conservation Archives

Creating Nature in Our Communities

“Imagine a therapy that had no known side effects, was readily available, and could improve your cognitive functioning at zero cost. Such a therapy has been known to philosophers, writers, and laypeople alike: interacting with nature. Many have suspected that nature can promote improved cognitive functioning and overall well-being, and these effects have recently been documented.”

-Berman, Marc G, John Jonides, and Stephen Kaplan. 2008. “The Cognitive Benefits of Interacting With Nature” Psychological Science 19: 1207-1212

By now, most of us have heard about hospital patients with views of trees recovering faster than those with poor (or no) views from their rooms. These effects are not only very real, but they’re part of a rising tide of research that’s identifying the same pattern over and over: encounters with nature, even on a very small scale, can have significant benefits on our well-being.

But those encounters are exceedingly fleeting or nonexistent for the growing numbers of people around the world who live and work in urban environments.

We need to be more focused on the broader idea of bringing nature – including native plant communities and the beneficial wildlife they attract – into communities in as many ways as possible. Not just into our parks and green spaces, but into our schools, hospitals, mental health centers, offices, streetscapes, and commercial spaces. It’s not only important from a sustainability perspective, but also a human one, as researchers keep finding more and more mental and physical health benefits stemming from even brief encounters with nature.

Just the Tip of the Iceberg:

A meta-analysis of 143 studies found wide-ranging health benefits associated with green space exposure, including “statistically significant reductions in diastolic blood pressure, salivary cortisol and heart rate.” [see sources below]
Populations that are exposed to the greenest and most natural environments have the “lowest levels of health inequality related to income deprivation.”
Access to green spaces reduces stress and stress-related illness for urban dwellers “regardless of the informant’s age, sex and socio-economic status.”
Interactions with nature “improves cognition and affect for individuals with depression.”
“Children with ADHD who play regularly in green play settings have milder symptoms than children who play in built outdoor and indoor settings. This is true for all income groups and for both boys and girls.”
Employees with views of nature from their workspaces had higher job satisfaction and lower stress and took fewer sick days than those without nature views at the same companies.
Populations that live close to trees showed 8-12% lower mortality rates.
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Nature in the Built Environment

At Wild Roots, we believe that by incorporating naturalistic plant communities into the built environment, we can all experience these benefits.

What do we mean by nature? You don’t have to visit a wilderness or National Park to find it, but it’s more than just open green space. And it’s definitely not beds of mulch with a few of the same old plants poking up at widely spaced intervals.

We believe that to have the greatest effect, we need to create thriving plant communities wherever we can that change with the seasons and over time. These areas should be alive with wildlife, including beneficial insects like butterflies, bumblebees, and other pollinators, as well as native songbirds. We also believe the plantings should reflect the natural landscapes of their regions, one of the many reasons we prefer to use native plants whenever possible.

These benefits can and should be available to everybody. Contact us to discuss how a dose of nature can benefit your community!

Sources

Twohig-Bennet, Caoimhe and Andy Jones. 2018. “The health benefits of the great outdoors: A systematic review and meta-analysis of greenspace exposure and health outcomes” Environmental Research 166: 628-637
Mitchell, Richard and Frank Popham. 2008. “Effect of exposure to natural environment on health inequalities: an observational population study” The Lancet 372: 1655-1660
Grahn, Patrik and Ulrika A Stigsdotter. 2003. “Landscape planning and stress” Urban Forestry and Urban Greening 2: 1-18
Berman, Marc G, Ethan Kross, Katherine M. Krpan, Mary K. Askren, Aleah Burson, Patricia J. Deldin, Stephen Kaplan, Lindsay Sherdell, Ian H. Gotlib, and John Jonides. 2012. “Interacting with Nature Improves Cognition and Affect for Individuals with Depression” Journal of Affective Disorders 140(3): 300-305
Taylor, Andrea Faber and Frances E. (Ming) Kuo. 2011. “Could Exposure to Everyday Green Spaces Help Treat ADHD? Evidence from Children’s Play Settings” Applied Psychology: Health and Well‐Being 3(3): 281-303
Shin, Won Sop. 2007. “The influence of forest view through a window on job satisfaction and job stress” Scandinavian Journal of Forest Research 22: 248-253
Elzeyadi, Ihab. 2011. “Daylighting-Bias and Biophilia: Quantifying the Impact of Daylighting on Occupants Health” USGBC
Crouse, Dan L, Lauren Pinault, Adele Balram, Perry Hystad, Paul A Peters, Hong Chen, et al. 2017 “Urban greenness and mortality in Canada’s largest cities: a national cohort study” The Lancet Planetary Health 1: 289-297

Plant This, Not That: Eco-Friendly Alternatives to Invasive Plants

An invasive species is one that is not only non-native to a region, but escapes cultivation and damages local ecosystems. They out-compete native species and disrupt the food web, causing harm to the environment, economy, and human health (such as water quality and increased populations of pests like ticks).

Once you get to know the more common invasive species, you start to notice them everywhere. One prevalent example is English ivy. When you see that plant wrapped around the trunks of trees, crawling over branches, it’s killing that tree. Not very charming, right? Learn a simple way to remove English ivy here.

As more people learn about the havok invasive plants wreak, groups are coming together to take action. Invasive strike teams here in New Jersey and across the country do the challenging but important work of identifying and removing the plants to protect our ecosystems. There’s even an app for reporting invasives in New Jersey.

Still, it never ceases to amaze me how many of these plants are still widely available in garden centers and used by professional landscapers. Bad habits are hard to break, and some species simply look familiar to homeowners who have no idea about the damage caused.

That’s changing, however, as interest in protecting the environment and planting natives grows. You can do right by wildlife and your local ecosystem, and encourage your neighbors to do the same, using these native alternatives to invasive species.

Native plant alternatives to invasive species

Here, we provide lots of examples of native plants that share certain visual characteristics with a common invasive, starting with English Ivy. Give some of these beautiful native alternatives a try. Not only will wildlife be happier, I think you’ll end up preferring them too.

English Ivy Alternatives

If you like English Ivy, a reminder of classic English gardens that really just strangling everything it climbs, there are a ton of alternatives you’ll love:

Our native pachysandra is a great alternative to invasive ivy

Allegheny spurge (Pachysandra procumbens), an evergreen groundcover that does well in shade but does need moisture. And guess what – this is a great alternative to Japanese Pachysandra too!

Green and gold

Green-and-gold (Chrysogonum virginianum): This is an evergreen groundcover that produces masses of yellow spring flowers that bloom from April through October. You can divide larger clumps to cover more space over time.

Foamflower

Foamflower (Tiarella cordifolia) – One of our favorite spring bloomers, foamflower has lovely, ivy-like leaves and beautiful white and pink spiked flowers in the spring. This one spreads nicely to form masses in shady areas, but it is not evergreen like ivy.

Wild Ginger (Asarum canadense) – This groundcover has lovely heart-shaped leaves, but it does die back in the fall. In the summer, though, the butterflies love its small brownish-red flowers and it hosts the Pipevine swallowtail butterfly.

Virginia creeper in the fall

Virginia creeper (Parthenocissus quinquefolia) – This baby is aggressive like ivy, but will not kill the trees it climbs. It also has vibrant fall color just as other plants are fading, and it is very wildlife friendly. Plus, if you let it climb walls, it won’t damage masonry like ivy will.

Barren strawberry

Appalachian Barren Strawberry (Waldsteinia fragaroides, Geum fragaroides) – Here’s a great semi-evergreen groundcover with bright flowers that thrives in sun or part-shade.

Japanese Honeysuckle Alternatives:

The obvious choice is Coral Honeysuckle (Lonicera sempervirens). It’s a hummingbird-feeding vine with blueish-green leaves and coral flowers that are way prettier in the garden than the invasive variety. (I really don’t think that’s subjective either!)

Butterfly Bush Alternatives (Buddleia spp.):

Summersweet

Consider Summersweet (Clethra alnifolia). It does well in sun or shade, and has spike-shaped flowers which attract a ton of pollinators. Or if you have a large space and want to go bold, how about a Bottlebrush Buckeye (Aesculus parviflora)? It’s a southeast native that will form a large thicket, about 12-15 feet across, and you won’t believe how many butterflies you’ll find on its dramatic flowers.

Japanese Wisteria Alternative (Wisteria chinensis or W. japonica):

There is a beautiful native Wisteria that’s not invasive called American Wisteria (Wisteria frutescens). Shocking, right? This is such a clear example, like coral honeysuckle, of the insanity of replacing native varieties with destructive species.

American Wisteria

Spiraea (Spiraea japonica) Alternative:

New Jersey Tea

New Jersey Tea (Ceanothus americanus) – This nitrogent-fixing low shrub is a similarly shaped native alternative to spiraea. It was coined “New Jersey tea,” because it was a (caffeine-free) substitute for tea during the American Revolution.

Sweetspire (Itea virginica) works great as well. These are best planted in masses, and can grow to 8 feet tall with small, white flowers that boom into 4-inch spires, though more compact cultivars like ‘Henry’s Garnet’ will work for smaller spaces.

Barberry Alternatives (Berberis thunbergii):

While most of the exotics on this list are a problem partly because they don’t support wildlife, barberry has been shown to serve as excellent habitat for a certain kind of wildlife – the species of tick that carries Lyme disease.

Thankfully, there are a lot of superior native shrub alternatives to consider: Ninebark (Physocarpus opulifolius), Winterberry (Ilex verticillata), Dwarf Witchalder (Fothergilla gardennii), and the aforementioned Sweetspire and New Jersey Tea. Barberry is a plant that is everywhere, and the only plant I really encourage people to rip out immediately if they have it in order to reduce tick habitat.

Ninebark ‘Summer Wine’

Winterberry

Dwarf Fothergilla

Callery or Bradford Pear Tree Alternatives (Pyrus calleryana):

These popular street trees might have nice spring blooms, but they’ve colonized many of our woodlands open fields. Serviceberries (Amelanchier spp.) definitely fit the bill as a great native alternative, and you’ll get edible fruit to boot. Eastern redbuds (Cercis canadensis) are a gorgeous alternative as well.

Canadian Serviceberry

There’s a world of fantastic natives out there if you decide to branch out from those boring big box garden center invasives. And if you need help tracking down any of these or planning out your own sustainable yard, contact us.

It’s Spring! Pre-order New Jersey Native Garden Kits and More

Our popular garden kits are ready for pre-order!

Hopefully you’re aware of the benefits of native plants and their value to pollinators already. But if your yard is lacking in those areas, it can feel daunting to start from scratch. That’s why we’ve put together two ready-to-plant pollinator garden kits, one for sunny spots and one for shady spots, to help you turn a patch of yard into a beautiful, sustainable wildlife habitat.

Both kits and trays are made up of landscape plugs, an economical short-cut to establishing larger-scale plantings that are usually harder to come by outside of the landscape trade. They’re much cheaper than full-sized plants and nearly will reach full size nearly as fast. Each kit will fill a 25-square-foot (5′ by 5′) and comes with a planting guide and sample layouts.

So yup, that’s a whole garden’s worth of plants in that box in the photo.

Our plants have been selected for their beauty, their wildlife value, and their suitability to low-maintenance plantings in South Jersey. In other words, we chose these plants because they are native to this region – they’ve evolved to grow well here without much fuss (no green thumb required). The kits also offer a succession of bloom times and plant forms so your garden will show off new beautiful elements all throughout the growing season.

You’ll need to order by 11:59 p.m. on Thursday May 2nd, and plants can be picked up in Collingswood on Saturday, May 11th – Mother’s Day weekend.

If you’ve been thinking about starting a pollinator garden or replacing part of your lawn with hardy native perennials, now’s a great time to do it. For those of you interested in Collingswood Community Habitat Project or the National Wildlife Federation Backyard Habitat Project, our kits would get you one or two steps closer to certification. Oh, and as your garden grows, also consider adding your property to the Million Pollinator Garden Challenge map.

Order Now!

Ice Age Sand Dunes: Hidden Gems In the Pines

Walking down a dirt road through the pine barrens in Brendan Byrne State Forest, all of a sudden, the woods open up, and we’re standing in a sandy open area with virtually no vegetation.? People lucky enough to be familiar with the area know that “pine barrens” is a bit of a misnomer given the vibrant plant and animal communities that thrive there.? But my first impression of this clearing is that it’s, well, pretty barren.

A small group of participants in the Rutgers Environmental Stewards Program is touring the pine barrens, and Emile DeVito, ecologist and Manager of Science and Stewardship for the New Jersey Conservation Foundation is our guide.? And we couldn’t ask for a more knowledgeable one.

What we’re standing on, Dr. DeVito informs us, is a paleolithic sand dune, a remnant of the forces that shaped the landscape during the last ice age.? While the ice sheets themselves never reached this far south, the spot where we were standing was only about 70 miles from a wall of ice thousands of feet high.? Hurricane-force winds regularly scoured the sandy former sea floor that makes up southern New Jersey’s coastal plain.? Sand from wetlands was piled up into nearby dunes, many of which persist today.

And sure enough, just a couple hundred yards from the dune area is a vernal pool.? Inundated in the winter and spring but mostly dry in the summer, it has no outlet or connection to nearby waterways, and therefore no fish.? So it makes an ideal breeding ground for frogs and toads.? I made a mental note to bring Mae to this spot in the spring to hear the frog symphony.

Though it looks like a regular meadow now, this vernal pool is saturated in the springtime and is teeming with amphibian life.

As for the dune itself, despite appearances, it’s far from barren – in fact it’s a haven for several rare species.? In this particualr area, Dr. DeVito points out a population of Pickering’s Morning Glory (Stylisma pickeringii), one of the many rare species of plants that can be found in the pines.? There are only a handful of populations left, and off-road vehicles are a particular threat.? The plants were going dormant now, but we did see a number of seedpods, which will hopefully lead to new seedlings in the spring.

These Pickering’s morning glory vines don’t look like much as they’ve entered dormancy. But they’re a very special plant that needs to be protected.? Here they’re growing across a carpet of mint-green reindeer lichen.

Dr. DeVito also pointed out the den of a northern pine snake, another threatened species and an excellent burrower.? Growing up to five feet long, their coloring allows them to blend easily with the forest floor.? Off-road vehicles are a threat to the snakes as well, as are poachers (they’re prized as pets for their docility and long life span).? The New Jersey Conservation Foundation is using radio transmitters to track a number of female pine snakes to identify and protect their winter dens, where up to 30 individuals will pass the colder months.? On our dune, we can see that a female had laid eggs this year and the young had shed their skins upon emergence.? Didn’t spot any actual snakes though.

The entrance to an egg chamber of a northern pine snake. If you look closely in the vegetation, you can see some of the skins shed by the baby snakes.

Later that day, at another spot a few miles away, we did get a chance to radio track a female snake.? After tromping through the woods for about 20 minutes listening for the beeps of the transponder, we were able to locate the snake.? Since it was warm, Dr. DeVito was hoping it would be out and about, but she was below ground in her burrow.? This particular snake was living very close to a popular area for off-roading spot, so we hoped it could stay safe as it moved about in search of food and a winter den.

Other ancient dunes are scattered around the pine barrens, and they’re yet another great reminder of the surprises these landscapes always seem to have in store.

How can you tell where the dune ends? Just look at where the vegetation starts back up again.

I looked down and thought, “Cool, the mist looks neat on those spiderwebs.” Dr. DeVito, on the other hand, pointed out that today would be a great day to study the spiders’ territoriality.

New Studies Weigh Ecological Value of Native Cultivars

I recently wrote about the key differences between native cultivars and straight species and why we should care. My conclusion was that while it wasn’t necessary to completely eschew cultivars of native species (sometimes referred to as nativars), if you wanted your garden to provide crucial ecosystem services, like supporting pollinators, you should be sure to include a significant number of straight species plants, ideally from local ecotypes, or geographic origins, if possible.

It makes intuitive sense that if you want to support wildlife and natural processes (and you should!), you’d want the plants you select to reflect those processes, as opposed to choosing genetically indistinct clones that may exhibit unusual characteristics. But is there a scientific basis for this?

Luckily this is a question that a few intrepid scientists are beginning to address. Doug Tallamy, entomologist and celebrated author of Bringing Nature Home, has been studying caterpillar interactions with native plants and their cultivars alongside graduate student Emily Baisden at Delaware’s Mt. Cuba Center. And Annie White recently completed doctoral research at the University of Vermont which tracked pollinator visits to straight species and cultivars in the context of pollinator restoration projects. Hopefully this will be the start of even more robust research, but early results, which should be of great interest to land managers, the ecological restoration community, and even home gardeners, are highlighting the value of straight species while not dismissing cultivars out of hand.

Tallamy’s findings are preliminary, but they show that different characteristics of cultivars can have different effects on how they fit into the ecosystem. In terms of cultivars with distinct plant size or habits, caterpillars had no preference between them and the straight species. The same went for specimens selected for disease resistance, which is good news for the folks working to restore elm and chestnut populations. Leaf color, however, was an area where differences started to come through. Cultivars with purple leaves, for instance, were not nearly as attractive as their green straight species counterparts. This could be the result of visual cues, or as Tallamy suggests, the unpalatibility of the specific chemical compounds that lead to those unusual colors. Variegation in leaves (streaks of color) was less conclusive. Some caterpillar species actually preferred the variegated cultivars, though most avoided them (and since they contain less chlorophyll, they’re probably less nutritious).

White’s research in Vermont focused not on caterpillars and leaves, but on adult insect visits to flowers during the pollination process. “Because cultivars have been selected primarily based on ornamental and cultural traits,” she writes, “it is not clear whether or not they perform the same ecological roles as the species, which evolved naturally in the landscape.” To test this performance, she painstakingly counted thousands of visits by bees, moths, butterflies and flies to the flower varieties she was studying. Her findings were for a general preference for the straight species plants among pollinators, but, she writes, “not always, and not exclusively.” Among the species and their cultivars that she studied, all commonly found in restoration projects and home landscapes, she observed “seven native species to be visited significantly more frequently by all insect pollinators (combined) than their cultivars, four were visited equally, and one native cultivar was visited more frequently than the native species. Bees (both native and non-native) and moths/butterflies exhibited similar preferences, whereas flies showed no preference between the native species and the native cultivar.” The differences could be profound in some cases. During her observation periods, she recorded 1,414 pollinator visits to Achillea millefolium (common yarrow), but only 119 to the popular ‘Strawberry Selection’ cultivar. She cautions that further research is required to account for the wide array of species and cultivars as well as regional differences, but her data do certainly support a more widespread use of native straight species plants.

This coneflower cultivar, ‘Double Delight,’ has a double flowered structure. White found that this major morphological difference from the straight species plant made it difficult for pollinators to physically access the nectar. Image: Ltshears, Wikimedia Commons

And the insects’ preferences notwithstanding, both Tallamy and White warn about the lack of genetic diversity that comes from widespread plantings of cultivars. ?It is a bad idea to load the landscape with plants that have no genetic variability,? says Tallamy. ?I?m not a hardliner on this issue, but gardeners ought to have access to straight species. We have to convince the nursery industry that native plants are about more than just looks.?

In my own experience this can be a problem. While straight species plants are generally available to the restoration community, home gardeners will often have a hard time finding them compared to cultivars. In order to find many of the plants for our own garden, we’ve had to seek them out through wholesale growers that typically don’t do much retail business, along with the one-day native plant sales that many nonprofits offer. And there is certainly a growing desire among home gardeners to have a positive impact on wildlife, especially pollinators, so the overabundance of cultivars in the market may mitigate the potential impact they can have.

Like Tallamy, I see no need to be a hardliner on this issue. If you want an accent that lends a splash of unexpected color, if you’re gardening in a small space and need a more compact shrub, or if you’ve had issues with certain pests or diseases, there’s no reason not to make use of native cultivars in your garden that have those desired characteristics. But if knitting your garden into the wider ecosystem is important to you, making heavy use of straight species should be a key part of that strategy.

Header image: Luckily this tiger swallowtail didn’t mind that we planted phlox ‘Jeana’ instead of the straight species in our garden.

America, The Beautiful: Show Pride in our Natural Heritage

It’s the Fourth of July, a chance for all of us to come together in our red, white, and blue and agree that despite all of the divisiveness that’s got us down, we love this country and are proud to call it our home.

The spirit of today has got me thinking about our garden, as usual, and dreaming of what it might be like if everyone celebrating with juicy watermelon and good beer and patriotic songs and parades small and big would have that same pride and sense of place when planning their home and community landscapes. Often when we talk about our natural heritage, the conversation centers around how critical it is to protect our national and state parks. But what sense does it make to stop there? If you believe that gorgeous and diverse forests, wetlands, deserts and prairies are part of our identity, why not promote that same message through your own ecological restoration efforts?

?Here is your country. Cherish these natural wonders, cherish the natural resources, cherish the history and romance as a sacred heritage, for your children and your children’s children. Do not let selfish men or greedy interests skin your country of its beauty, its riches or its romance.? ? Theodore Roosevelt

I find it funny?and sometimes sad and often frustrating, depending on my mood?that we hang flags and talk about who and what is un-American, and then we rip up, replace, or pave over our natural areas with little thought about what it means to strip the country of this incredible part of our past.

Take a minute to dream about what your piece of land might have looked like before past generations replaced it with composed gardens meant to mimic the places from which they came. Imagine that 40 million miles of hard-working, air purifying, wildlife-supporting natural beauty we paved over with cement.

Now that’s not to say that there’s a single specific pristine time to go back to. Native Americans transformed the land for their needs long before the Europeans began dismantling the massive hardwood forests that covered the East Coast and plowing over the prairies of the Midwest. And prior to all that, there was a mile-thick ice sheet just a little ways north of our little town. But the scale of the transformations of the past 100 (heck, even 60) years have left our ecosystems reeling.

If that mental exercise of imaging what was and what is today brought a sense of calm quickly replaced by panic, take comfort knowing that you can actually do something about it.

How cool would it be if everyone waving American flags, donning patriotic outfits, and parading down Main Street today took a little time to learn more about how they might help preserve the United States’ natural beauty?

As with any movement or area of interest, there are the fanatical: those who don’t believe in planting a single seed that would not have been here without our help. And while I respect that, Tim and I suggest and practice a less strict approach that simply requires you to research what plant species were once prevalent in your area and plant them in a design that makes you happy. Keep it neat and tidy if that’s your thing.

I love the wild look. It makes me happy. I drive around wishing I could turn all the strips of useless turf grass and overly manicured spaces to lush, green, gorgeous landscapes, which is why I’m so proud that New Jersey recently passed a bill requiring three major statewide transportation agencies to use only native plants when landscaping.

All of that said, we’ve still got a ways to go here at home. We have time and budget constraints that have made it necessary to plant from seed or plugs, and do what we can every year rather than what we want to do all at once.

Start with a few plants if that’s all you can do right now, and be proud. You’ll be joining fellow citizens from across the country coming together to restore, protect, and conserve America, the beautiful.

Image: Cole Thomas’s The Course of the Empire: The Arcadian or Pastoral State, 1836

Fight Climate Change at Home: Landscaping with Native Grasses

There’s no denying that we need a?government dedicated to keeping our water and air clean, and one that’s willing to join the global movement to combat climate change. At least there’s no denying that here within the walls of our home. We need policies that push us toward a clean energy future, and more politicians talking about green infrastructure jobs. We need all of this, and yet I also believe great things happen when communities of individuals decide to make a change at a smaller level.

If you feel stressed the [expletive] out about the destruction of our earth, yet look out the windows of your home to little more than a turf?lawn, here’s an idea: channel some of that anxiety into making an impact in your own yard. Get off the internet, go outside, and plant some native grasslands.

At the Native Plant Society of New Jersey spring conference, nurseryman and botanist Jared Rosenbaum of Wild Ridge Plants made a science-backed plea to the gardeners in the room to replace the 40M+ acres of detrimental, or at the very least unproductive, lawns in the U.S. with the sustainable and beautiful grassland ecosystems that once thrived in the Northeast.

It’s simple, really: If climate change is caused by plants being metabolized into gasses, converting more gasses to plants is one way to reverse that process. In the blog post that inspired the talk, Return to the Hypsithermal, Jared lays out the specifics of how powerful of an opponent to climate change native grasses are. “Grasslands are ideal tools with which to sequester carbon in soils,” he writes. “An intact grassland can sequester 2-5 tons of carbon per year on every acre.”

Native grasses are C4 plants, meaning they suck up more carbon dioxide and require less water than other plants. They represent only 5% of the Earth’s biomass, but account for 20-30% of CO2 fixation. Just think about the opportunity there.

Replacing our lawns with diverse grasslands featuring native grasses will create a more authentic, natural American landscape that combats climate change and provides shelter and food for songbirds and other small mammals even through winter months. What’s not to love?

Jared’s talk made me anxious to do more at home. We’ve been working hard to replace the mix of invasive plants, bulbs, and turf we acquired with the house, but not hard enough. We replaced the back portion of our yard with a meadow of pollinators and grasses, but there’s room to do more. A lot more.

As I work on this next lawn-replacement project, I’m adhering to the ecological landscaping principles of Planting in a Post-Wild World: Designing Plant Communities for a Resilient Landscape by Thomas Rainer and Claudia West. In the book, they show and explain how to design gardens that function like naturally occurring plant communities. My grassland plant community will include a structural layer, seasonal theme layer (blooms that visually dominate at different times), a ground cover layer, and a dynamic filler layer. I’m starting with a list of just 8 plants, and the beds will prominently feature indiangrass and purple lovegrass.

My structural layer:

Indiangrass, Sorghastrum nutans – Light: sun, part shade, shade; soil: dry to moist; blooms yellow or purple in fall
Purple Lovegrass, Eragrostis spectabilis? – Light: full sun; soil: moist; blooms red and purple August through October
Wrinkleleaf Goldenrod, Solidago rugosa – Light: full sun; soil: wet; blooms gold in September
Dense Blazing Star, Liatris spicata – Light: full sun; soil: moist, blooms purple in September

Seasonal theme layer:

Fire Pink, Silene virginica -? Light: part-shade; soil: dry/moist;?blooms red in May/June
Butterfly Weed, Asclepias tuberosa – Light: full sun, soil: drought tolerant; blooms orange June/July

Ground cover layer:

Pennsylvania Sedge,? Carex pensylvanica – Light: partial shade, shade; soil: well-drained

Dynamic filler layer:

Eastern red Columbine, Aquilegia canadensis, Light: part-shade, shade; soil: high drought tolerance; blooms red in the summer

Making this change is an investment, for sure, so my next step is to sit down and sketch out what this plan might look like. As I figure out how many of each plant to order, I’ll think about the root systems of each layer, the light we’re working with, and how the soil might change as we get closer to an area that collects a bit of runoff from the roof.

If you have any plant ideas or tips, please share them! I’m not a certified ecological landscaper. I’m just a person who enjoys gardening and realizes it’s time to fight for the health of our earth and the wildlife and people living here. I hope you’ll join me.

Mapping Our Yard with Habitat Network

We’ve written a lot about turning our modest suburban yard into a contributing part of the ecosystem, and it’s been really rewarding to spot critters and bugs that we otherwise wouldn’t see, not to mention just being able to enjoy the beauty of the native plants we’ve added. But it only goes so far to create a little island for wildlife; we need our neighbors to join in as well.

We’ll never get back the unbroken tracts of wild lands and habitat that once took up the whole east coast, but if enough of us welcome wildlife into our yards and shared public areas, going piece-by-piece in a huge patchwork quilt, we can mitigate the habitat loss and massive declines and even extinctions that so many wildlife species have suffered.

Lindsay wrote about how our town is trying to mobilize residents to take the plunge, and people all over the country are doing the same thing.? There’s a great web tool out there that aims to document these efforts and make connections within and across communities: Habitat Network.

Habitat Network is a citizen science project designed to cultivate a richer understanding of wildlife habitat, for both professional scientists and people concerned with their local environments. We collect data by asking individuals across the country to literally draw maps of their backyards, parks, farms, favorite birding locations, schools, and gardens. We connect you with your landscape details and provide tools for you to make better decisions about how to manage landscapes sustainably.

Habitat Network is also the world?s first interactive citizen scientist social network. When you join you are instantly connected to the work of like-minded individuals in your neighborhood, and across the country. Together you can become a conservation community focused on sharing strategies, maps, and successes to build more wildlife habitat.

Even beyond the ability to share this information with scientists and the public, their yard map is a great tool to understand your own property.? I’ll give you a warning though, you might not like what you learn.

You can use their map overlays with satellite images of your home to indicate exactly which parts of your hard are what types of habitat.? You can even indicate what species of trees and plants you have.

Here’s our property mapped:

We’re pleased with how our yard has been coming along since we moved here.? We ripped out a big section of lawn for replacement with a meadow, removed invasives, planted natives, and we already had some nice mature trees on and adjacent to the property.?But I can’t say I was thrilled when I finished mapping our yard and saw this breakdown:

There’s nothing we can do about the footprint of the structures, and we plan to remove the portion of pavement in front of our garage as soon as possible (it hasn’t been used for parking for many years). But even after starting our meadow (that’s the “grass” section), nearly 30% of our property is still unproductive lawn. That’s nearly as much as is covered by the productive habitat portions: the “grass” meadow and our native flower beds.

As a reminder, turf grass provides almost nothing in the way of food and habitat for wildlife, and though we manage ours organically and never water it (except when establishing new seed), it’s generally resource intensive. We want some for chasing around Mae and yard games and such, but seeing these numbers really hit home that we can do a lot more about reducing ours.

We already have plans next year to put in more native shrubs, a shade garden, and expand our existing flower beds, all of which should greatly shrink that percentage by this time next year. And as those plants grow and spread, and others are added, we’ll keep whittling down that lawn percentage to make room for more habitat in our yard.

If you want to learn something about your own property and be a contributing citizen scientist, take a few minutes and map your yard.? Then figure out what you can do to make it better.

How We Turned Our Yard Into a Certified Backyard Habitat

This week our small town of Collingswood started an exciting new initiative: to become a National Wildlife Federation (NWF) Community Habitat. When we saw an article about it, we were elated. The NWF’s Garden for Wildlife initiative helps and encourages individuals, schools, communities, businesses and governments to make a real impact by creating gardens that help wildlife not just survive but thrive.

Community-wide involvement in habitat restoration is something we talk a lot about and nothing’s better than learning there are more like-minded people around you than you realized. Local landscape designer Stephen Coan of Ferrett Hollow Gardens initiated the discussion, explaining that the main qualifications are to have at least 100 backyards in the town certified, along with two schools and three common areas. Excellent.

When I attended the Collingswood Green Team’s monthly meeting last night, Coan was there to explain the effort to the team and the support was unanimous. One of our commissioners is already a strong proponent of environmental sustainability, and totally on board. That’s a big deal, and makes it feel like this isn’t just a cool vision; it will happen.

That said, accomplishing this goal of turning our small, historic suburban town into a certified wildlife habitat will require more than support from a group of passionate people like our commissioner, green team and experts like Coan working toward it; we need at least 97 other people to get on board.

Data shows that the majority of people are in favor of protecting wildlife and making changes that will have a positive impact on our environment, and our town is already deserving of its sort of “crunchy” reputation. People care here. People are involved. They come together to make great things happen. The challenge is to connect the disconnect between an interest in this kind of change, and the knowledge and resolve to get it done.

I thought it might help to share exactly how we went from a basic yard of grass and invasive plants to becoming a Certified Backyard Habitat. It’s important to note, here, that we aren’t perfect. We have a long way to go, and our work over the past year is just a start.

Let’s start with the requirements. All you have to do is provide food, at least two forms of shelter, water for drinking and/or bathing, and places to raise young. You need to practice sustainable gardening (think: composting and rain barrels) and then fill out a form online and make a small donation to get your certification.

Some of the things you do will overlap, like if you add native plants species, you’re providing both food and shelter. Anyway, here’s exactly what we did:

Provide Food:

We added a squirrel-resistant bird feeder, a super cheap goldfinch seed bag and suet as our easy food sources. Then we focused on getting rid of lawn and non-beneficial and invasive plant species and replaced them with native plants. We focused on multiple layers that come together to form a solid habitat: groundcover, shrubs, understory, and canopy.

Thankfully, we already have a dogwood, two pin oaks and a black walnut. The dogwood is toward the end of its life, but we’ll keep it for the benefits it will continue to provide to the birds and bugs. We replaced part of our lawn with a meadow that provides food for many different species of moths, butterflies, and other insects.? And we’ve gradually been replacing exotic plants (and a heck of a lot of weeds) in the previous owner’s flower beds with native perennials.

Provide Shelter/Cover:

As part of this process, you want to make sure that the birds and other animals you’re attracting can hide from predators. This can be done with evergreens, shrubs, rock piles and more. This is an area we’d like to do more with, but to achieve a certification-level habitat, we planted rhododendrons and are keeping our yard ugly throughout the winter. That means? we didn’t mow the meadow or cut back any of our plants; they are there as hiding spots.

We also have a hedge placed close to the busy bird feeder that hangs on our dogwood that we’re transitioning to Virginia creeper and coral honeysuckle. One minute spent watching the birds fly back and froth from this hedge to the feeder proves how valuable ti s as shelter from harm.

Provide a Water Source:

This one’s simple: a bird bath with a heater so that the water is there for birds to sip from and bathe in throughout even the coldest days of winter. I’ve seen some really cool stuff done when it comes to water features, like DIY fountain features and dragonfly habitats created from old cast iron tubs, but the bird bath got us to our certification.

Provide Places to Raise Young:

Again, native plants are key here. Doug Tallamy’s Bringing Nature Home is sort of the bible for the native plant community, because of how effectively he explains the urgent need to restore habitats that support the ecosystem. For now, just understand that bugs are picky little creatures who can only feed and recreate on specific species of plants. If we get rid of those plants, we get rid of the bugs. If we get rid of the bugs, we’re getting rid of the birds that need them to survive, and so on.

The easiest way to accomplish this item is to get a couple of bird houses. We have four bird houses and a bat house, and the houses are made to support the families of different kinds of birds. For example, we have one that Tim made with an opening that is best for wrens and chickadees.

Practice Sustainable Gardening:

Collingswood offers very cheap compost bins and rain barrels, along with directions on how to set them up. If you happen to live in this lovely town, you can get them through the borough at the green festival in April. If not, order them online. Here are a couple of options: Yimby Tumbler Composter and Good Ideas Rain Wizard Rain Barrel.

The other key here is to stop using fertilizers, pesticides and any other harmful chemicals. Oh, and here’s the other great thing about gardening with native plants: they require pretty much no maintenance after the first year as long as you choose plants well suited to your soil and other growing conditions.

Get the Certification:

Everything I detailed above is just how we went about turning our yard into a certified backyard habitat; it’s by no means the only way or even the best way. Tim and I are constantly planning improvements to our situation, and look forward to doing more and more every season to create a true haven for wildlife. Folks like Coan are a few years ahead of us and doing really cool things, like focusing on attracting and supporting specific native bee species.

Once you ensure you have all of the components in place, you just have to go to the National Wildlife Federation’s website and fill out a very simple form that includes a small donation. It takes 5 minutes tops. There are different signage options, but we paid just $30 for official certification and classic sign.

Please, please share stories of your own journeys toward creating a backyard habitat with us either in the comments here or on Facebook. In the meantime, we’ll get some more photos together to show you what our yard looks like.

Whitesbog Village: Blueberries, Beauty and Feminism

It’s going to be a cold week with Christmas festivities at the tail end, so I wanted to get outside yesterday despite the rain. We drove about 50 minutes to Whitesbog Village, and it was well-worth the distance and eventual “OMG we’re missing our toddler’s nap window! Now she’s literally pulling her hair out!” moment on the way home.

Whitesbog, a registered national and state historic site, is part of Brendan T. Byrne State Forest. It features a “village” of beautiful old buildings and 3,000 acres of cranberry bogs, blueberry fields, reservoirs, sandy roads, woodlands, streams and trails. Not only that, it’s a site on New Jersey’s Women Heritage Trail due to the work of “Blueberry Queen” Elizabeth Coleman White. She’s the one who brought Jersey blueberries to the masses after extensive research for growth habits, taste, scent and texture.

According to the Whitebog website, White also focused her research on the American holly (ilex opaca). “She even founded her own nursery business?Holly Haven, Inc.?and is credited with having helped to rescue the American holly from obscurity. She was even one of the first members of the Holly Society of America, founded in 1947.”

Volunteers have worked hard for decades to restore and preserve Whitesbog Village, including White’s old house. It’s a gorgeous place to stroll along paths lined with mountain laurel and other native plants, view cranberry bogs, check out White’s original test garden and experience the beauty of the Pines.

The Whitesbog General Store was closed yesterday morning, which was a bit of a bummer, because I was looking forward to picking up a few last-minute Christmas gifts. It’s typically open Saturdays and Sundays from 10am to 4pm February through December, and carries blueberry and cranberry preserves, honey, candy, books on the Pine Barrens, and items handcrafted by locals.

The store and other buildings within the village date back to the late 1800s and early 1900s. The largest building, which is basically rubble now, was the packing and storing facility that was damaged in two different fires. In the other adorable buildings, Whitesbog Preservation Trust tells the story of Whitesbog Village and holds events, such as art shows, festivals and a holiday craft fair.

We knew we were in a good place when we walked up to find this awesome banner of a Jersey Devil playing banjo. Whitesbog regularly holds a Blueberry Music Jam, an acoustic jam for local musicians, which I’m hoping Tim will attend, banjo in tow.

The trip was still fun without anything in particular going on and a tiny bit of rain. Speaking of that rain, inspired by a story in the Introduction of a book I’m reading, How to Raise a Wild Child, I let Mae try splashing her boots into the puddles. She’s a kid. She should be allowed to splash in that puddle to see what it’s all about, even if it means she gets a little dirty.

One highlight was meeting a landscaping volunteer who saw me taking pictures and led me to the most awesome looking fungus. He admittedly isn’t a “fungus guy” so wasn’t quite sure what it was, but he did then proceed to show us all kinds of plants, native and not. He’s most certainly a plant guy, a weekend botanist, as he says.

The volunteer showed us a small American climbing fern (lygodium palmatum), a rare native fern with S2 status, meaning there are only 6 to 20 known occurrences in the state due to habitat destruction.

Speaking of destruction, here’s a photo of the old packing and storing facility, or what’s left:

As I’ve mentioned in other posts, when the more showy flowers of spring, summer and fall die off, some of the other aspects of the landscape finally get time to shine. This evergreen moss, which popped up all over the grounds and trails, is a beautiful contrast to the greys and browns of winter. Seeing it here led me to, once again, look into native mosses that could work in our garden. We don’t live in the Pine Barrens — we don’t have that sandy soil — so while this one wouldn’t work, there are others. But that’s for a later post.

Looking out from the trails closer to Elizabeth’s old home, the scene is stunning even on the gloomiest day just before winter settles in. I can’t wait to return in different seasons to observe how it changes.

Part of the trails has a boardwalk, which Mae loves, and there is a real range of plant species. The forest of Whitesbog includes sweet gum, pitch pine, red maple, black gum, holly, and Atlantic white cedar.

We believe this next photo is of a really old American sweet gum, but would love to be corrected if we’re wrong. Identifying trees without leaves while wrangling a dog and toddler can present a challenge at times.

The grounds around White’s house have a mix of natives and non-natives, though as far as I understand, the Whitesbog Preservation Trust’s goal with maintenance is to keep her collection of friendly non-natives healthy, get rid of invasives and add only plants native to the Pine Barrens and this region in particular.

This low-growing shrub, bearberry (Arctostaphylos uva-ursi), can be found close to White’s house, and is prettier than this photo suggests. It’s a great native groundcover for those of you with that signature Pine Barrens sandy soil. It’s a host plant for the Hoary Elfin, Brown Elfin and Freija Fritillary butterflies, and its bright berries are edible.

As always, we have lots of other plant photos to share, and will continue to do so on Instagram. But all in all, it was a great little family adventure. And again, we weren’t even there when one of the many events was happening!

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