"The nonprofit group Wild Ones offers
a free library of designs, with plants specific to your area — and you don’t
have to be a member to use it.
Turning your front yard into
something other than a manicured greensward sounds like a bold new idea, even
today. Imagine how it felt, in 1992, to see former lawns in Wisconsin that were
already many years into their transition to prairie-like spaces, with no turf
grass in sight.
Positively radical.
I was collaborating on a book called
“The Natural Habitat Garden” with Ken Druse, a writer and photographer,
traveling across the country to see the vanguard of the native-plant movement.
We spent a day north of Milwaukee with Lorrie Otto, an early leader in what
became a nationwide push to ban the pesticide DDT and a force in the formative
years of Wild Ones, a membership organization promoting native landscapes. Ms.
Otto sent us to visit other members’ home landscapes that were wild-ish, like
hers — gardens unlike any we had ever seen.
Education is at the heart of the
nonprofit organization’s mission, and Ms. Otto, who died in 2010, developed
some of its earliest programming. The group turned 45 in July; it also just hit
11,000 members, up from fewer than 4,000 before the pandemic.
Those members belong to 125 chapters
in 36 states (and both of those numbers have doubled since 2020). Members
participate in garden tours and workshops, seed collection and exchanges, and
plant sales.
They also take on community projects, restoring degraded
landscapes including vacant lots, street medians, schoolyards and business-park
lawns.
All of this falls within the group’s
mission: to “promote native landscapes through education, advocacy and
collaborative action.”
But one of the most popular programs
involves maintaining a library of free, downloadable garden designs for
specific regions — available to nonmembers, as well. The designs debuted in
2021 in a moment of rapid growth, said Sally Wencel, a member of the Tennessee
Valley chapter and a past president of the national organization who was
instrumental in developing the program. It was meant to answer the question
that members were frequently asking: What’s the best way to use native plants?
“We were preaching to the choir,”
Ms. Wencel said, referring to the group’s native-focused member base. “And they
said, ‘Yeah, this is great, but help us with how to use them in the landscape.’
The designs do that.”
The validation: As of January,
84,000 downloads of those designs had been recorded.
Getting Started With Ecological
Design
The library currently has 20 designs
for various locations, including Tallahassee, Fla.; Tucson, Ariz.; and Boston.
(And, yes, Milwaukee.)
Five more are coming soon, each created by a
professional landscape designer with expertise in the specific ecoregion.
Preston Montague, of Durham, N.C., a
landscape architect and artist who teaches at North Carolina Agricultural and
Technical State University, in Greensboro, is among them. He contributed the
Greensboro design, which he said is appropriate for landscapes between the
foothills and the coastal plain of the Piedmont area, from Georgia into
Pennsylvania.
The plant lists provided with each
design make great cheat sheets for those who want to familiarize themselves
with some of the best native choices for their own home landscape. (The Wild
Ones website also provides a state-by-state list of native plant nurseries
where they can be found.)
Mr. Montague’s plan, like those of
many other contributors, comes with guidance on site considerations and
preparation. He recommends studying the space for a year before planting
begins, to record its microclimates and find patches of existing habitat that
can be connected to the new design — “even if it’s simply a small tree by the
street,” he said.
Many designers, including Mr.
Montague, have done webinars to introduce the concepts in their plans, as part
of the Wild Ones “Meet the Designers” series. (All are archived on the group’s
YouTube channel.) Plans from Heather McCargo, the founder of Wild Seed Project
in Maine, and the prairie-style designer and author Benjamin Vogt are being
added this fall. Ms. McCargo will kick off hers with a free webinar about the
benefit of hedgerows on Sept. 19; on Oct. 24, Mr. Vogt will do one about matrix
landscape designs — aesthetically pleasing, high-density plantings inspired by
natural ecosystems.
Mr. Montague said he found the
collaboration an especially good fit, and not just because he shares the
group’s commitment to promoting native landscaping: “We are both trying to
translate very complicated ideas of landscape ecology into an approach that
gardeners of all skill levels can deploy,” he said.
Unless gardeners develop familiarity
with their locally appropriate plant palette and get a solid introduction to
some foundational principles of ecological design, those goals cannot be
realized. “Native plants assembled according to native community structures and
densities can be more complicated, can be a little hairier than perhaps more
conventionally organized gardens,” he said.
In a classical bed design, for
example, you might put “three of this here and five of that there, and one big
thing here,” he said. But these landscapes are more diverse.
“The conventional planting-design
approach reminds me of my approach to acrylic paintings, which distills detail
to simply a few layers overlapping,” Mr. Montague explained. His approach to
oil painting, by comparison, “requires a lot of mixing and has a gradient of
colors across the canvas.”
He encourages us to embrace this
complexity — as if our planting designs were rendered in oil, “using a million
strokes,” he said. “Dense and diverse plantings don’t reveal the weeds or gaps
in seasonality like simpler, conventional gardens can.”
Providing Ecosystem Services,
Beautifully
Art analogies aside, Wild Ones
members and the group’s collaborating designers are quick to stress that this
is not purely ornamental horticulture. They are striving to create plantings
that provide ecosystem services, Mr. Montague said, not simply aesthetic
pleasure. Although “gorgeous” is an important goal, too.
This dual focus is why he favors shrubs
like inkberry (Ilex glabra) and various viburnums that offer resources to
pollinators and fruit to birds, while serving as space-defining hedging that
responds well to shaping with a string trimmer. He calls such shrubs “plastic,”
because their short internodes — the length of stem between nodes, or leaf
attachments — make them well adapted to shearing.
Similarly, he recommends Cherokee
sedge (Carex cherokeensis) as “a fantastic Liriope replacement and a sturdy
all-purpose ground cover in many cases.” Unlike the ubiquitous lilyturf
(Liriope), an Asian native, the sedge is a larval host for certain Lepidoptera,
and its seed is enjoyed by birds and small mammals.
For maximum ecological benefit, Mr.
Montague said, more is better; plant density and diversity are required. He
advises planting lavishly, using a mix of seed and small plants, or plugs.
“I find that if you supersaturate
beds, particularly with seed, and then with a lot of plugs to exercise some
design control,” he said, “you may discover that actually the beds begin to
sort themselves out based on competition. It takes a few years, but the species
that will sustainably thrive in your garden will reveal themselves.”
Don’t start too “strict and clean
and tidy,” he advised. “Basically, I want to empower people to make a mess. And
then you just manage the mess.”
He encourages us to “stop thinking
about plants as discrete objects and really think about plantings as vegetative
bodies,” he said, adding: “If we’re not going to be fussy about species
composition, then just think about these vegetative bodies as major shapes, and
how those major shapes aesthetically organize a space or produce a reaction
when viewed.”
From that viewpoint, it’s all right
(and inevitable) for one species to disappear from the mix, and for another to
gain territory. “I don’t want people to get too overwhelmed by the whys — just
allow,” he said, meaning let things unfold.
Once all that seed and those plugs
take hold, “you can just garden by subtraction,” Mr. Montague said. But he
doesn’t subtract in the conventional sense, by pulling unwanted plants, a
practice that backfires, bringing more weed seeds to the surface, where they
germinate and compound the infestation.
“Our constant pulling was creating
bigger weed problems,” he said. Instead, he “flosses or tweezes” unwanted
species with the string trimmer, to give the desired species surrounding them
the edge.
“You walk through those vegetative
bodies with a string trimmer,” he said, “and if you just zap those species you
don’t want, the species you leave alone tend to fill in the gap and dominate.”
Nutsedge, Bermuda grass and crab
grass are also on his “just allow” list. “They’re going to be in the matrix
anyway,” he said. “If you selectively zap them, flossing them out of the
situation, they’ll remain, but in a better-behaved condition.”
It’s all in the re-education of the
gardener.
“If I had a big word to underline in
bold, it’s teaching people to allow,” Mr. Montague said. Allow the looser style
to take hold; allow the diversity to return, as in those Wisconsin yards and
others that followed their lead over the decades.
But be forewarned: This can be
habit-forming.
“Once I got started gardening this
way, I got bored to tears with conventional landscape planting,” Mr. Montague
said. “I just couldn’t do it anymore.”" [1]
