Going Native. A blog by Katy Flammia

Repairing the environment one small garden at a time.

GOING NATIVE A BLOG BY KATY FLAMMIA, AIA, IIDA, LEED AP, DESIGN DIRECTOR-HUDSON

It's easy to be discouraged at the enormity of the environmental issues we face.

It can feel like nothing we do puts a dent in the problem, but people are doing things in their own gardens that are adding up to big change.

Restoring a landscape

I got into Native Plant Gardening several years ago when a landscape architect friend visited our property in Hudson NY. We bought what I thought was lawn, forest, and possibly a pond. It was so overgrown you could only see the pond on Google Earth.

My friend told me we had eight acres of mostly invasive plants. She wrote us a prescription for removals and native plants. It included a seed mix for meadows we were to create, by gradually removing lawns and pulling out the invasive buckthorn, multiflora rose and autumn olives. She also specified native water loving plants, that one rainy spring day we planted from the canoe all around the newly exposed pond.

Slowly over seven years the landscape turned from suburban lawn and overgrown tangled woods to rolling meadows of grasses and wildflowers and light dappled woodlands where ferns and native columbine were springing up, with the only help from us being the removal of invasive species that had been choking them out.

What is inspiring to witness is the restoration of the native wildlife. I was surprised to learn that so many of the plants that were common garden favorites are non-native imports, brought here for their showiness and often for their resistance to insects.

Native Columbine

What seemed like a good idea at the time, we now know resulted in the disruption of the insect population. Pesticides and lack of host plants has decimated a foundational link in the cycle of a healthy habitat. No host plants-no pollinator, no insects-no birds, and eventually, the total collapse of healthy environments which sustain life on our planet.

If you are old enough, you might remember summer car windshields full of smashed insects. Evening skies were filled with fireflies. The back yard was full of sound, buzzing, chirping, and croaking. Our modern yards, parks and landscapes have been silenced, so slowly, we didn’t even notice.

Fireflies

The last couple of years we have seen a great increase in wildlife on our property since we began “rewilding� it. We see many more butterflies, grasshoppers, moths, and crickets. There are summer evenings with fireflies flashing over the meadows, bats patrolling, nesting birds, herons fishing, and owls hooting late in the night. The place thrums with life and reminds us how a little attention from us can have a farreaching effect.

Monarch on Milkweed

Catepillar

Blue Heron

Carolina Wren

What can you do?

Plant native plants. You don’t need acres of land. You can contribute if you have only a balcony or fire escape. The key though is to grow natives. When we re-establish healthy conditions and our friends and neighbors do too, we create many small habitats that together, are transformative.

Native plants are host to native insects and birds. Native plants evolved together with native fauna, and established plant-animal communities which support each other.

Oak trees host over 600 different insect species. Compare that to the imported Ginko tree, which hosts only five.

Oak

Ginko

Some introduced plants are so invasive they are choking out native plants.

Many of these plants are still available in garden stores. Periwinkle (which spreads and is allopathic), Forsythia, Bamboo, Honeysuckle, Oriental Bittersweet, English Ivy, Burning Bush, Japanese Spirea, Purple Loosestrife, and much more.

There are many lovely plants that can replace suburban standards. If you are going to landscape, plant as many natives as you possibly can. There are many great native alternatives to old standards. Instead of burning bush, plant red twig dogwoods, instead of Japanese spirea, use viburnum, spicebush, or witch hazel. Instead of Japanese maples, plant dogwoods.

Red Twig Dogwood

Spicebush

Maple Leaf Viburnum

Think about converting or reducing your lawn. $30 billion a year in harmful chemicals, fossil fuels and labor are spent on lawns in America. Converting a lawn to a meadow is a fair amount of work (believe me I know) but done right, it can be done in two seasons. After that, there is a once a year mowing and no watering, no fertilizer, and extremely minimal weeding. It’s a beautiful, always changing, always moving, lush habitat that is sequestering carbon and sustaining the biodiversity of your local environment.

Urban action. Even if you live in the city and don’t have a garden or balcony you can still have an impact. The Highline is planted with native plants. The gardens near our New York office in Battery Park are full of native plantings. Governor’s Island has beautiful native plant beds. Support the work the city is doing, organize in your neighborhood. There are plenty of empty lots, medians, tree wells, verges, abandoned lots screaming for you to do some wonderful guerilla gardening.

Battery Park Plantings

This year I’m making seed bombs for my holiday gifts. Part soil, part powdered clay, water plus native seeds. You roll them into little balls, dry them out and then toss them into spaces you think could use a little native plant love! What could be more fun?

Resources to learn more:

I started a Facebook group for people interested in Native Plants who are gardening in upstate near Hudson NY. https://www.facebook.com/groups/345453889897081 Create a seed bomb to grow food for pollinators! Make a "pollinator pathway" by throwing your seed bomb somewhere no flowers are currently growing.

Video of how to make pollinator seed bombs. https://vimeo.com/429429705

Katy Flammia, AIA, IIDA, LEED AP, Design Director-Hudson