Native Plants

Gardening tips: The Helpful Gardener brings the pleasure of gardening to your home. You will find our garden design articles collected in one spot.

Native Plants - Gardening with Mother Nature Part 2

It was my transformation from horticulturalist to gardener that began my real education in native plants. Many garden plants I tried were temperamental, needing a surplus of attention, while at the back of the border, those asters were spectacular, more in need of the occasional beating to keep them in check rather than coddling. And I couldn’t help notice that the bees and butterflies preferred those asters to the much “prettier” flowers in front of them. The specific epithet of nova angliae was my eye-opener here. But of course! These plants belonged here!

I tell of my enlightenment to illustrate several key points in the discussion of native plants. Let’s look closer at those New England asters. They are vigorous, maintenance free plants for a reason. If they were in need of care and maintenance the species would have gone the way of the dodo long before. But it is adapted to our weather, to the neighboring plants, prevalent disease and pests, and predation by herbivores. Over the millennia it has developed symbiotic relations with any number of flying insects; it provides nectar and larval food sources and the butterflies and bees provide pollination. Man need not enter into this picture for this plant to flourish.

In fact, when Man does enter into the plant picture, things often begin to go astray. We move an azalea from Japan, and it brings the seed for mile-a-minute, a voracious eater of woodland. We select cultivars of a fine native, winterberry, only to create berries too big for many of our native birds to use (we accomplished this by crossing with a Japanese native). We collect plants for garden use to the point of extinction; witness Franklinia alatamaha, named for that founding father upon discovery and no longer found in the forest only decades later (If not for continued propagation by the horticultural industry it would have disappeared over two hundred years ago. The latest horror to visit itself on the plant world, Phytophtera ramorum, or sudden oak death came to California with nursery stock and then was shipped country wide by two of the largest nursery companies on the planet (All this happened in the span of two years). While nature finds her own ways to move species around the planet, no other vector in the history of the natural world has moved as quickly, or done so much damage as the hand of Man.

For someone who joined this industry with hopes of “greening” the world, the fact that I was part of the problem was an abhorrent thought. Native plants began to make more and more and more sense to me. Everything I heard about invasive species had remediation as the final step to cleaning up the problem, and every source listed native species as the best bet for remediation. I started to talk to the industry about natives and was surprised to have my words fall on deaf ears. I heard “They don’t sell.” or “Why would someone spend money on something they can dig out of the woods?” , but the killer was “They’re just not as sexy as the garden plants people are used to.” I had no come back for that one; they weren’t. Not a lot of double flowers, many of the wildflowers are ephemerals, and shade plants (a huge category for the Northeast natives) aren’t very floriferous to begin with. Just wasn’t fitting the garden that most people wanted…

But as I began to dig deeper, I found allies along the way. Designers like Oehme and Von Sweden and Piet Oudolf were slowly dismantling that English cottage border look. In the trade I began to meet people like Dale Hendricks at North Creek Nurseries and Neil Diboll of Prairie Nurseries, guys who had been singing my tune since the Seventies and building businesses around the concept. As friends in the trade became aware of my interest, I got introductions to folks like Colston Burrell and Bill Cullina, both extraordinary native plant specialists. As I met these folks I began to realize I was not a lone voice crying in the wilderness. The word was spreading… article continued here

part 1,2,3

• Flame weeder
  
• Weeding Tool: Easily pull weeds - roots and all
  
• Cape Cod Weeder - Eliminate weeds with the flick of a wrist
  
• Deluxe Electric Leaf Shredder: Don't drag bags of leaves to the curb, then pay to have them hauled away. The Deluxe Shredder converts leaves into one tidy bag of nutritious mulch.