parts of an ecological community that evolves over time.

Principles of Ecological Landscape Design -- Travis Beck
A slew of ecological principles that can be translated to garden design from small to large scale. It's a more technical book but written with grace and accessibility, as are all of the above books listed here.

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Nature vs. Suburbia -- Reviving Wildness At Home

11/2/2018

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I'm baring it all today and showing you what HQ looks like from a bird's eye advantage -- or a bee's eye advantage. This is obviously where a lot of my experimentation takes place; when I look at these drone images I see not only a personal landscape I didn't think looked like this, but also the many changes I'd like to make. I also see how crazy I might appear to neighbors. In any case, I believe employing drone footage on future garden designs may be a useful tool for myself and clients as we imagine a new landscape paradigm.

I'd say this is a pretty typical newer subdivision. I'm assuming most folks sink all of their money into the home and landscaping isn't part of the budget, or any sort of landscaping is seen as high maintenance. Of course we all know the benefit nature has to learning as well as mental and physical health, not to mention increases in property value (I once read a study that showed for each caliper inch of a front yard tree one could add $1,000 to the price of a home -- but sure, that sounds crazy, even though street trees alone increase neighborhood desirability). Have I mentioned how woody plants can decrease home energy use?

My back property line is city limits and behind are small acreage lots. In the top right corner you can see a bit of a pond as well as a thin woodland that stretches along a good chunk of our development. This is a significant wildlife corridor and bird flyway. I'm careful not to use any fertilizers so nothing gets washed into the pond or street, and the majority of rainfall stays on our lot due to plant density and placement. I've tried to pull that wilder area out into the neighborhood in my small way, extending habitat just a bit.

I manage the front yard more intently than the back, thinning aggressive species, cutting back tall ones in early summer, adding new flowers in summer and fall where gaps have developed, et cetera. While the space will certainly look wild to the lawn-only crowd (and at least 50% of neighbors have lawn up to the foundation wall), I'm still trying to create drifts and massing, as well as tiers or levels that we expect in traditional garden design. What do you think? Do suburban gardens like this matter? Can we evolve attitudes and help nature recover or adapt to a world of extinction and climate change? I hope the many people walking their dogs and babies will excitedly see the rabbit hunkering in the little bluestem, the goldfinch plucking seeds from flower heads, butterflies circling and settling on aster, and clouds of pollinators above goldenrod. But I also know many will see something that needs to be mowed, a place that harbors pests, and a homeowner who doesn't care. You already know of this year's weed inspection. Below are some more images I hope you enjoy. Prairie up!

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Autumn in Our Gardens

10/23/2018

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We're wrapping up fall installs and taking a moment to appreciate what's going on at headquarters, a place that in many ways is a proving and testing ground for client spaces. So, let's take a quick trip through the fall colors and snow (the third earliest snow of over one inch on record).

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Thoughts On Gardens As Social Justice for All Species

9/7/2018

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Recently, someone told me I should stop being so "political" about gardens because gardens aren't "political." I think the term was used as a way to shield themselves from some uncomfortable ideas about our role on a planet we're eroding quickly, and how responsibility for it might begin in a very personal space -- our home gardens. So I came up with the following thoughts:

Gardens aren't political statements? Sure they are. If gardens are art -- and that's how we talk about them 99% of the time (sigh) -- art has a long, lively tradition of being "political." And make no mistake, by "political" we mean thinking critically about our culture in whatever way we can: moral, ethical, socioeconomic, disrupting the status quo of systems of power, et cetera. Being "political" makes us uncomfortable, since it calls us out and asks us to look at ourselves and the world in a radical new way that stretches and challenges us. Gardens are revolutions in a time of mass extinction -- they are no longer simply pretty little paintings to stroll through. Being made uncomfortable, angry, and even despondent is the first step to waking from our human supremacism and speaking the language of life again.

And then I connected the above, in my head anyway, to something else I wrote a few days earlier:

Gardens full of native plants are acts of social justice, empathy, and then compassion for other species we've put on the brink, as well as fostering the physical and psychological health of our own species. Gardens are a resistance to a culture of narcissism and hubris. Gardens are more than art, more than beauty for us. Urban gardens, especially, are a rewilding (not a restoring) of the broken bonds between us all, an open conversation held again where we begin to remember the languages we've lost, ignored, or betrayed. When we speak leafcutter bee or bobwhite quail, we remember the chorus and our own language is enriched. Without the voices of the animate world in our daily lives, our existence is a pale, sick shadow.

Finally for kicks, here's a Tweet I tossed out yesterday:

If climate change and mass extinction aren't the first subjects we're addressing in garden design and horticulture, then these fields are a waste of time and perhaps shouldn't exist.

So there you go -- pretend this is a page from my book, or at least the second edition. What do you think? If you'd rather simply look at an image that may illustrate the above, then how about...

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Un-Messify Your Garden

8/7/2018

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Do you get notices from county weed control or dirty looks from neighbors -- or your spouse? Why does your garden look messy, wild, haphazard, or even incoherent? Do you want to give up and revert to hosta, daylily or -- gasp -- lawn? I think the number one reason a landscape may appear messy is plant selection and placement that's well-intentioned but not well researched. Let me break it down for you like Vanilla Ice:

1) Mature Size
Yeah, we all look at the plant tag and hopefully consult several reputable print and online sources, but mistakes happen either through impatience (I want a big plant now so I'll buy the bigger pot) or bad evidence (plant tags might list the mature size at 10 years old and in a different region with different site conditions -- but what does it look like at 20 years in your city in your yard?).

And then what if you choose an adaptable plant, one that can take dry / wet / shady / sunny? It will absolutely grow differently in one set of circumstances even if it does fine in another... several sedge species come to mind that are bigger and bushier in wet sun and loamy soil, yet thinner and short in dry conditions. Trees certainly do this, too. And that all makes sense, right? Flowering plants tend to bloom more with additional sun; even if it's a shade plant more ambient light or a brief period of direct light will alter that plant's growth characteristics.

There are lots of native plant species with large ranges across the U.S. -- little bluestem and black-eyed susan for example. But Nebraska is different than Pennsylvania or Oregon or Georgia, which is why there are genetic differences in local plant populations that help them evolve to do well in that place. Keep in mind, that place isn't just geographical, but site specific from soil to drainage to wind to rainfall to herbivore use.

2) Reproduction
How many times do you really, REALLY think about how or if that new plant is going to spread or not? Will it self sow like crazy or lightly? If it self sows do seedlings struggle in a thick bed with lush plant layers? How fast do seeds germinate? Or does it spread by runners, and if so, will it spread a lot slower in clay (dry or moist) than in loam or silt? Will it spread just in its immediate area or will you have 100 new children in a year all over the neighborhood?

Maybe you need to use less of one plant and more of another, depending on how they spread. Less black-eyed susan and little bluestem, more butterfly weed and rattlesnake master. If this feels complicated that's because IT IS, but the first step to uncomplicated plant decisions is to learn what to look for, and we're doing that right now.

3) Community
So you've got an aggressive plant that sends out runners -- if it's planted among other species that also run, will they all keep each other in check? Maybe. But unless you have a large area to plant I wouldn't risk the experiment. It's better, especially in smaller urban gardens, to choose plants that are more behaved clumpers or that lightly self sow nearby, as seedlings are easy to remove. Having a collection of behaved clumpers helps you maintain a "clean" or "designed" appearance for longer, as things aren't getting too out of control that you can't stay on top of it.

I mentioned two more behaved native plants above, but others can work too: prairie alumroot, pale purple coneflower, blazingstars (if in a thick bed), aromatic aster, and definitely not giant blue hyssop / anise hyssop. Nope.

Once you decide on using all or mostly clumping plants, the next step is to consider their mature size in your site conditions. Choosing a majority of plants with similar heights at least can give your garden the appearance of tidiness many look for when walking by and judging you (sarcasm -- sort of). It's ok if they spread out a little and fill in, heck, you want that so the ground is covered which helps in fighting weeds and reducing the need for wood mulch. Maybe you include a few species that shoot up twice the height of the majority around them just to add some architectural flare. If you are planting in clay soil it's more likely your native prairie plants are adapted to do well in such "harsh" soil, whereas if you put them in rich loam tilled to death they might grow gangly with a short lifespan. Nothing helps keep an aggressive plant in check like clay soil and a lack of rain.

4) Edit / Kill Your Darlings
Some call this "management" or "maintenance," some "murder." In this case murder is totally cool. Rip out seedlings if there are too many. Take out a few specimens if they are overwhelming the space. Do you really need 15 of that one flower or will 5 look more put together and still provide a beacon for pollinators? The balance between aesthetic design for humans and ecological design for the site and wildlife can be tricky and precarious, but we still have to strive for it in highly populated urban areas where human and animal cultures mingle. Just remember that no matter how much editing you perform, you're still doing well by nature when you have designed and managed wildness using native plants.

5) Copy Nature
Finally, visit a local "wild" area near you that approximates your landscape and site conditions, whether that's a prairie, woodland, desert, or lakeside. Let your eye wander over the space until it settles and focuses in on a particular vista or area. Is the space "weedy" and "messy?" What provides coherence that makes you find it pleasing, comforting, exciting, welcoming? What plants are used, how are they grouped, what plant communities are they a part of it, how are they layered among each other? This will begin to give you some clue about how plants work together, what wildlife will recognize and use, and how to tap into nature's design while perhaps bumping it up a notch in a man-made ornamental landscape (for example, that meadow might have just a few butterfly weed among sideoats grama, but maybe in your landscape you could double the flower number).

Next time you plan a new garden bed make sure to do your diligent research -- it will save you time, headache, and some maintenance issues. And hey, hiring an expert to help you doesn't hurt either, and might even save you money and stress over time.

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Why Plants Are Better at Mulching Than Mulch

7/18/2018

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If you enjoy spreading wood mulch every year in your landscape, then by all means ignore this post. If you enjoy pushing heavy wheel barrows and carefully navigating plant stems and branches without breaking anything, move along. However, if you're into less maintenance, more wildlife, and more environmental sustainability, then follow me into cultivated wildness.

Wood mulch has nothing on plants!

1) Wood mulch is touted as a way to improve soil and conserve soil moisture. It's true, it does these things, and can be valuable around newly-planted trees as well as an initial, one-time application at planting time for perennials. Soil organisms digest and incorporate wood mulch, building the upper layer over time, and mulch is great for saying "keep away" around tree trunks.

But thick layers of plant communities shade the soil with their leaves, which cool it down and robs sunlight from weed seedlings. Plant roots also rob water and nutrients from weed seedlings while amending soil naturally over time. Take prairie grasses -- 1/3 of their roots die each year, adding organic material. Many plants have evolved to punch down into clay and open up air and water passageways, while plants with fibrous roots can build up sandy and rocky soil so it holds more water over time.

2) When you cut down the garden in spring with a hedge trimmer, string trimmer, or mower, all that dead plant material becomes a mulch layer providing a lot of the nutrients that plants need -- that's why trees drop their leaves over their root zone, after all. Give the plants back to themselves!

3) Leaving plants up for winter helps them gather leaves around their bases, insulating them from winter cold, adding organic matter over winter and spring, and provides shelter for overwintering insects. The more plant layers and plant diversity you have, the more life you'll have thriving in your landscape.

Wood mulch is beneficial, yes, but doesn't hold a candle to more plants. If you can't afford a lot of plants, try to choose those that spread by seed or runners (wild geranium, purple poppy mallow, zigzag goldenod, solomon's seal, blue mistflower, etc). Consider planting just the ornamental flower layers with forbs and shrubs, then sow in a grass or sedge groundcover; we love to suggest sideoats grama for this purpose if you're working toward a stylized meadow look. Additionally, there are local and regional nurseries and growers that offer smaller plants for a smaller price, so you can buy more at once time. Some day, we hope the industry sells trays of plugs at nurseries to consumers planning larger beds.

What should you shoot for then when it comes to the number of plants in an area? Let's keep it simple. Say you have 10 square feet -- you could plant this with one shrub or three gallon-sized perennials. Or, you could plant ten or more smaller perennials. Some of these smaller perennials may be ground covers, some mid height plants, and one or two taller architectural plants. The point is to both layer vertically and cover the ground horizontally. Remember that any bare patches of soil might be good habitat for the 75% of our 4,000 native bee species that nest in the ground.

Finally, look at the numbers and tally up how much money you spend on wood mulch each year. Is it around $200? In three years that's $600 -- money you could have put into more plants, which means more habitat and less work for you as that habitat grows.

4 Comments

How to Pass Weed Inspection -- A Real Life Story & Guide

6/11/2018

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This was my second time. The first was about four years ago when our front lawn was taller than six inches and had a few dozen dandelion seed heads in it. Three months after that notice I tore out most of the yard and put in large prairie garden beds. No one has reported the space since, oddly enough.

On May 23 of this year we received another warning -- this time a bright orange sign staked into the middle of the front yard -- notifying us we had to cut down the back meadow (just weeks before a local garden tour). This designed space began in 2015 because I refused to water a lawn we never used, that burned hard every July and August, and was becoming patchy; it's also become a wonderful proving ground for my business. You can read more about the 2,000 foot meadow planting here.

After sending a plant list to the local weed superintendent, he was gracious enough to meet at my home to discuss the issue. Here's how it went, what we both learned, and what you need to take away as we move to more sustainable wildlife landscapes in urban areas.

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At first we were both in our ideological corners. I was being quoted ordinance about vermin, snakes, and fire, while I was quoting stats about snakes eating mice, native bee decline, and the low burn temperature and quick burn time of prairie grasses. I planned to approach our talk as calmly as possible, but after pacing for a solid hour beforehand I'd worked myself up. So, the first lesson is don't pace for an hour beforehand.

But after awhile we settled into a very productive and friendly half-hour conversation I was thankful for. We taught each other and, I believe, pledged to work together here and around town. One of the largest sticking points centered on cutting down plant material in fall so as not to be a fire hazard. Since every garden I design is planned to be aesthetically pleasing in winter -- not to mention a haven for birds and overwintering insects -- I kept coming back to how we needed to find a solution to have the garden standing. Heck, in spring I leave 12-18" of stubble for nesting bees. Eventually, I heard "hey, if no one complains in winter I won't come knocking on your door."

As we walked around I was able to provide the Latin and common names to over 90% of the plants (I should have had coffee because I can hit 100% just fine). And as I discussed plant communities, how the space was designed, what the intention was and how it would continue to develop, the superintendent noted that it was clear I knew what I was doing. He even said both my front and back gardens could serve as an example of what and how to design effectively and avoid the hassle or stress such meetings produce. The other inspector that came along mentioned that as we face climate change, these types of lawn alternatives will have to become more prevalent -- I'm sure not only for aesthetics but as a practical purpose to help combat the invasive exotics their department diligently patrol. Open ground is an invitation to real weeds.

It was a wonderful, energizing conversation and I felt like there was room for future collaboration, especially as we noted some struggling public spaces around town that had recently been planted but were filling up with weeds. The super also asked me what I tell people at my talks about designing a space all species can be comfortable with, and I'll tell you what we agreed on and what I say everywhere I can:

1) It can help to hire a professional to get you started. That can be a landscape plan, a consult, or a coach that keeps coming back to help you progress. You can install a design yourself or have the professional do it for you then modify on your own, but having good bones is critical -- especially in front yards (my backyard has a wood fence and faces acres of dense red cedars, but I still got in trouble).

2) Plant in masses and groups and tiers. These are traditional design strategies that we're all accustomed to, and so they help folks see that a landscape has intention. Grouping plants also serves as a larger beacon for pollinators flying overhead, so design with 3, 5, or 7 of a kind. Have tall plants in the back or middle with shorter plants toward the front. Don't just toss out a bag of seed or let the lawn go to see what comes up. Convert the space quickly or do it one piece at a time over years.

3) Always have something in bloom. People like flowers and flowers show intention -- plus bloom succession is critical for pollinators.

4) Have a mowed edge around beds that abut sidewalks, driveways, or property lines. In lieu or combination with that strategy is placing low plants along the edges. For example, I have nothing that gets taller than 2 feet within 4-6 feet of the sidewalk. Hey, people don't like to be touched by plants they don't know.

5) Have a sign that says what you are doing and why. The super mentioned signs significantly mitigate their workload. Something as simple as "This is a low-maintenance, native plant pollinator garden."

6) Show human use by including a sitting area, bench, or mowed pathway through the space. Using sculpture or fountains also helps create visual foils so it's easier to interpret the space and focus on what might at first seem chaotic wildness (even if plants are grouped and tiered -- anything that isn't lawn up to the foundation walls is suspect).

7) Native plant pollinator gardens don't have to look like meadows. They can be more simple and modern looking, or formal and angular. There is a middle way, too, a place where we can all meet in the landscape.

8) Talk to your neighbors. Tell them what you're doing. Invite them over for drinks. Knock on doors and calmly / warmly ask if they'd like to talk about it or see it. Don't accuse anyone of anything or act like you're better then them. Educate. Teach. Welcome. Even if you're a passionate activist who believes the sixth mass extinction is here and our over-manicured lawns are creating an ethical crisis that will consume us all (ahem), hold back and just listen. We can still have constructive and friendly conversations regardless of what is modeled for us online and in the news.

So there you go. Rest assured, there are ways to design a space that not only passes weed control inspection, but that can model where we need to go. Lush, layered gardens using interlinked plant communities lower air temps, clean that air, sequester carbon, reduce runoff into storm drains, provide valuable habitat, combat invasive weeds, and increase home values while making us psychologically and physically healthier.

If you're interested in the above ideas, A New Garden Ethic is a superb place to start. Then, explore the suggested book list in the back for even more guidance and encouragement on design, native plant benefits, ecosystem gardening with science, and environmental philosophy.

Additionally, in my research leading up to the on-site meeting, I gathered some helpful links debunking common weed ordinance concerns (pests, fire, etc), as well as legal precedents from around the country if your case goes to court.

As Natural Landscaping Takes Root We Must Weed Out Bad Laws (25 years old, so there is surely more legal precedent to find)

Weed Laws and Ordinances (lots of links)

Sourcebook of Natural Landscaping for Local Officials (incredible treasure trove of why, how, and where)

It's amazing to me that we've been struggling with the same issue for decades now -- even when "natural" garden design was once the default landscape mode long before lawns came into vogue just after mid century. But what we see is what we accept, and what we see is what we assume is good. The prevalence of highly-managed lawn, and wood mulch as a design aesthetic in its own right, is harming a push toward sustainable design -- we need more public examples of what we can do, even if those examples require more intensive management to withstand scrutiny.

One final note -- the super said it's important for folks to know landscapes like mine are also high maintenance like lawn. I'm not sure. I mow the back meadow in spring and am done. The front 400 foot garden and the older 1,500 foot main garden I simply use a hedge trimmer on and leave the detritus as natural mulch (another ordinance no no, even if it's what more and more large public gardens do). Obviously, if you try to take on more than you can chew from the outset then you can get overwhelmed, give up, and let the weeds come in. But for me, I honestly spend one day a year in spring doing the majority of my work. With tight-knit plant communities (layers of plants on 12 inch centers or closer), my big job is cataloging wildlife and observing plant growth -- with the occasional yanking of a tree seedling, musk thistle, or bush honeysuckle.

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Learn more!
1) 200 free articles on sustainable design for wildlife plus native plant profiles.
2) Online classes from gardening for climate change to how to start a native plant garden.

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Pollinator-Friendly Alternatives to Hosta & Daylily

5/27/2018

13 Comments

It's cool if you love your hosta and daylily collection, however their value to pollinators is minimal even if they are easier than bindweed to grow (oh, bindweed, you scoundrel). Neither plant is a host for butterfly or moth larvae, so we won't be making new pollinators, and the nectar is primarily accessible and suitable to long-tongued generalist adult insects only (think bumble bees).

What could we use instead that would help more pollinators and still be simple to grow? This is assuming you don't care so much how the plant looks in comparison to a hosta or daylily (no apples to apples here), but simply how it acts and how easy it is to cultivate. So for hosta we're looking at plants that thrive in dry shade, and for daylily plants that enjoy medium to dry sun. Plus, if you use all 5 suggested plants for each replacement, you're getting a bigger bloom succession and helping far more adult pollinators.

You'll find all of the below perennials featured more in depth in our plant profiles.

HOSTA

Calico Aster (Syhphyotrichum lateriflorum)
-- dry to dappled shade
-- about 2' wide and 2-3' tall (more moisture means bigger plant)
-- early fall white flower with yellow center that turns pink (turning pink tells pollinators the flower is empty)
-- all asters are highly prized pollen and nectar sources

Zigzag Goldenod (Solidago flexicaulis)
-- dry to moist, shade to part sun (more sun, more moisture)
-- 2-3' and tall depending on moisture, slowly spreads
-- early to mid fall, richly-scented blooms
-- incredible adult pollinator diversity

Solomon's Seal (Polygonatum biflorum)
-- dry to medium soils in shade
-- 2' tall and spreading slowly
-- mid to late spring blooms prized by queen bumble bees
-- smooth foliage like hosta

solomon's seal

Early Meadow rue (Thalictrum dioicum(
-- dry to medium soils in shade
-- 2' tall by 12-18" wide
-- wiry stems with airy blooms mid spring with delicate leaves the size of dimes
-- plant in masses for best effect

Wild Geranium (Geranium maculatum)
-- dry to medium soil in shade to sun (more sun, more moisture)
-- 1' tall and slowly spreading for a superb groundcover among taller plants
-- late spring blooms with some rebloom in summer
-- pollen accessible to variety of insects

DAYLILY

Wild Blue Indigo (Baptisia australis & B. minor)
-- dry to medium soils in full sun
-- 3-4' tall and 2-3' wide and 2x2' for minor (there are even more species than the above!)
-- mid spring bloom with large jet black seed pods in winter
-- host plant for sulphurs and prized by queen butterflies

Pale Purple Coneflower (Echinacea pallida)
-- dry to medium soils in full to part sun
-- 2-3' tall and 1' wide
-- early to mid summer bloom
-- a coneflower that has pollen, vs. many of the hybrids out now

Rattlesnake Master (Eryngium yuccifolium)
-- slightly moist to slightly dry soil in full to part sun
-- 3-4' tall and 1-2' wide
-- mid summer bloom
-- highly attractive to adult insects

rattlesnake master

Smooth Aster (Syphyotrichum laeve)
-- medium to dry soils in full to part sun
-- 2-3' tall and 1-2' wide
-- early to mid fall bloom
-- smooth foliage and gobs of insects

Aromatic Aster (Symphyotrichum oblongifolium)
-- medium to dry soils in full sun
--1-2' tall and 2-3' wide (shrub-like appearance)
-- mid to late fall bloom, tons of flowers
-- one of the last food sources for migrating and late-season insects

13 Comments

Why We're Not Fans of Amending Soil

5/21/2018

1 Comment

There are many garden practices that are so widely believed and preached that they become de facto blanket statements for what makes a successful garden no matter where you live. From fertilizing to mulching to soil amendments, it may be that you're doing too much when you don't have to do hardly anything.

Let's take amending soil. There's this idea that there is only one good garden bed -- one composed of loose, crumbly, earthy-smelling black gold. When we're talking ornamental gardening nothing could be further from the truth (however, vegetable gardens do usually require a "perfect" bed). Even if you stop to think critically about where you find this information, you should start hearing some alarm bells. It's companies, businesses, and products that need you to buy more. Hardware stores get truckloads of bagged topsoil and amendments each spring and stack them up in the parking lots enticing you. Landscapers increase their bottom line by offering additional improvements in the form of soil conditioners, top soil, wood mulch, fertilizer, etc. But most often you don't need all of that. Here's why amending soil isn't as big of a deal as you think.

1) The perfect or ideal soil is the soil you have right now. Unless your land is poisoned or there are drainage issues undermining a structure, amending soil is often an expensive and back-breaking practice for homeowners (soil tests can tell you a lot, by the way). There are a plethora of plants from around the world -- and of course lots of native plants, too -- that will thrive in sandy, gravelly, rocky, loamy, mushy, or clay soils. In fact, by plethora we mean hundreds available to you right now in the nursery trade. A garden designer or landscaper worth their salt will know these plants and be able to match them to you site. And amended garden areas aren't usually that big or deep; what does a plant think when it hits the native soil beyond its perfect little princess zone? "Uh, no thanks, I'll just stay right here." In the case of perennials this may inhibit their drought tolerance, and for large trees it will increase their likelihood of falling over in a windstorm because they didn't root out far enough to anchor in.

A Piet Oudolf garden in West Cork

2) Matching plants to site often means less maintenance and less plant death over time. The goal in any thriving garden is to have healthy plants. Traditional landscaping says that to do this you need to enrich the soil, add fertilizer, and apply lots of wood mulch. Now, there's nothing bad about a one-time topdressing of compost (an inch) and a layer of mulch (usually an inch or two is plenty, especially for clay soils). These additions will naturally improve soil over time from the top down. But plant roots do that, too. Take native prairie grasses, which lose up to 1/3 of their roots every year. Those dead roots amend soil naturally as they break down and soil organisms digest them, while opening pathways of air and water. The plants that do the best are the plants that evolved to thrive in your site conditions -- from sun to drainage to soil.

3) Matching plants to one another. There's more to know about plants than the soil, light, and moisture levels they evolved in. There's also the art of designing plant communities. A plant community is one with balance where plants naturally support and even compete with another over time to create a healthy and ecologically-sound landscape. Simply put, when we match plants to one another we increase the plant's ability to be healthy. For example, planting taprooted plants among fibrous-rooted plants means no one is competing for resources at the same level. Or using behaved clumpers together (play nice, kids, and everyone will get a turn) or aggressive thugs together (butting heads means everyone keeps the other in check and no one wins out but they all work together for a common good -- or how government is supposed to work).

Garden design by Adam Woodruff

4) Planting tightly means more soil building and less work long term. Our gardens are designed by planting material 12" on center. Generally, we'll use a base layer -- a grass or sedge -- that forms a living green mulch so you never have to use wood mulch again. Then we build the garden layers. First, we'll add some spreading groundcovers like wild geranium or purple poppy mallow to fill in the gaps. Second, we'll build up to the intermediate layer by using plants that get 2-4' tall. Often, this second layer will compose plants of various foliage types, and we'll use some plants with thicker foliage to help shade the soil, which contributes to out competing weeds and conserving moisture (plus it looks good to us and wildlife using the space). Finally, plants are left standing all winter; they'll gather wind-blown leaves which will fertilize and build soil naturally from the top down like compost. And in spring, when the plants are cut down, they are placed back on the garden bed to provide the nutrients plants need while acting as a temporary mulch.

All of these practices -- from matching plants to the soil and site and to one another, layering of the root zone and top growth, and leaving spring cuttings in place -- is all the the soil amending you'll ever need to do. And the only thing it will cost you is the price of plants, which you were in for anyway, and rethinking traditional high-maintenance practices. Do you see prairies and woodlands bring soil amendments, fertilizers, and wood mulch in bags and dump trucks? What can we learn from nature about creating resilient and sustainable landscapes that look pretty to us and wildlife?

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We're Surrounded -- High Maintenance Landscaping

5/8/2018

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Drive around town and 99% of what you'll see are landscape beds made to need more investment and with little wildlife value. The spaces require herbicides, annual wood mulch applications, and provide little in the way of habitat. Not to mention the environmental impacts of herbicide and mulch production, transportation, and the minimal water infiltration and air-cleaning these sparsely-planted beds achieve.

When folks drive around town and see these "professional" landscapes, they'll probably tend to think this is how their home landscape should look, too -- after all, it's how the big guys do it.

Here are two landscape bed examples that could use some re-imagining as a way to inspire their communities to garden smarter:

You'll notice the first example does at least have a few plants, but even this number is about 10% of what it should be. You can see how rainwater, in part from the sidewalk, has washed mulch away -- meaning it will need to be reapplied probably several times a year. The planting certainly won't help shade out or compete against weeds, and hopefully you agree it just isn't pretty even if everything was leafed out. Where are the layers, the different textures and colors? These plants were doomed the minute they were put in the ground -- spread too far apart in a bed that will fight climatic conditions and lose. What is an alternative? A mix of native sedge and then forbs that stay relatively tidy, like prairie alumroot, pale purple coneflower, lead plant, butterflyweed, dotted blazing star, nodding onion, and aromatic aster -- a solid layer of plants placed on 12" centers.

This second bed perhaps has trickier issues, being an island in a strip mall parking lot. You can see the landscape company simply put down as much mulch as the bed could hold in hopes of suppressing weeds -- which won't work at all because plenty of weeds germinate and do fine in thick mulch like this. But the larger issues this sort of bed faces is people walking through it and doing damage. What could we do? Perhaps a ground layer of sedge and wild geranium to add spring and summer blooms. At least the ground will be covered and you won't need annual mulch and as many weed control treatments. You wouldn't want to put shrubs in here that would block sight lines or scratch cars. Perhaps a stone pathway through the middle from left to right would also alleviate trampling of new plants.

If businesses added up how much they spend on landscape maintenance over the course of 1-2 years, I wonder how it would compare to a one-time planting with the right plants in the right configuration. Do you have a parking area, business frontage, or neighborhood entrance you'd want grown more sustainably and beautifully? We'd like to see it, and certainly to help design a more wildlife and people-friendly space. Keep in mind there are studies out there that show business beautification in the form of plants can increases consumer spending -- although I hope our goal would also be to provide for pollinators and clean air and water. Plants do so much for us!

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Benjamin Vogt's thoughts on prairie gardening in Nebraska. With a healthy dose of landscape ethics, ecophilosophy, climate change, and social justice.

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In a time of climate change and mass extinction how & for whom we garden matters more than ever.

"This book is about so much more than gardening."

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Original Archives1,257 posts fromJuly 2007 - May 2017

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Original Archives

1,257 posts from

July 2007 - May 2017