More Good News

Dear all,

Earlier today I wrote a sort of two-faced post in which on the one hand I said it was great that Douglas Tallamy's new book Bringing Nature Home: How Native Plants Sustain Wildlife in Our Gardens is getting a lot of publicity--but at the same time I gave a gigantic ho hum to the arrival of the book itself. I received a good comment from blogger Benjamin Vogt, who is relatively new to this style of gardening and liked the book a lot. He suggested that I haven't given the book enough credit and referred me to the review he wrote for his blog, The Deep Middle.

Having read Benjamin's summary and a list of fun facts he pulled from the book, I have to say that it sounds as though Tallamy's book is one of the better ones that have come out on this topic in the last decade. If you are new to native-plant gardening and looking for a book to get you started, see what you think after reading Benjamin's review and the other links provided in my original post, which is below. If you're not already familiar with the material, this book will probably kick start your enthusiasm for native plants and give you a new appreciation for the value of insects in the garden.

Cheers,

Wild Flora

Good news from the New York Times

The Victorian-era illustration above is from the Full Color Decorative Bird Illustrations CD-Rom and Book. This example was kindly provided by the publisher, Dover Publications.

HAVING WORKED AT THIS FOR SO LONG, I'm always a little amazed, and a lot thrilled, when mainstream publications start to promote ideas I've been talking about for at least a decade. So you can imagine how pleased I was when the New York Times "Home and Garden" section recently published an article titled, "To Feed the Birds, First Feed the Bugs."

Yes!

For the article, writer Ann Ravner visited the home of Doug Tallamy, author of a new book that has been gaining a lot of attention for naturalistic gardening: Bringing Nature Home was published by Timber Press last November. Tallamy is an entomologist at the University of Delaware. You can see his academic resume (and a nice photo) at the university's website. His book has its own website, which includes a couple of items that appear to be excerpts from the book:

• "Gardening for Life" makes the argument for why it is so important for us to use native plants in our gardens and otherwise try to make these spaces wildlife and environmentally friendly.


• "Gardening for Biodiversity" is a list of what Tallamy considers to be "the 20 best native woody and perennial plant genera for supporting biodiversity in East Coast suburban landscapes."

The latter illustrates why books such as these are often a disappointment to anyone who is beyond the beginner level of native-plant gardening. Because books such as Tallamy's have to appeal to a wide audience, they are often too general to be of much help once you are actually trying to create a native plant garden in a specific region. For instance, Tallamy lists all the usual suspects of the native plant world. And because he lists genera rather than species, you will still have to find out which plants are appropriate for your region.

To be honest, I'm not all that interested in Tallamy's book (which I hasten to admit I have not read--so if I'm wrong about it, please tell me). I'm very glad he wrote it, but my initial investigation suggests that it's another in a growing list of books that cover more or less the same ground. Probably the first of them, or at least the first to get a lot of attention, was Sarah Stein's Noah's Garden: Restoring the Ecology of Our Own Back Yards, which was published in 1995. In the late 1990s, I bought a lot of these books. But eventually I tired of reading the same information over and over again. Now I spend my money on reference works that are specific to my region.

That isn't to say that these books should not be published! On the contrary, every time one of them comes out there is a chance it will catch a wave of publicity, as Tallamy's has. Each wave of publicity attracts new people to native-plant gardening. Many people who are avid native-plant gardeners today caught the bug by reading Stein. Ten years from now, it looks like we'll have another batch who were inspired by Tallamy's work.

Witness the article in the New York Times, which allows us to pay a vicarious visit to Tallamy's garden in Pennsylvania, where he and his wife have removed non-native, invasive plants such as Oriental bittersweet, Japanese honeysuckle, and multiflora rose, and replaced them with natives such as white pine, black cherry, and goldenrod. The best part of the article is Tallamy's argument in favor of encouraging insects in the garden. He is quoted as saying that 96% of North American birds other than seabirds feed their young on insects.

None of this is exactly new, but it probably is new to a lot of New York Times readers. So let's celebrate. With its lovely pictures of native plants and the insects that depend on them, the New York Times article is a great advertisement for native plant gardening.

Meanwhile, if you'd like to learn more about Tallamy's book, I recommend the following:

• A review of Tallamy's book by Susan Harris at the Garden Rant blog.


• Interview with Tallamy at the Garden Rant blog.

Wildlife Gardening and Deer

Above is a photo of a black-tailed deer that was munching on fireweed a few feet away from my living room window in Redmond, WA, a few years back. I found that native plants did not attract deer to anything like the extent that my neighbors' exotic ornamentals did. When deer did eat my natives (like this fireweed), the plants grew back quickly and were not seriously damaged.

"Few events in the history of North American wildlife have been so remarkable, so unexpected, and so provocative of conflict as the rise of suburban deer," writes Richard Nelson in his wonderful book Heart and Blood: Living With Deer in America. Famously referred to as "rats with antlers" by writer John McPhee, suburban deer have sadly helped to turn many gardeners against wildlife and wildlife-friendly gardening.

Yet there's an irony here, because it is humans who have caused deer populations to explode in areas of human habitation. You see, deer like the same kind of environment we do: A few wooded areas but lots of open ones; an abundance of well-fertilized, well-watered plants (decorative to us, tasty to them); and a complete absence of predators. When we provide them with their ideal environment, quite naturally they breed. Some suburban areas in the United States are now trying to cope with deer populations that can be as high as 250 animals per square mile. Killing or removing the animals has no long-term effect, because they simply repopulate.

So naturally there are conflicts. Yet oddly enough, suburban gardeners seem to assume that nature is to blame for the deer problem, instead of looking a little closer to home.

Why wildlife corridors

I started thinking about this today after reading a post at the Garden Rant website, in which Susan Harris discussed a lecture by Doug Tallamy, author of Bringing Nature Home: How Native Plants Sustain Wildlife in Our Gardens. According to Harris, Tallamy makes the case for native-plant and wildlife-friendly gardening in a way that many conventional gardeners have been able to accept and understand.

But in describing Tallamy's lecture, she happened to mention that he recommends what are called wildlife corridors. These are plantings of trees and shrubs, which can be anywhere from a few to many feet wide depending on how much room you have, that join one natural area to another.

Say, for example, that you've put a wetland garden near your house, to collect rainwater from your roof. Half an acre away, just outside your property line, is a greenbelt. A wildlife-friendly way to design your property would be to plant a corridor of shrubs, trees, and wildflowers, preferably native, stretching from the greenbelt to your mini-wetland. This allows the wildlife using the greenbelt, including frogs and salamanders, to reach your little wetland. You get to enjoy the new wildlife, and they have a small addition to their habitat area.

No, they don't attract deer

Wildlife corridors are recommended by just about everyone who writes on wildlife-friendly gardening. But in comments on Harris's post, several gardeners complained that wildlife corridors would only bring more deer into their gardens.

So this is my 2 cents on that: The deer are going to be in your garden anyway. As long as the suburbs remain an almost perfect environment for deer, there will be lots of deer around. And as long as you plant things that deer like to eat, the deer will come to the table for the meal you've put out. Being a lot larger than most other suburban wildlife, deer do not need special wildlife corridors in order to move around. And being practically without predators, they have nothing to fear from coming out into the open.

If gardeners refuse to put in wildlife corridors, however, it's the smaller creatures--especially birds and amphibians--that will suffer. These are the creatures that are finding it increasingly difficult to live in suburban landscapes. They are the ones that need protection from predators--especially the domestic cats that are a feature of most suburban landscapes. Amphibians in particular, being slow moving (thus more vulnerable to predators) and with porous skins that must be kept constantly moist, are dependent on corridors in order to move from place to place.

Refusing to plant wildlife corridors will have no effect on your deer problem, if you have one. And oh, by the way, if you're looking for someone to blame for the deer in your garden, find a mirror.

PS: Purely by coincidence, I am about to go down to a supper of venison, courtesy of a local hunter. Here's my recipe for slow-cooked venison roast.

The trackback URL for Susan Harris's post on the Tallamy lecture is http://www.typepad.com/t/trackback/854423/23874574

For the Bird Lover on Your List

MANY THANKS TO MIKE BERGIN, who founded the birding blog 10,000 Birds, for recommending what surely will be the most requested Christmas book of the year, at least among bird lovers. See his review here.

The Forest (or Woodland) Garden

This photo shows a scene from a woodland garden in the Pacific Northwest. Beyond the fence is a completely developed area, with nothing but pavement for miles around. Within the fence is a serene haven for humans and birds. The photo illustrates one of the key principles of woodland gardening, which is the use of vegetation at multiple levels rather than (as in a traditional flower garden) just near the ground. Douglas fir trees provide the top layer. The intermediate layer is occupied by a PNW native shrub called osoberry, and the ground layer is covered with a glossy-leaved native called Oregon grape.

FOREST OR PRAIRIE? Most gardeners are Prairie gardeners, in a sense. Because we like flowers, we tend to like sun. That in turn leads us to prefer gardens that are open and treeless, mimicking the conditions in the wide open Prairies of the Midwestern provinces and states. Many of the most popular garden plants--purple coneflower and black-eyed Susan to name just two--came to the garden from the Midwestern Prairies.

I grow Prairie plants myself, because in addition to being beautiful and hardy, they also attract pollinators. However, for the last 14 years of my gardening life (since leaving Illinois in 1993), I have lived outside of the Prairie States. First in the Seattle area and now in Nova Scotia, I have lived in areas that are naturally forested. And it has always seemed "just natural" to me that my gardens in these areas should be forested too. When the existing tree cover wasn't adequate, I've planted fast-growing trees and planted large shrubs in order to try to get a woodland effect, as I described in a post called "A Walk on the Shady Side".

I have come to prefer this style of gardening to the open style. You don't get as many brilliant flowers in shade, but woodland gardens are cool, quiet, and serene; they are great habitat for birds, and they are relatively easy to maintain. I've also come to appreciate the aesthetics of a shady garden: Because you can't lean on flashy flowers for effect, you have to pay a lot more attention to foliage, structure, and other subtle ways of creating beauty.

Until today, I never gave a lot of thought to where woodland gardening came from, however. So I was very pleased to read an article in today's Guardian that provided some background on this topic. Jill Tunstall writes in the British newspaper that this style of gardening "goes back to the Aztecs but was reinterpreted by the late Robert Hart, a visionary gardener who brought the idea to Britain in the 1960s and named it 'forest gardening'."

She says that Hart, who lived on the border between Shropshire and Wales, realized that forest gardens "were both productive and self-maintaining. He set about rearranging his own garden on forest principles with edible layers of self-sustaining perennials that would provide food, fuel and medicines, as well as support wildlife. His philosophy was recorded in two books, The Forest Garden and Beyond the Forest Garden (Green Books), both published shortly before he died in 2000."

Tunstall insterviews garden designer Jennifer Laurol, who emphasizes, quite correctly, that the key structural element of a woodland garden is layering--that is, the use of vegetation on mutiple levels. Books on natural design typically describe three layers, which roughly correspond to trees (top level), shrubs (intermediate level), and groundcovers (ground level). But apparently Robert Hart listed seven layers, from roots all the way up to the high canopy.

There does seem to be a key difference between the British forest garden and what designers here in North America are more likely to call a woodland garden. (See for example Rick Darke's book The American Woodland Garden: Capturing the Spirit of the Deciduous Forest, published in 2002.) Designers here tend to want to imitate the ecosystem that would occur naturally on a site, which requires using native plants or at least trying to. In contrast, British designers seem to be more interested in growing food than in imitating the local ecosystem. Hart seems to have emphasized that a forest garden is a more wildlife-friendly, low-maintenance way of growing food plants. I was quite surprised to learn that woodland gardens can be used to grow food plants, as a matter of fact. Although I remain committed to working with native plants, now I'm wondering whether a portion of the food garden couldn't be a lot shadier than I had previously planned.

One thing is certain: Even if you're not a native plant enthusiast, as I am, if you live in a naturally forested area the woodland or forest approach to design is more appropriate, better for wildlife, and easier to maintain.

Many thanks to the member of the Native Gardening group on Yahoo! Groups who tipped me off to the article in the Guardian.

The Starfish Story

Note to readers: If you came to this blog looking for information on Colony Collapse Disorder among honeybees, please see "Gardeners and the Honeybee Crisis." I wrote the following, in a slightly different version, earlier today as a comment on the No Impact Man blog. However, I thought it was so appropriate for wildlife-friendly gardeners that I decided to republish it here.


There must be hundreds if not thousands of versions of the "starfish story."

Details change, the characters change; sometimes they're father and son, sometimes the "little girl" is an old man. The punch line varies slightly, too.

In my favorite version, a man is walking on a very long beach, where thousands of starfish have been left stranded by the tide. As he walks, he comes across a little girl who is picking up the dying starfish one by one and throwing them back into the ocean. The man says, "Look at how many starfish there are. You can't possibly throw them all back into the ocean before they die. Why are you doing this? It's not going to make a difference."

And the little girl replies, as she's throwing a starfish back into the ocean, "It made a difference to that one."

This story apparently originated in a 1969 book called The Unexpected Universe by the revered writer and naturalist Loren Eiseley; Eiseley titled his magnificently written version "The Star Thrower." (The story is also found in a 1978 collection of the same name.) But Eiseley's story has been transformed in the retelling and adopted by countless people as their own. Its popularity testifies to our enduring faith in the power of a single person to make a difference.

I think this story is a particularly apt one for people who decide to practice wildlife-friendly gardening. No matter how large or small the patch of earth you've chosen to care for, you are doing your bit to help others live. You are saving the planet, one back yard, one garden, one windowbox at a time.

Here's to you. May you forever throw starfish.

A Plug for a Great Organization

IF YOU LOVE THE GARDEN'S SMALLER CREATURES, one organization you'll want to know about is the Xerces Society, which is based in Portland OR and is devoted to the conservation of insects and other small animals. Their book Butterfly Gardening: Creating Summer Magic in Your Garden (San Francisco: Sierra Club Books, 1990) contains all sorts of great information on attracting butterflies. (And here's a link to their online pdf about butterfly gardening.)

Here are some of the plants and plant families the Xerces Society recommends for feeding adult butterflies. All of these would make excellent additions to a flower garden. For photos of several of these plants, see the post previous to this one. Most of these plants are highly adaptable, but you'll want to check to make sure they're appropriate for your region.

Black-eyed Susan (Rudbeckia spp.)
Milkweed (Asclepias spp.)
Purple coneflower (Echinacea purpurea)
Joe-pye weed (Eupatorium spp.)
Daisies (Chrysanthemum spp.)
Sunflowers (Helianthus spp.)
Yarrow (Achillea spp.)
Stonecrop (Sedum spp.)
Goldenrod (Solidago spp.)
Asters (Aster spp.)
Yarrow (Achillea spp.)
Globe amaranth (Gomphrena globosa)
Pearly everlasting (Anaphalis margaritacea)
Ageratum or flossflower (Ageratum houstonianum)
Coreopsis or tickseed (Coreopsis spp.)
Cosmos (Cosmos bipinnatus)
Indian-blanket (Gaillardia pulchella)
Gumweeds (Grindelia spp.)
Gayfeathers or blazing-stars (Liatris spp.)
Zinnias (Zinnia spp.)
Forget-me-not (Myosotis scorpiodes)
Pinks (Dianthus spp.)
Pincushions (Scabiosa spp.)
Lavender (Lavandula spp.)
Mints (Mentha spp.)
Rosemary (Rosmarinus officinalis)
Sage (Salvia spp.)
Thyme (Thymus spp.)
Onions (Allium spp.)
Butterfly bush (Buddleia davidii)
Hibiscus (Hibiscus spp.)
Lilac (Syringa vulgaris)
Phlox (Phlox spp.)
Wild strawberry (Fragaria spp.)
Shrubby cinquefoil (Potentilla fruticosa)
Jupiter's beard or Red valerian (Centranthus ruber)
Verbenas (Verbena spp.)

Acknowledgments

I've been writing and speaking about native plants, ecosystem-inspired landscaping, and wildlife-friendly gardening for quite a few years now, and I want to acknowledge that many of the posts appearing in these pages will draw on my previous work. There's no copyright infringement, as I will only be copying myself. But it's only fair to acknowledge publications and organizations that have supported my work in the past. These include Terrain.org: A Journal of the Built & Natural Environments, which published one of my favorite essays, and Northwest Garden News, a monthly newspaper whose publisher and editor, the lovely Mary Gutierrez, was nice enough to let me be a columnist for several years. Organizations that have allowed me to speak include the Washington Native Plant Society, countless gardening clubs, and Molbak's Nursery in Woodinville, WA.
I also want to acknowledge friends from whom I learned most of what I know about "wild" gardening, especially Russell Link, author of Landscaping for Wildlife in the Pacific Northwest, and Brett ("Greenman") Johnson, who is by far the most knowledgeable plantsman I have ever known; if you live in the Seattle area and want plants or consulting services, please let me put you in touch with him.