Feature Story
How a Native Garden Grows M y parents still live in the house I grew up in. It is your typical suburban brick ranch surround by what I call “a sacred yard.” Not just any grass grows there—as my father would proudly remind you, it is zoysia grass. Dad had painstakingly plugged the yard with zoysia plugs when I was in grade school. The polkadotted lawn was favorite conversational fodder for kids on the school bus during the two years it took for the dots to grow together. You were always kind to the grass. You didn’t walk on it when it was wet, frosty, or right after it was mowed.
The only native plants in the yard were an ash tree in the front and an eastern red cedar on the corner of the house that is painstakingly trimmed to look like a tall dollop of ice cream, depriving it of most of its berries and value to wildlife.
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CONSERVATION FEDERATION
Once upon a time there were three silver maples we used as bases in softball, but one by one they were judged unworthy and removed. There wasn’t much for nature. In a small semi-circular bed at the end of a brick path, Dad would sow marigold seeds he’d collected from the plants in the bed the previous fall. Each year he would trim the round cedar and de-thatch the zoysia. In between our yard and the neighbors, the spring rains would create a channel where even his tentacle grass couldn’t mount an effective defense to erosion, thus hauling in dirt to fill that area was also an annual occurrence.
