‘New naturalism’: Should we rethink the way we plant our yards?
Clip source: ‘New naturalism’: Should we rethink the way we plant our yards? | George Weigel - pennlive.com
Kelly D. Norris' front-yard meadow is an example of the new naturalism style of planting a yard.
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Alarmed by a drumbeat of shrinking bird and butterfly populations, dying pollinators, and invasive pests and plants, gardeners are embracing the idea that their own landscapes can help.
The National Wildlife Federation reported a 50 percent increase in the number of so-called "wildlife gardens" in 2020, a trend that NWF says is continuing.
Books and talks about anything and everything related to "ecological landscaping" are also proliferating, from Dr. Doug Tallamy’s "Bringing Nature Home" that ignited the movement in 2009 to Thomas Rainer and Claudia West’s "Planting in a Post-Wild World," Larry Weaner and Tom Christopher’s "Garden Revolution," and Piet Oudolf and Henk Gerritsen’s "Planting the Natural Garden."
The latest iteration, by former Greater Des Moines Botanical Garden horticulture director Kelly D. Norris, suggests a complete rethink of how and why we’re planting in the first place.
Norris’ 2021 book "New Naturalism" (Cool Springs Press, $30 hardcover) marries gardening with ecology and lays out a template for how our gardens can please us while helping nature at the same time – all while saving us work.
"Why and how we garden has changed dramatically in the last decade," Norris said in a Great Grow Along webinar talk on his new-naturalism approach. "The next generation of gardeners doesn’t want plants in a row that are pruned to perfection and reliant on fertilizers and pesticides. … They want gardens that are more in sync and in tune with nature, gardens that celebrate place and planting for all forms of life."
Norris himself was drawn to the approach in an attempt to "blur the lines" between his dueling love for cultivated gardens and wild landscapes.
Kelly D. Norris in his Iowa garden.
"I’m interested in wilder gardens, for sure," he says. "But I’m also interested in gardening with place and how we can learn to plant and steward landscapes in site-specific fashion."
He says more home gardeners also are moving to yards that "generate abundance, minimize inputs, and develop deeper relationships with landscape and place."
New naturalism is based on these guiding principles:
These plants of similar growing needs are planted in a community, not as unrelated individuals.
1.) Gardening in plant "communities."
Norris says plants in traditional gardens are treated as isolated individuals, selected largely by how they look. In other words, the plants function much like outdoor furniture.
In nature, however, Norris says plants "grow together in a cohort, a related population of one another growing in like circumstances… They’re part of a system."
He says plants’ "social lives" not only help each other thrive, it makes them a critical piece of the greater ecosystem, tying them to the soil microbes underneath as well as to the birds and bees flitting atop the flowers.
It’s that naturally evolved big picture that allows everything to adapt and be self-caring and resilient without any input from humans.
2.) Work with Mother Nature.
The more we understand and mimic nature, the more eco-friendly and easier our gardening efforts will get, Norris contends.
His guiding mantra is "first follow nature."
Traditionally, Norris says, "we’ve not followed nature as much as we’ve tried to lead it."
He suggests instead taking our cues from how nature "gardens" and suggests that gardeners think of themselves as "players" in a place instead of "bumbling overlords" who attempt to control nature with pruners, weeding tools, mulch, and never-ending sweat and tears.
He says we should watch nature to learn what plants work together, what sites each prefer, and how they all interact, giving us a guide for when we put together our own landscape.
That doesn’t necessarily mean copying nature plant by plant, Norris says. Rather it’s more "planting garden habitats inspired by wild ones."
A key part of new naturalism is figuring out which plants best match each particular site in a landscape.
3.) Know your site, embrace your place.
Norris says the key question new naturalism asks is, "What plants would thrive in a garden of this place?"
The starting point is closely observing each site around the yard and then trying to figure out what’s naturally adapted to each.
"It’s much easier to embrace the nature of place than to be on a constant quest to alter it," Norris says. "The further you deviate from the site as you find it, the more resources it will require both to establish and manage it... Be realistic about what plants will grow appropriately without life support."
He suggests looking at such factors as microclimates, topography, light, soil type, wind patterns, and especially what’s been growing there already, from "ditches to dead trees."
Observing isn’t accomplished "on one sunny Sunday afternoon in May," Norris says. "It’s a process that continues for the life of the garden."
New naturalism focuses not just on plant looks but the role they play in the local ecosystem.
4.) Think about what plants can do, not just how they look.
New naturalism focuses on plants not just as ornamental objects but how they can be useful, functional parts of the local ecosystem.
Ignoring that in favor of aesthetics only, Norris says, is a bit like letting the color of the living room walls determine the construction of the house.
It’s possible to have it both ways, Norris says – gardens that look good but that also serve a bigger purpose.
He suggests looking for plants that "check multiple boxes," for example, plants with pretty flowers that also are attractive to pollinators and shrubs with showy foliage for us and fruits for the birds.
5.) It’s more than just planting all native plants.
Norris says that although native species do most of the "heavy lifting" in eco-friendly landscapes, there’s more to this than just planting nothing but natives.
He says "near natives" from nearby areas, cultivars of native plants ("nativars"), and even plants from ecosystems similar to our own are suitable components of our home-garden plant communities.
He notes that sometimes we’ve changed the local terrain so much (especially in urban settings and heavily graded subdivisions) that one-time native plants may no longer be the "right plants" for the altered site.
This fully planted garden at Delaware's Mt. Cuba Center is an example of how to plant abundantly.
6.) Plant abundantly.
"Wild plant communities are home to abundant plant biodiversity – dozens of kinds of plants and not just one or two or three," Norris says.
Planting lots of species and packing them closely builds the kind of "redundancy" and "resiliency" that nature relies on to roll with whatever punches nature throws.
In other words, if a changing climate or a new bug or disease wipes out a few things, something else that’s better adapted is there to pick up the slack.
"It’s fair to say that with a greater array of plants in your garden, the better your chances will be for a more functional and stable community over time," Norris says.
Swoops of low perennial flowers makes up the matrix layer of this planting at Mt. Cuba Center.
7.) Plant in layers.
The heart of new naturalism is rethinking a landscape’s layout into three "layers."
The first is the "matrix layer," which is the "underlayment" or ground layer that should cover all of the soil under the bigger plants.
Too often we use mulch for most of this purpose, which Norris says is expensive, maintenance-heavy, and not as helpful as a diversity of low-growing groundcover plants.
"Why not put plants to work instead?" Norris asks. "These unsung heroes can save you time while providing habitat and cover for wildlife and keeping the garden filled to the brim with lush and exuberant growth."
He says plants such as spreading juniper, sedges, liriope, prairie dropseed, creeping sedum, and thyme prevent erosion, choke out weeds, and account for as much as 75 percent of the total vegetation in a new-naturalism landscape.
The second layer is the structure layer, which is generally the trees, shrubs, tall perennials, and really any plant that acts as a frame, backdrop, or focal point.
Norris says these are the plants that give the garden its form, even though they might only take up 5 to 10 percent of the total vegetation.
Black-eyed susans and butterfly weeds are the stars in this vignette.
The third layer is what Norris calls the "vignette layer" – the "pretty pictures within a planting."
These are the attractive plant clusters that give the landscape color, texture, interest, change, and that steady stream of biological activity that supplies pollen to the butterflies and that feeds the caterpillars that in turn feed the birds.
The vignette layer includes spring bulbs, perennials that bloom in various seasons, roses, reseeding annuals, ornamental grasses, and most any plant that "brings beauty to the eye of the beholder."
A big chunk of Norris’ book goes into practical details on how to make all of this work, including how to stay on top of weeds, how failures and tweaks are "learning opportunities," and how to use enough traditional design elements to prevent the eco-garden from looking like a "run-away train" to neighbors.
The book also offers a series of "plant palette" lists that gives specific plant suggestions – by site – for each of the three layers.
Perennial sunflowers, grasses, helenium, sedum, and Verbena bonariensis are among the plants in this full-sun bed.
Examples:
In a dry, sunny area: Matrix plants such as big bluestem, golden ragwort, sedges, prairie dropseed, spiderwort, and feather reed grass; structure plants such as amsonia, baptisia, New Jersey tea, and silphium, and vignette plants such as agastache, allium, butterfly milkweed, boltonia, coneflowers, sneezeweed, perennial sunflower, liatris, monarda, salvia, goldenrod, penstemon, mountain mint, and ironweed.
In a shady front yard: Matrix plants such as hardy ginger, sedges, hardy geranium, hosta, foamflower, and white wood aster; structure plants such as bugbane, wood ferns, fothergilla, juniper, and mahonia, and vignette plants such as anemone, columbine, hardy begonia, hellebores, lungwort, toad lily, and golden alexander.
In a curbside planting: Matrix plants such as anemone, geum, monarda, switchgrass, sedum, and purple poppy mallow; structure plants such as rattlesnake master, red hot poker, goldenrod, aster, and staghorn sumac, and vignette plants such as agastache, coreopsis, sneezeweed, mountain mint, and salvia.
