Ecological gardening

 While snow blankets the garden, it’s all potential. Dreaming of spring, I’m enjoying reading about ecological gardening—what I’ve been calling sustainable gardening, but I like the new term better. As Kelly Norris writes in a recent article in Fine Gardening, ecological gardening means understanding plants as part of a community, not just building blocks for an aesthetic composition.

 

Native Joe Pye weed in an ecological garden

    Goals I currently aspire to achieve in my ecological garden include promoting and supporting biodiversity, helping to keep air and water clean, sequestering carbon, minimizing my garden’s carbon footprint, conserving water, and preventing stormwater runoff. Since these are inherent functions of natural systems, the good news is that gardening this way should be less work, not more.

 

Leaf mulch conserves soil moisture and provides shelter for native insects

 
    Native Plant Trust and the Woodwell Climate Research Center have been researching how these goals can be accomplished in suburban yards in their Yard Futures Project. They’ve chosen yards in six cities: Boston, Baltimore, Minneapolis-St. Paul, Phoenix, Los Angeles, and Miami. The lucky chosen ones get a visit from a team that’s prepared to observe and document what’s living on their property, from birds to insects to soil organisms. The goal of the research is to document the current state of backyards in a range of climate conditions and discover how suburban properties can best support a healthy environment.

    I wish my yard had been chosen! I’d love to know what experts could find there. In one visit, they could detect and document far more than I ever will. But I’m hopeful that my yard would show lots of biodiversity, because I’ve been trying to put out the welcome mat with native plants and gardening strategies that imitate natural processes.

 

Virginia bluebells

    To take it up a notch, I can start to think more about how plants weave together in natural settings. For example, when choosing a perennial, I pay attention to whether it’s a spreader. That might be a red flag for a traditional garden, but for creating a ground cover layer in a naturalistic ecological garden, it can be an asset. But I don’t usually ask whether a plant is tap-rooted or rhizomatous, grows singularly or in colonies, is short- or long-lived.

 
     In nature, plants fill every available space, above ground and below, gaining from each other’s contributions and maximizing diversity. Instead of fields of mulch punctuated with separated plants, ecological gardens are a mix of tall and short, broad and upright, early and late-developing plants, similar to what you’d see in a wild setting.

 

Plants knit together in an ecological garden

    This doesn’t have to look like a mess. By maintaining clear edges and growing large swathes of species that flourish in site conditions, ecological gardeners are creating gardens that are “legible”—appealing to viewers as designed spaces.

    So for this spring and summer, I’m thinking about how to fill up beds with more—more low spreaders, more early bloomers for the first pollinators of the year, more self-seeders. They should be native plants, but that’s not all. They should contribute actively to the plant community.

 

For the pollinators