Mission-Driven Gardening Comes to WNY

Why have a garden? What’s the point?

I’m not kidding: these are serious questions that scientists, industry professionals and many home gardeners are currently asking.

Anyone who thinks there are simple, obvious answers is not paying attention. Of course, home gardens benefit those who own them, plant them, and spend time in them. A lush green space soothes the soul and is a well-deserved reward for hard work and lots of expense. Many gardens also provide fresh, healthy food. That’s an important advantage in an era where Flamin’ Hot Cheetos is a food group.

But the international movement that focuses on gardening primarily for wildlife and biodiversity has gained impressive strength and changed the way many Western New Yorkers garden.

Joseph Han, owner and co-founder of local landscaping company English Gardener Ltd, shows just how far the pendulum has swung when he says: “I think the key is that it’s not just about to plant for birds, bees and butterflies, but also for humans. »

Notice who came last in this sentence. This order of priorities is echoed by renowned ecologist and entomologist Douglas Tallamy, who recommends that every American garden contribute to a local national park for the sole purpose of providing habitat for wildlife and promoting biodiversity.

None of this is news to gardeners who proudly display Certified Wildlife Habitat signs – many such signs can be found throughout Western New York. And this is certainly not news to those who embrace the No Mow May movement.

Area nurseries now carry plants that would never have found buyers in my mother’s gardening days: milkweed, prairie queen, ironweed, Joe Pye grass. The fact that three of these plants contain the word “weed” is no coincidence.

The reason gardeners in my mother’s day wouldn’t have bought these plants wasn’t that they were strange or unfamiliar – in fact, they were too familiar, seen everywhere in fields and backroads. They were wildflowers to be enjoyed in passing, not necessarily to be installed in a tightly controlled domestic landscape, where peonies, hydrangeas and roses were the stars.

For some gardeners, roses, hydrangeas and peonies are now the protagonists, not for lack of beauty, but for lack of usefulness to wildlife.

Ken Parker, part of the English Gardeners team, is a Certified National Green Infrastructure Program Trainer and, like Joe Han, a Certified Nursery Landscape Professional. He is also a member of the Seneca nation and has spent much of his life educating others about the native plants he grew up with: their beauty, their habits, their medicinal uses – and, most importantly, the creatures that depend on it for their health. habitat.

Parker enjoys using the common names of the native plants that surround the company’s headquarters at 4000 Harlem Road. As he makes his way through the rows of flats and pots, he explains that blackbird plantain (Erigeron pulchellus) is also known as hairy fleabane. Allegheny spurge (Pachysandra procumbens) is a native alternative to the common ground cover popular with traditional landscapers around the world. Canada Milky Vetch (Astragalus canadensis), also known as Rattle Weed, is the host plant of the Western Blue-tailed Butterfly.

I had never heard of any of these plants, let alone seen them in a nursery – and there have been dozens of other such discoveries, all delicious – or at least interesting. But English Gardener is not yet a retail company. The native plants that Parker has grown mostly from seed are used in landscaping jobs where clients are willing to have what Han calls a “natural” garden. Soon, however, there may be modest mail-order offerings for local consumers.

Parker and Han are also involved in the Western New York Native Plant Collaborative. Parker is a founding member, along with Linda Schneecloth, Jay Burney, Sally Cunningham and others. There are many small groups like this across the United States, run by volunteers and limited in scope. However, the Native Plant Collaborative was brought under the wing of Wild Ones, a national nonprofit with 89 chapters in 35 states. This will significantly strengthen the power of the local native plant movement.

In many ways, this is encouraging, even inspiring. Gardening is progressing while other areas of our national culture seem to be moving in the other direction.

But there is a risk that those who advocate an evolved gardening philosophy underestimate the human benefits that have nourished the souls of home gardeners for centuries. The reward of work, the beauty, the peace of sitting in a lush, fragrant space. This is why I garden. This is why many of us garden.

A friend, Shirley Verrico, who is also director of visual arts at Buffalo Arts Studio, regularly posts images of the view from her chair, while she has coffee or other drinks in her backyard in Clarence. Verrico doesn’t prioritize native plants, even though she has plenty of them — coneflower, prairie queen, meadow rue and Joe Pye, among others. But above all she is a sensual planter. She looks for contrasts of textures, touches of color and floating perfumes; things that provide visual pleasure during the day and surround it with fragrance in the early evening.

“I’m always experimenting,” Verrico says. “I really, really like being outside. And I love seeing how much it changes every day.

Verrico is a specialist. She grows plants that must overwinter here, like night-blooming jasmine, angel’s trumpet (brugmansia), and the spectacular annual flowers of cereus, which is otherwise a slender, boring variety of cactus.

Besides hosting a birdbath and plants, like salvia, that hummingbirds love, it doesn’t take much trouble to attract birds, butterflies and bees, but – given its extensive plantings and from its almost rural location – they don’t need it. an invitation.

This is the problem with gardens. They have plants. Insects would not recognize the difference between someone who has deliberately installed a contribution to Tallamy State Park and someone who simply prefers a large perennial garden to the traditional American lawn landscape.

Is there just one way to benefit the planet through gardening? Harvard botanist Peter del Tredici touts the ecological benefits of “invasive” wild plants found colonizing vacant urban lands in his book “Wild Urban Plants of the Northeast: A Field Guide.” Del Tradici believes that globalization and climate change have dramatically reshaped the world’s ecology and that many despised “invasive” species are remediating this damage by providing erosion control, stormwater management, carbon sequestration and habitat.

This is not as simple a debate as many believe.

Fortunately, most gardeners probably don’t pay attention to this. They buy more plants – to meet the needs of birds, bees, butterflies and, incidentally, humans.