Gardening for a Wilder World

MAKING OUR GARDENS INTERESTING

Many of us liberally deploy the word “rewilding” in gardening conversations. On a large scale, it is clear what it means, but I question how appropriate it is in the smaller scale of our suburban gardens, small town green spaces and roadside verges. Consider the alternative term “naturalising” instead, as rewilding is not what can be achieved in reality.

The prefix “re-“ implies restoring the land to what it once was (when?). In most instances and with the best will in the world, that is clearly not going to happen. Where I live to the west of Montreal the original habitat before people started making major changes included small indigenous food gardens with corn and similar crops but mainly it was composed of deciduous hardwoods—maple, beech, oak, hickory, elm, ash, and birch and a good deal of coniferous softwood, such as pine and eastern hemlock with white pine and white and red oak. Outside of the nearby Arboretum, it is pretty certain that we are not going to recreate that in suburbia … so whatever we create, it can be only a facsimile of wilderness.

Always worthwhile doing something, anything, to replace all those boring, sterile monoculture lawns. Oh, yes.

GARDENING PEOPLE

Beauty is in the eye of the beholder, of course. One person likes flat lawns while another wants the restoration of native plant-rich habitat, and neither is right or wrong. It is pleasing to see how public perceptions are changing lately, and even some dyed-in-the-wool lawn-lovers might be willing to turn over a corner of their gardens to native plants (so long as they have pretty flowers) in order to attract so-called pollinators.

Some tell you they want open space for kids to roll in with their dogs, some want minimal input plots they happily pay a contractor to manage so long as there is room for a BBQ, while others opt for bees and butterflies and birds. It’s strange how many people will say that they like birds around but sort of expect them to just happen along, regardless of the things in their gardens that might make them settle. Start with a feeder. Creatures will want to stop by if you offer what they seek - food, shelter, potentially a home. You get out what you put in.

There are even peculiar people who don’t want gardens at all and would rather live in stacked condos divorced from any greenery – each to their own, of course, but I do find that quite bizarre unless you are physically unable to tend a garden. Hard to get my head around. A picnic in the park is no substitute for a garden where you can be entertained by the birds and smell the scents of flowers you have grown yourself. Then there are the simple pleasures of eating vegetables and fruits you have raised.

Should you decide to experiment with going native with your plantings and so try to attract more wildlife, then it’s important to understand that you cannot just leave stuff to happen on this locally small scale, that would be neglect. You still need to manage and actually work quite hard to introduce and establish the necessary plants and other features but the end result is so much “wilder” than the lawn you started with and so much more worthwhile and, yes, enjoyable and interesting. There is real pleasure in getting your hands dirty.

Quote:

And so, to the garden … more intervention is needed to create the complexity that produces life. So, the rewilding gardener thinks foremost about how nature works, and acts as a keystone species. This affects the whole decision-making and design of a garden. A conventional gardener, for example, might build a pond. Good for wildlife. But it would most likely be uniform in depth, round, steep-sided and edged with rocks or paving. The rewilding gardener would create a pond with open edges and varying depths, and then think like a beaver – putting dead branches in the water to create habitat for aquatic insects. They might puddle the margins like a water buffalo, creating pockets for aquatic plants and places for newts, frogs and toads to spawn. A miniature ecosystem.

NOT ONLY GARDENS

Any small green space can be made beautiful and useful to wildlife, even if you don’t have your own garden to work in and naturalise. For example, there’s this area of public space in Ottawa that is tended by volunteers …

Clyde Bee & Butterfly Patch on Clyde at Castle Hill is an effort to make use of a public space along the shoulder of an urban road. Many people pass, walking, biking or taken there by their dogs. Goldenrods, asters, and sumac were all growing there already, making it quite lovely in the fall, but it was not offering any food for pollinators in spring or summer … The idea was to introduce species that might be able to establish themselves there and require little further human intervention if the garden gets abandoned at some point. Part of the site is landscaped to include habitat structures in the form of logs, tree stumps, an artificial mud puddle and small rock piles. There is signage to help explain what the purpose of it is and to identify it. .

WHAT’S IN A NATURAL(ISED) GARDEN?

On the assumption, and I think it’s a good one, that a primary purpose is to have attractive plants, reduce the time spent mowing and to bring in wildlife, then anything from a small corner to the entire area of land you garden in is going to help. My own suburban plot is not large, about 1600 sq.m, but it is surrounded by mature trees (we were lucky there, some are older than us, and we are not young). There is a pond with a waterfall which calls to passing birds, and there is an unmanaged corner under dense trees that provides shelter such as the floor of a natural forest would. The main area, however, now hosts mostly, but not exclusively, native plants – we did a census a few weeks ago and there are at least 52 different species. Echinacea, rudbeckia and golden rod are dominant at this time of the year. Lots of colour there. I could give the full list, though you would get bored (email if you really want it) … the main thing though is that, apart from the plants we look after, we have been visited by 120 species of birds in the years we have been here with an annual count in the region of 80+ species. We have butterflies and bees (many species) and moths and wasps and hoverflies and too many ants to count. Bats fly overhead on warm summer evenings while mammals pass though regularly – raccoons, skunks, rabbits, chipmunks, groundhogs, sometimes a fox, mice, and moles. Almost none of that would be here if we gardened traditionally.

The message is - naturalise your garden, or at least a corner of it, and you will forever be entranced. What’s more, if you have children or grandchildren, nephews or nieces then not only will they like the garden, especially if you have a forest corner such as I mentioned above where they can lose themselves, but they will learn many important, hands-on, things about nature that they would perhaps not be otherwise exposed to.

CONSERVATION GARDENS

Conservation gardens is another term that I rather like. Marc Johnson, the Canada Research Chair for Urban Environmental Science, professor of biology at the University of Toronto Mississauga and director of the university’s Centre for Urban Environments has written:

“By increasing species diversity in the spaces that we have control of, whether that be a detached home, in your yard or in flowerpots in front of a townhome or even in a small little planting in an apartment, it can have positive effects on native biodiversity”

Finally, this is from a recent article in Canadian Geographic magazine:

Gardens awaken the soul. There’s something beyond measurement that happens when hands plunge into cold, damp earth, ready to conjure whatever’s in the mind’s eye … Gardens can read like a roadmap of our experiences; a poetry of plants. And each time we interact with a garden, it’s an acknowledgement of our duality with nature: we have the power to shape her, and we are her. In the end, I’m just another creature digging in the dirt. Tending a garden can be a radical act, too. It can be a source of nourishment in a food desert, a medicine cabinet, a connection to cultures and ways of life that were nearly extinguished in some places, a way of building community in an individualistic society. And for a growing number of us, gardening is a grassroots effort to restore damaged ecosystems and reconcile our relationship with the land.

Do you really like that boring and alien grass? Really?

---

WHERE ARE THE BEES?

Our local social media has been asking this question recently. We will look at what might be happening because bees are there if you look. Coming soon.

COMING SOON

“September WildThings” – some creatures and plants to look out for in your neighbourhood during September. The first of a monthly series.