Help is at hand to plan your native landscape – San Diego Union-Tribune

By Margaret Roach

For The New York Times

Turning your front yard into something other than a manicured greensward sounds like a bold new idea, even today. Imagine how it must have felt in 1992 to see former Wisconsin lawns that had already undergone many years of transition to prairie-like spaces with no turfgrass in sight.

Radically positive.

I collaborated on a book called “Natural Habitat Garden” with Ken Druse, a writer and photographer, traveling the country to see the vanguard of the native plant movement. We spent a day north of Milwaukee with Lorrie Otto, an early leader in what became a national push to ban the pesticide DDT and a force in the formative years of savagea membership organization promoting native landscapes. Otto sent us to visit other members’ home landscapes, which were wild like hers—gardens unlike any we had ever seen.

Education is at the heart of the nonprofit’s mission, and Otto, who died in 2010, developed some of its oldest programs. The group turned 45 in July; It also just hit 11,000 members, up from less than 4,000 before the pandemic.

Those members belong to 125 chapters in 36 states (and both numbers have doubled since 2020). Members participate in garden tours and workshops, seed collection and exchanges, and plant sales. They also take on community projects, restoring blighted landscapes, including vacant lots, street medians, schoolyards and business park lawns.

San Diego also has a chapter, with information available online at sandiego.wildones.org.

All of this fits into the group’s mission: to “advance native landscapes through education, advocacy and collaborative action.”

But one of the most popular programs involves maintaining a library of free downloadable garden patterns for certain regions – also available to non-members. The models debuted in 2021 at a time of rapid growth, said Sally Wencel, a member of the Tennessee Valley chapter and past president of the national organization, who was instrumental in developing the program. It was intended to answer the question that members frequently asked themselves: What is the best way to use native plants?

“We’re preaching to the choir,” Wencel said, referring to the group’s Native-focused membership base. “And they said, ‘Yeah, that’s great, but help us how to use them in the landscape.’ Drawings do that.”

Validation: In January, 84,000 downloads of these designs were recorded.

Start with green design

The library currently has 20 models for various locations, including Tallahassee, Florida; Tucson, Arizona; and Boston. (And, yes, Milwaukee.) Five more are coming soon, each created by a professional landscape designer with expertise in the specific ecoregion.

Preston Montague of Durham, NC, a landscape architect and artist who teaches at North Carolina Agricultural and Technical State University in Greensboro, is among them. He contributed to the design of Greensboro, which he said was well-suited to the foothills and coastal plain landscapes of the Piedmont region, from Georgia to Pennsylvania.

The plant lists provided with each design make excellent fact sheets for those who want to familiarize themselves with some of the best native choices for their own home landscape. (The Wild Ones website also provides a state-by-state list of native nurseries where they can be found.)

Montague’s plan, like that of many other contributors, comes with guidance on site considerations and preparation. He recommends studying the space for a year before planting begins, to record its microclimates and find patches of existing habitat that can be connected to the new design — “even if it’s just a small tree by the street,” he said. he.

Many designers, including Montague, held webinars to introduce the concepts to their designs as part of the Wild Ones “Meet the Designers” series. (All are archived on the group’s YouTube channel.) Plans from Heather McCargo, founder of Maine’s Wild Seed Project, and prairie designer and author Benjamin Vogt were added this fall.

Montague said he thought the collaboration was a particularly good fit, and not just because he shares the group’s commitment to promoting native landscaping: “We’re both trying to translate very complicated ideas about landscape ecology into an approach that gardeners of all levels can qualification I can implement it,” he said.

Unless gardeners become familiar with their locally appropriate plant palette and receive a solid introduction to some fundamental principles of ecological design, these goals cannot be achieved. “Native plants assembled according to native community structures and densities can be more complicated, can be a little hairier than perhaps more conventionally organized gardens,” he said.

Providing ecosystem services, beautifully

Art analogies aside, Wild Ones members and the group’s contributing designers are quick to point out that this is not purely ornamental horticulture. They strive to create plantations that provide ecosystem services, Montague said, not just aesthetic pleasure. Although “great” is also an important goal.

This dual focus is why he favors shrubs like inkberry (Ilex glabra) and various viburnums that provide resources for pollinators and fruit for birds while serving as space-defining cover that responds well to shaping with a lawnmower. He calls such shrubs “plastic” because their short internodes—the length of the stem between the nodes or leaf attachments—make them well adapted to shearing.

Similarly, he recommends Cherokee sedge (Carex cherokeensis) as “a fantastic substitute for Liriope and a solid, all-purpose ground cover in many cases.” Unlike the ubiquitous lilyturf (Liriope), native to Asia, sedge is a larval host for certain lepidoptera, and its seed is enjoyed by birds and small mammals.

For maximum ecological benefits, Montague said, more is better; plant density and diversity are needed. He advises planting generously, using a mix of seeds and small plants or plugs.

“I find that if you oversaturate the beds, especially with seeds, and then with lots of plugs to exert some control over the design,” he said, “you may find that the beds actually start to arrange themselves based on competition. It takes a few years, but the species that will thrive in your garden will reveal themselves.”

Don’t start out too “tight, clean and tidy,” he advised. “Basically, I want to empower people to make a mess. And then manage the mess.”

He encourages us to “stop thinking about plants as discrete objects and really think about plantings as vegetative bodies,” he said, adding: “If we’re not going to fuss about species composition, then think to these vegetative bodies as being major. shapes and how those major shapes aesthetically organize a space or produce a reaction when viewed.”

From this point of view, it is okay (and inevitable) for one species to disappear from the mix and another to gain territory. “I don’t want people to get too overwhelmed by the reasons — just allow,” he said, meaning let things play out.

Once all the seed and those plugs have taken hold, “you can garden by subtraction,” Montague said. But he doesn’t decrease in the conventional sense, by pulling unwanted plants, a practice that backfires, bringing more weed seeds to the surface, where they germinate and worsen the infestation.

“Our constant pulling created bigger weed problems,” he said. Instead, he “flosses or brushes” the unwanted species with the clipper to edge the desired species around them.

“You walk around those vegetative bodies with a lawnmower,” he said, “and if you just remove the species you don’t want, the species you leave alone tend to fill the gap and dominate.”

Nutsedge, Bermuda grass and crabgrass are also on his “allow only” list. “They’ll be in the matrix anyway,” he said. “If you selectively snow them, removing the floss from the situation, they will stay, but in a better state.”

It’s all about re-educating the gardener.

“If I had one big bold word, it’s to teach people to enable,” Montague said. Let the looser style take hold; allow diversity to return, as in those courts in Wisconsin and others that have followed suit over the decades.

But be warned: this can be habit forming.

“Once I started gardening this way, I was bored to tears with conventional landscape planting,” Montague said. “I just couldn’t do it anymore.”

Roach is the creator of the website and podcast A Way to Garden and a book of the same name.