Grow Wild Gardening with Native Plants
Seminars@Hadley
Grow Wild Gardening with Native Plants
Presented by
Ed Haines
Moderated by
Dawn Turco
July 16, 2015
Dawn Turco
Welcome to today’s seminar at Hadley. I’m Dawn Turco, and I am moderating our seminar today. We have a title of Grow Wild Gardening with Native Plants. We are joined today by Hadley Gardening Instructor and Vision Rehabilitation Therapist Ed Haines. Ed is going to share his suggestions for moving beyond the types of things we find in our average gardening center and talk about other choices among the wonderful world of native plants. I have moderated several seminars at Hadley with Ed, and in fact, I have to admit I look forward to doing so. Especially when we are talking gardening which truth be told I know so little about. So let’s sit back and Grow Wild with Ed. Ed I’m handing you the microphone.
Ed Haines:
Well good afternoon everyone, and I hope you’re enjoying your spring. It’s particularly nice for me here in the north where I live. The final snowbank just melted yesterday, so that’s a huge landmark for us and a milestone rather. So we’re quite happy that things are finally growing and becoming green again, and I know all of you are as well. I see a number of my former gardening students among the list of participants, so welcome.
Thanks for joining me this afternoon for what I hope is an interesting discussion about gardening with native plants. This is a subject that I’ve become increasingly interested in over the past couple years. I thought I’d like to share a little bit of what I found out about gardening with native plant with the rest of you.
The first thing we need to understand when we talk about this subject is the definition of a native plant.
What is a native plant? Native plants can be many kinds of plants. They can be grasses. They can be ferns, flowers, cacti, etcetera, but what makes them native? Well, a native plant, and I’ll give you a definition I got off the internet, and I think it’s a pretty good one. It’s from CornellUniversity. “A native plant can be said to be a plant that grows naturally in a specific area over a period of geologic time.”
In other words, a native plant is a plant that has evolved over many thousands of years in a specific region.
What I love about this concept and this definition, and what excites me about it is that it means native plants have evolved with other organisms as members of a community. So, for the purposes of this afternoon’s discussion, unfortunately, because we have time constraints, I’m going to talk about plants that have evolved naturally in the North American continent. But the idea of native plants and gardening with native plants can really apply to any geographic area in the world. There are plants native to every continent, every ecosystem, so it doesn’t matter where in the world you live.
But because of time constraints let’s talk a bit about plants that have grown in North American and grown in North American before European settlement. We use European settlement as a defining timeline, because Europeans brought with them countless varieties of plants and animals that have in many cases they’ve certainly dominated and overrun our native species.
There are native plant purists, and I’m not one of them who feel that a true native plant is a plant that is only from within a 100 mile radius of where they happen to live. So if you’re a purist, and you’re gardening with native plants, you will only grow native plants that have evolved over thousands of years within a hundred miles of where you live within your specific geographic area and not necessarily within the North American continent itself.
I’d like to talk in a more liberal way about gardening with natives, and not really restrict the conversation to that kind of limitation. Although there’s nothing wrong with that.
Probably, I’m sure all of you know that the North American landscape prior to the arrival of European settlers was made up of a wide variety of ecosystems, and they included prairies, woodlands, wetlands, deserts, high deserts, swamps, etcetera. These were all communities that worked together as plants and animals and insects and reptiles, and sadly, most of these communities in North America have disappeared. And that’s primarily, of course, due to urban development and agriculture, etcetera. There really are very few original pre European settlement ecosystems left in North America.
What I like about gardening with native plants is that it’s a way for us individually to bring back just a little bit of that original landscape. I’ll give you an example. For instance, Hadley’s located in Illinois, and you may or may not know that before European settlement, the state of Illinois was 65% original tall grass prairie. Today, the statistic I found was it’s the State of Illinois is less than .01% of tall grass prairie. So, in other words, it’s almost nonexistent. So the predominant ecosystem and community of plants that existed before European settlement in the State of Illinois is now essentially gone.
Also, most of the plants that we grow and propagate, and I’m talking about the plants we find in garden centers and nurseries. They’re not natives. They’ve been introduced from all over the world. There’s nothing wrong with that. For instance, a lot of our houseplants originate really from one temperate rain forest region of the Himalayan foothills.
It’s interesting how many of our houseplants we take for granted come from one specific area. Tomatoes obviously aren’t really native plants to North America, and a lot of the annuals that I love and all of us love in our gardens like begonias and chrysanthemums, these are all nonnative plants. So, actually, it’s quite rare that we come across real native plants, especially in gardening centers and nurseries where most of us shop for our garden supplies.
So native plants are plants that have evolved over a period of thousands of years in a specific geographic area, and in this instance, I’m going to refer to the geographic area of the North American continent. I hope that definition is clear about native plants, and so we’ve defined them.
And now I’d like to suggest some reasons why you want to garden with native plants. So in the first place, first big reason, native plants will be likely adapted to your area. That means they may be accustomed to your climate. They’ll be used to your hardiness zone, your average rainfall, and a whole host of other environmental factors. I’ll give you a quick example of what I mean, and we’re all aware that the State of California’s undergoing I believe the most severe drought it’s experienced I think I saw in the New York Times 1,200 years. The governor, in fact, today just signed some sort of bill that restricts water usage by 25% or something. It’s amazing.
Nonnative lawns and gardens in California are suffering from lack of water, and will suffer even more in the future. So people are tearing up their lawns, and they’re establishing native landscaping. Essentially, they’re growing plants that require much less water, plants that have evolved naturally in an arid climate which is their specific geographic kind of climate. So native plants will likely be adapted to where you live.
Secondly, I mentioned earlier, and I’m going to touch on this several times. Native plants evolved as communities with other organisms as parts of communities. An important part of these communities of course are the insects who provide pollination.
Therefore, regionally native plants in your garden may well attract some of the pollinators, the insects that evolved with them. And here’s the important thing about that. That means native plants are often very attractive to local butterflies. And I think butterflies add so much movement and beauty to any container in any garden and anything we can plant that attracts them is a huge plus. A terrific example of a plant that attracts butterflies is the milkweed plant, and you guys may know that that’s food source for the Monarch butterfly. So, if you garden with native plants, you may find you have an increased population of butterflies or other insect pollinators like bumblebees, etcetera.
Another reason for growing native plants, and this is a good one, is that because they did evolve with local insects, they may have more resistance and be less vulnerable to insect pests. Also, they’ll probably be less vulnerable to local diseases as well. Consequently, and I love this part of it, native plants may require less care, and they may require less pesticides. I try to use little to no pesticides myself. One of the benefits of native plants is that they will be more resistant to local diseases and pests. That being said, there are exotic pests that have been introduced into your environment like Japanese beetles that natives may not have developed defenses against. And if you folks if any of you live in the eastern seaboard, particularly you’ll know that Japanese beetles are horrific, and nothing seems to be safe from them. So there are exotic pests. Natives won’t necessarily be resistant to those. But they may have defenses against local pests.
And finally, native plants, and I think this is maybe the best reason to try growing a few, native plants are o0ften beautiful. There are just so many wild flowers that are native to North America that are just gorgeous. Black-Eyed Susan’s, goldenrod, false indigo, lupines, and I think all of these flowers are just as dramatic and exotic looking as any flower imported from the South Pacific or from Asia. So natives are beautiful.
Just to expand on those regions briefly that I mentioned, the California Native Plant Society has come up with just five bullet points for why you should plant native, and they are – they pretty much echo what I’ve just said. They save water. They’re low maintenance. They provide pesticide freedom. They’re good for wildlife viewing, and they support the local ecology. I think those are fantastic reasons to grow anything, and particularly great reasons to grow plants that are native to our continent.
Before I go any further, we should ask ourselves are all natives fantastic? And the answer is no. Not necessarily at least not to grow in our garden. First of all, some natives are endangered, and that means so little of their habitat and population exists that they have the potential for extinction. So I would like to interject a word in this part of the presentation about acquiring native plants, and I’ll be talking about acquiring a little later in the talk also. But here’s the cardinal rule. Never harvest or take native plants from wild areas. So native plants can be endangered, and native plants occurring in wild areas and in their natural state are extremely rare, and they’re precious. They should be left undisturbed.
In fact, I’m sure you guys know there are many prohibitions in state and federal parks against harvesting native plants, so please don’t walk away from this webinar and think, gee I’m going to go grab some plants out of the woods and put them in my garden. Do not pick them. If you want to grow natives, you’ll need to purchase your plants from a nursery that specializes in propagating them.
So not all natives are terrific under some circumstances, and there’s a few other reasons why some natives are not terrific. Certainly not as garden plants, and that is, because some are harmful. And they’re harmful to people although they may be harmless to insects or other animals such as birds. And of course, a classic example of this is poison ivy. Poison ivy is a native plant, but it’s certainly not something we want to cultivate in our own garden even though the birds enjoy the berries very much, and it is a food source for animals.
Some natives are undesirable, because they are invasive. That means they will take over, and they will crowd out your other plants if they’re not controlled. I can’t tell you how many hours I have spent pulling up and digging and cutting back Virginia Creeper from the corner of my garden that actually was so aggressive it was covering and killing a really large almost 40 foot tall spruce tree, and every year I go back, and it keeps coming up. It must have a root system that’s unbelievable. I spend days and days cutting it back every spring and in the fall, and it keeps wanting to return. So natives can be invasive. So be very careful about what you introduce into your garden, and make sure that you’re not introducing something that’s going to take over.
Finally, some natives don’t make terrific garden plants, because they’re delicate, or they require very specific growing conditions to thrive. Native orchids specifically are like this. The lady slipper orchids, it’s very difficult to cultivate those in your garden. It can be done, but it’s not something that a beginner would attempt. It’s certainly not something I even attempt. I don’t have that much time. Some plants have conditions that are very difficult to duplicate in a garden environment, conditions like specific soil composition or humidity.
We’ve talked about why you want to grow natives, and why you might not want to. So I’d like to talk briefly and specifically about growing native plants in containers. That’s because I teach container gardening, and I think containers are more accessible for everyone, and it’s less of a daunting idea to grow a few natives in a container rather than to start a whole garden bed. A lot of us, we may not have an entire garden bed that we want to fill with natives, or we may not live in California, and we may not want to tear up our lawn and fill it with native landscaping. But it might be nice to duplicate just a little bit of a wild environment in a container. So even if you live, or if you live, in a condo or an apartment, you don’t have a lot of garden space, you can have a container that duplicates in a small way part of a natural ecosystem. A container, for instance, that’s a miniature prairie, or a miniature desert, or a shady woodland, and I think that’s a fun idea.
And because I’m going to focus on containers, and because we have limits on the amount of time for this discussion, I already said I wasn’t going to talk about natives that aren’t native to North America. I’m also not going to talk about trees or shrubs that are native to North America. There just isn’t enough time, and there are wonderful native shrubs and trees that I encourage you to try if you have space. But, again, I think that’s a discussion for another day.
The first rule for gardening with natives is get a large container. As large as you can manage. The larger container the better. And there’s a few reasons for this. A lot of natives are perennials. That means they come back every year. They overwinter, and their root systems need to survive through the winter, so they need to grow deeply. A lot of the annuals we buy begonias are a great example, for instance. They originated on the forest floors of temperate rain forests, and those particular ecosystems have very shallow topsoil’s, and of course they don’t have winter. The temperature is equatorial, and it’s constant all the time. So they don’t have to have big root systems. But a lot of our native plants, of course, since they have evolved in areas with winter and cold temperatures, they made deep root systems, so we need good sized containers.
Also, natives are more fun to grow as communities. I told you I’d be coming back to this concept. And so, you need a big enough container to hopefully plant several different species at least. I’ve been doing some research about growing mediums when we’re growing natives, and there is some debate about growing mediums out there. But most of what I’ve read basically indicates not using dirt from your yard. It makes sort of intuitive sense to plant natives in soil that you’ve taken from your geographic region, your yard, because that would be the environment they have evolved in. But most soils around areas of residential construction have been disturbed, and they really may not replicate or even be similar to the natural soils that were there before we started building everywhere. And they probably won’t contain the composition that wild plants need, or it’s possible.
So, I think ultimately, commercial potting mix is really the way to go when you’re experimenting with natives. Commercial potting mix is usually well balanced. It retains moisture. It’s easy to work with. It’s sort of a no brainer. It’s not going to duplicate the actual soil composition of where natives grow, but it’s generally all purpose. Here’s a big important factor. Commercial potting mix weighs a lot less than topsoil or your regular garden soil. So if you need to move your container, and you might, it’s going to be a lot lighter filled with commercial potting mix.