Sustainable enough

I just listened to an informative interview with Uli Lorimer, director of horticulture at Native Plant Trust, our local native plant society in Framingham, Massachusetts. Uli was a guest on garden writer Thomas Christopher’s weekly radio show and podcast, Growing Greener. Thomas focused the interview on native and locally adapted plants.

Monarch on New England aster

    Together, the two men proposed a type of garden that’s designed to serve the interests of as many living things as possible, not just humans. Instead of choosing plants because they’re pretty, you’d select what performs the most useful functions for your garden ecosystem. You’d put aside neatness as a top aesthetic priority.

Goldenrod is a key player in this meadow ecosystem in Maine

    This is the path I want to follow, but I argue that we don’t all have to arrive right away. Uli pointed out that much important information about native plants hasn’t yet been ascertained, and the rest hasn’t spread past native plant enthusiasts. As a start, he suggested, growers should be using plant labels to tell where plants came from and how they were propagated.

A plant label that lists the seed source and nursery location

    Native Plant Trust advocates growing plants that evolved in the local ecoregion, the area with the same environmental conditions they'll find in your garden. In addition, they value genetic diversity within each species, meaning plants that are grown from seed, not cloned through cuttings or divisions to be genetically identical. 

    A genetically diverse, locally adapted plant population will be well-equipped to deal with shifts in its environment, including rapidly changing climate. But so far, conventional growers haven’t figured out how growing from seed could be scaled up to their volume of production in a financially viable way. In addition, we consumers have been trained to want reliably uniform plants, which is what you get with clones. Seed-grown plants are variable. 

Mass produced plants are genetically identical and uniform

    Native Plant Trust sells about 300 species of locally adapted native plants at their garden shop. They’re grown from ethically collected wild seed of known New England provenance. But what if the shop doesn’t offer a native plant you’d like to buy? Is it wrong to buy plants that don’t meet their high standards?

    This brings me to my point. I think becoming a sustainable gardener, and a native plant gardener, can be a process. You don’t have to change everything all at once. After 35 years, my garden is full of nonnative plants I’ve chosen over the years. Many of the ones that have survived are plants I love and wouldn’t dream of removing. We have a history together.

They'll have to pry my nonnative white bleeding heart from my cold dead trowel

    Every year as I learn more about native plants, I add more of them to the garden. I adjust my gardening approach to accommodate their needs and welcome a richer population of wildlife, especially insects. Is it still OK to buy nonnative plants because you like them, or North American native plants even if they’re not local, they’re “improved” cultivars of native species, or they’ve been propagated asexually? I think it is. If we’re thinking about these issues, we’re moving toward full sustainability, even if we’re not there yet.

Newly planted mountain mint from NPT--native, locally grown and adapted

 

Thankful

This Thanksgiving I’m thankful for garden clubs. Back in 2016 when I gave my first sustainable gardening talk at Holden Garden Club, I had no idea what to expect. I was harboring an anxious fantasy that garden club members would be dressed in peach basket hats and white gloves and be interested only in arranging flowers.

Setting up for a garden club meeting? {{PD-US}}

     Maybe there were clubs like that in the 1950s, but the Holden group and the clubs I’ve visited since haven’t matched that picture at all. My impression now is that the clubs are bastions of good values, springs of water in a civic desert where kindness and community spirit are sorely needed.

    The clubs I’ve visited are mostly members of the Garden Club Federation of Massachusetts. We know about each other because of a speakers’ forum that the Federation holds each spring to help the clubs find talks they’d like to hear. Clubs typically book speakers for monthly meetings except in summer, so their officers need to select nine or ten talks or demonstrations per year that will interest and educate their members. I find club members impressively open to hearing about new ideas, more so than many groups I’ve been part of in other contexts.

Duxbury Garden Club meets in an historic building in summer

    In addition to meeting monthly to socialize and exchange information, most clubs pursue community projects ranging from maintaining beautiful plantings in public places to engaging schoolchildren or nursing home residents in plant-related activities. To raise funds for club activities, many run spring plant sales that are major community events.

Garden clubs tend gardens in public spaces

    Club members tend to be women ranging from middle to older age. Some have a passion for floral design, it’s true. 

Thanksgiving arrangement created by Elsa Lawrence at my home club, Temple Shalom Garden Club

The majority are also “dirt gardeners,” those of us who like to get outside, dig holes and plant things. These are people with plenty of life commitments: work, family responsibilities, and community involvement. Yet they take the time to focus on doing the right thing for the environment.

     Sure, not everyone in the room sees gardening through my sustainability lens. But I always find a few who are right with me, excited to talk about what they’ve tried, what’s worked and what hasn’t.

    Take the Arlington Garden Club, where I spoke this October. Their brochure describes them as “a group of gardeners interested in conserving natural resources and the environment through educational programs and public works.” Those are my goals, too. I see gardeners as natural environmentalists, because we’re outside observing nature closely. It’s great to know that garden clubs identify themselves as part of the movement to protect our planet.

Promoting native plants and insects at  a New York garden club event

    But what I enjoy most about meeting garden clubs is their culture. I’ve found them friendly, good-humored, well organized, down-to-earth (no pun intended), and committed to learning. No wonder they continue to thrive. Thank you, Massachusetts garden clubs, for letting me share in the fun and the growth, both personal and vegetative.

With Norwell Garden Club Program Chair Carolyn Auwers and President Laurie Hall at Norwell Library

New aesthetic needed

With October gone, the leaf blower season in my area is officially under way. Rain and heavy winds have brought down a lot of leaves, and many homeowners feel those leaves need to be disposed of post-haste. That means blowing or raking every last leaf into a pile and stuffing it into a leaf bag or vacuuming it into a truck to be transported to “away,” wherever that is.

Move 'em up and move 'em out

    Two years ago some local citizens rose up to protest the noise and health risks caused by leaf blowers. Some towns around the country have imposed meaningful limits, and some have even succeeded in passing outright leaf blower bans. But here, the team I was backing lost the fight, or at least the first round. We ended up with a complicated new noise ordinance that still allows leaf blowers seven days per week, with gas models permitted before Memorial Day and after Labor Day. 

After Labor Day, gas-powered leafblowers are free to roar in my neighborhood

I think this means the anti-leaf blower faction underestimated the determination of local landscape contractors to defend their business model. Leaf blower noise continues at a cost to the rest of us: loss of quiet enjoyment of our property. I hope we’ll eventually achieve an ordinance with more teeth.

    If I ran the zoo, we wouldn’t need leaf blowers because we wouldn’t clear fallen leaves from our yards. My town, like many, is stuck with a standard of landscape maintenance that dates to the aftermath of World War II. According to this aesthetic, fallen leaves are whisked out of sight as quickly as possible, and an ideal front yard consists of a swath of neatly mown lawn, as big as possible, backed by a few shrubs planted against the house’s foundation.

Neatness reigns

    As I’ve traveled farther along the path to a sustainable garden, I’ve gotten increasingly comfortable with seeing leaves on the ground. Fallen leaves on garden beds used to look like a mess to me. Now they’re a pleasing part of the view, just the way they’d be on a walk in the woods.

Fallen leaves enhance the beauty of the woods

    I’ve learned there are lots of good reasons to let those leaves lie on the ground. They add organic material to the soil as they slowly decompose, providing nutrients for plants and improving soil structure. They offer shelter for native insects, helping them survive the winter. They act as mulch, minimizing the number of weeds I’ll be coping with the next spring, insulating the soil so a sudden thaw or cold snap doesn’t kill my plants, and helping to hold moisture in the soil for roots to access.

Fallen leaves and pine needles benefit this shady bed

    Now I wonder why my neighbors bother to send away all that valuable organic material and then pay to replace it with mulch or soil amendments. If we send those leaves away, we’re actually depleting our own soil, because what our trees drew from the soil isn’t replenished by decomposing leaves.

Why send away organic material that should become part of your soil?

    But the truth is, I wouldn’t be letting those leaves lie if I hadn’t come to find them pretty. In garden design, neater isn’t always better.

Big little choices

The other day I found myself dithering about covering our garden pond with netting. I hadn’t realized how much transitioning toward sustainable gardening has changed my thinking process.

This week in the garden

    Every fall I drag a lightweight frame made from plastic pipe and covered with bird netting over the 8- by 10-foot rectangular pond. The purpose of the pond cover is to minimize the number of falling leaves that end up in the water. 

The gray plastic pipe holds netting over the pond surface to keep out leaves

If leaves spend the winter on the bottom of the pond, their gradual decomposition will suck the oxygen out of the water, creating tough conditions for any animals living there. We don’t have koi anymore, but I buy five or ten tadpoles at the garden center each spring and enjoy their emergence as tiny froglets.

Tadpoles metamorphose in the course of the summer-photo Olaf Tausch

Adult frogs eat insects. I count them as part of my garden community.

I managed to photograph this frog from a distance before he jumped into the water

     My dilemma this fall was twofold. First, should I try to skim the floating duckweed off the surface of the pond before winter for aesthetic reasons? What if tadpoles were still depending on duckweed for food? What if I skimmed off frog egg masses with the duckweed? If I’d asked to know the scientific name of my tadpoles, I’d be more equipped to find answers to these questions. After a few passes with the net, I decided to leave the duckweed alone.

Duckweed on the pond surface provides high-protein tadpole food, prevents algae build-up by shading the water, and controls mosquito reproduction

    Second, if I covered the pond completely with the netting frame, how were those frogs going to get out of the water? I’d lowered the pots of water lilies to the bottom of the pond, so there were no lily pads on or near the surface where they could perch. The weather hasn’t gotten cold yet, so I didn’t think the frogs would be ready to go into their winter hibernation. Several small frogs are in the habit of sitting at the edge of the pond and swiftly jumping into the water if anyone approaches. I compromised by leaving a 1-foot opening where the pond was uncovered next to the frogs’ favorite sitting area.

Space for frogs to escape from the netting-covered pond

    Ruminating about the needs of frogs made me realize that my perspective has changed a lot in the last eight years. In shifting to seeing myself as part of a community of living things in the yard, I’ve opened up a lot of questions that never would have crossed my mind before. 

    How about this one: should I throw the cones dropped by our big white pine into the yard waste?

Pine cones: yard waste or winter forage?

I’ve done that for years, because I didn’t want the garden to turn into a white pine forest. This year for the first time I hesitated. Maybe those cones feed some animal during the winter. I compromised: I threw the cones lying on paths and lawn back toward the base of the tree.

My compromise is to move the cones back within the dripline of the pine

    Will I gradually stop being able to do anything in the yard except remove nonnative invasive plants? No, I insist on retaining the right to be a gardener! But I’m seeing a lot of my choices differently.

A journey of a thousand miles

Sunday at Celebrate Newton, a local craft fair, several shoppers asked me why I use the phrase “sustainable-enough.” I found myself replying, “My idea is that you don’t have to go from conventional to perfect in one step.” Back when it came time to choose a title for my book, I was stumped. My editor, Lorraine Anderson, suggested The Sustainable-Enough Garden, and that was just right.

Sustainable-enough gift basket

    There’s a nod in the title to pediatrician and psychoanalyst D.W. Winnicott’s concept of the “good enough mother,” a mother who recognizes and meets her baby’s needs but sometimes fails at perfect attunement, allowing the growing child to experience some manageable frustration. Similarly, I aim to be a good enough environmentally conscious gardener: trying my best, developing new insights over time, but not perfect.

On the path to 100 percent sustainability, but not there yet

    I think every step we take toward making a sustainable garden is a plus. If you can’t do everything, so be it. Do what you can now and add more as you go along. It’s foolish to think we know everything about natural processes. We’re bound to learn more as time goes on, and we’ll adjust our approach accordingly. For example, we now know that nonnative flowering plants do have a role to play in insect-friendly gardens. 

Nonnative butterfly bush draws lots of native insects

Thanks to active research, we’re getting more information in this area every year. Meanwhile, we can hold off on tearing out our beloved peonies and hydrangeas!

    It’s easy to get impatient with incremental changes. Compare the approaches of two effective environmental organizations. The Natural Resources Defense Council (NRDC), known for fiery defense of natural areas under attack, has been in high gear during the Trump administration, filing and winning lawsuits to block environmental deregulation. Their strategy seems to be to shoot for the stars.

NRDC fights to preserve wilderness

    In contrast, back in the 1980s, the Environmental Defense Fund (EDF) chose a more gradual, collaborative approach, showing industries how they can save money (and generate good PR) by eliminating waste and conserving energy. The idea of working with McDonald’s and Walmart must have been hard to stomach at first, but the results are undeniable. Over a decade, McDonald’s eliminated 300 million pounds of packaging and reduced restaurant waste by 30 percent with EDF’s help.

EDF persuaded McDonald's to skip the polystyrene clamshell packaging

Walmart has cut their greenhouse gas emissions and leveraged their clout to create a market for sustainably produced food and other products. I don’t want to support either corporation with my dollars, but I have to admit they’re positioned to be influencers in combating climate change.

Solar panels at Walmart in Caguas, Puerto Rico

    Recently EDF is working with Corn Belt farmers to reduce fertilizer runoff into the Mississippi and the Gulf of Mexico. Using less fertilizer saves money for farmers, and it promotes healthy soil and clean water. A goal of the program is to shrink the dead zone caused by man-made chemicals in the Mississippi Delta to “a safe level.” Is that enough? Even if it’s not, it’s still worth taking steps now, until we can do better in the future.

How it should be done

Yes, a garden can be both sustainable and beautiful. My faith in this ideal got a big boost Saturday when I visited garden designer Robin Wilkerson’s enchanting home garden in Lincoln, Massachusetts. She opened her site to visitors as part of a native plant tour organized by the Ecological Landscape Alliance.

The entrance to Robin's sustainable garden

      Robin’s house and garden sit on old farmland that had been taken over by nonnative invasive plants. For 20 years she has been reclaiming expanding portions of the lot for her organic garden, tearing out unwanted plants and sheet mulching with cardboard and wood chips to smother unwanted vegetation. She grows a large vegetable garden, grapes, berries, and numerous fruit trees.

Beds of bird- and pollinator-friendly shrubs and perennials lead to fruit trees in the background

    Unlike me, she’s resisted planting tall trees that would shade sunny areas. Her flowers enjoy full sun. There’s also a shady woodland section. 

    I had attended a workshop Robin taught at New England Wild Flower Society’s Garden in the Woods on native shrubs for garden use. Her enthusiasm for these plants was contagious and reinforced by a tour of the garden on a lovely June day. Afterward, though, second thoughts set in. 

    Many of the plants she’d showcased had medium-green, medium-sized leaves. They might have pretty fruits and bright fall foliage, but their flowers were often small, off-white, and not very eye-catching. I thought that a garden of these shrubs would look like a typical New England woodland edge, generally pleasing but not particularly striking or ornamental.

    Seeing Robin’s garden, though, I suddenly got it.

A peach tree, ornamental banana, and hanging basket of calibrachoa blend with native honeysuckle and phlox

While supporting biodiversity and welcoming wildlife, she’s combined natives and nonnatives in a harmonious blend of flowering plants from New England and around the world. The natives she’s planted are shown at their best through thoughtful combinations of shapes, sizes, and leaf colors and textures. 

It's all in the design

    She has large, thriving patches of a long list of pollinator-friendly plants. Plentiful fruit beckons to both humans and birds. 

Peaches!

She’s lined the lowest point in the lot, the back border, with a barrier made from pruned twigs and branches; 

This homemade fence provides shelter for insects and other animals

in addition to demarcating the lot line and preventing erosion, this provides a home for insects and other animals. For birds, she keeps several dead trees topped at around 20 feet standing behind the garage. These snags are valuable to woodpeckers and others that feed on insects beneath the bark and build their nests in tree cavities.

Dead trees offer food and habitat for birds

    Insects were everywhere. In addition to the many bees working flowering perennials, butterflies were wafting all over the yard, 

Black swallowtail nectaring on a tithonia flower

and I spotted a hummingbird moth. That was just while strolling around gawking at the flowers; I’m sure closer observation would find that this garden hosts a full range of insects in dynamic balance.

    Robin’s is the kind of garden I aspire to. The visit immediately got me thinking about how to emulate her dense plantings and thoughtful combinations of natives and exotics. Next, the front yard!

Energy conservation--mine

I spent much of last weekend bashing out a new slide talk for garden clubs. When I got home Monday from presenting it for the first time, what I most wanted to do was get out into the garden. I’d been harboring some resentment about spending nice days indoors working on the talk, although this was totally due to my own procrastination.

Stuck inside looking out

 

   The only downside of starting work in the garden at two in the afternoon was the outside temperature. It was in the high eighties. My motivation to work outdoors drops off sharply when the temperature passes 80. On cool spring and fall days, my idea of heaven is to be out in the garden. In summer heat, not so much.

In May, it's great to be outside

    I’ve certainly got sweat equity. I’ve put in many hours toiling over the vegetable garden under the hot sun. The only reason my skin in the game isn’t lobster-red is fanatical application of sunscreen. But when it’s hot and there’s no shade, gardening stops being fun and becomes just hard work.

I can relate

    This makes me feel like the consummate wimp, of course. People in Phoenix and Savannah probably don’t let a little heat keep them from tending their gardens. I recently heard an Arizonan describe getting up at 3:00 a.m. to do her outside chores before the 120-degree heat of the day sets in.

    That’s the approach I’ve decided to try. I won’t be getting up before dawn. But if I can be in the garden in the relative cool of 6:30 on days when the temperature is heading for the nineties, I can put in a good two hours before wilting.

Sunrise at home isn't as alluring as in Banff

    Part of this new plan is a liberating decision not to carry out my usual morning routine. No reading the paper over breakfast, just a quick cup of tea. Sunscreen on my face only. The dog can come outside with me, but she’ll have to wait for her walk.

Later

    So far I’ve done this twice, when I had work to do on my new planting project that couldn’t wait, but the weather wasn’t cooperating. Both times have been fun and productive. By 8:30 or 9:00, the day already felt rich with accomplishment.

    What does this have to do with sustainable gardening? A gardener’s energy and enthusiasm are finite resources too, like fossil fuels and peat moss. If sustainable gardening is such a harsh mistress that it demands working in the garden at the hottest time of the hottest days, it’s likely to find few lasting converts among home gardeners. 

 

Catching more gardeners with honey

    Monday afternoon my desire to plant shrubs trumped the heat, but the sweat running down my face reminded me of why early morning gardening had seemed like a better idea. 
  
    In deciding what we’ll to do to be part of the solution for environmental problems, each of us makes our own calculations. How much time, energy, money, and hard work are we willing to invest?  We might as well be realistic about what we expect from ourselves.

What does sustainable mean?

Happy New Year! For 2017’s first post, I’m going back to basics to clarify what I mean by sustainable gardening. 

Composting is key, but there's more

The term “sustainable” gets such broad use these days that it’s losing meaning.

     For example, did you know that Poland Spring water is “sustainably sourced from local Maine springs?” That’s what it says on the bottle. There’s a lot the label doesn’t say.

     It doesn’t say that Poland Spring has been owned for a number of years by the Nestle Corporation, an international bad actor that came to attention in the 1970s for causing infant deaths in the Third World by marketing infant formula to mothers who didn’t have access to safe drinking water. The babies could have lived safely with breastfeeding. 

    The label doesn’t address the impact of the the huge Poland Spring operation on Maine towns where Nestle extracts 800 million gallons annually from aquifers and ships it out on a fleet of heavy trucks. 

                          2013 Press Herald File Photo/John Patriquin

    Perhaps most importantly, it doesn’t say that plastic water bottles are some of the most environmentally problematic products we use. 

     Riverkeeper, an environmental watchdog for the Hudson, offers some eye-opening statistics about bottled water. The one that really got to me was this: “The energy it takes to transport the water to market, to chill the bottles, and collect the empties is the energy equivalent of filling each bottle a quarter of the way with oil.”  

There's no "away" for plastic water bottles

Whatever Poland Spring means by “sustainable,” it’s not what I mean. 

    Getting back to the garden, my definition of sustainable gardening is that it:
•    imitates natural processes
•    emphasizes cycling of materials
•    minimizes waste and energy use
That’s easy to say, but real gardening choices depend on weighing very local considerations.

    Say I’m choosing garden structures such as the tuteurs I bought last summer from Terra Trellis (my talented sister-in-law Jennifer Gilbert Asher is the designer and proprietor).  

I upgraded to an elegant steel tuteur like this one

The wooden structures I’d been using for vines such as cucumbers held out for a while, but as untreated wood will, they eventually began to rot and fall apart. 

The wooden trellis didn't last

The new ones are made of powder-coated steel.  That means they’ll last for the rest of my gardening life. But it also means that more energy went into their manufacture.

     Would it have been more sustainable to buy wooden ones every few years? That would depend on such factors as where the wood comes from, how it’s harvested, and what processes are involved in building the metal and wooden structures, all unknowns to me. 

     Perhaps most sustainable of all would be to build trellises from local scrap wood or straight branches pruned off my trees. That would tax another finite resource, my time and energy.

     I don’t think there’s a single correct choice. In each situation, we have to weigh our priorities and find the best solution for our time, place, resources, and stage of life. If we do our best to make informed choices, I believe we’ll gradually progress toward more sustainable practices.