The Pre-Garden Season Edition
Leaving Something Behind - A Garden Planted.
Birders - there’s something at the end for you, if you want to scroll down
Today is 8 March and here in Canada the clocks “spring” forward. Last year it was only another eight days until just enough snow had melted for a few snowdrops (en français, on les appelle perce-neige, et ce pour une bonne raison) to appear. They were later covered by fresh snow, but we declared “spring is here”. What better day to write something about gardening.
Interlude: As for thinking “spring is here”, it’s hope that springs eternal but there will be more snow to come. Meanwhile, this weekend is having a mild thaw and these Dopes are guarding the last iceberg. First free water seen for three months.
What follows is partially a repost and somewhat edited version of something I first published three years ago when I had fewer than thirty subscribers … many times more these days. I have used that original post as the framework on which to build what follows. I hope you find it interesting … and maybe even inspiring.
Leaving Something Behind
The following paragraph was written by the science fiction author Ray Bradbury, (Fahrenheit 451) and dates back to 1954.
“Everyone must leave something behind when he dies, my grandfather said. A child or a book or a painting or a house or a wall built or a pair of shoes made. Or a garden planted. Something your hand touched some way so your soul has somewhere to go when you die, and when people look at that tree or that flower you planted, you’re there. It doesn’t matter what you do, he said, so long as you change something from the way it was before you touched it into something that’s like you after you take your hands away. The difference between the man who just cuts lawns and a real gardener is in the touching, he said. The lawn-cutter might just as well not have been there at all; the gardener will be there a lifetime.”
Not having kids to fuss about, I have to say that worrying over a material legacy is not a thing that I give too much thought to. Arrangements have been made. Whatever is left when the time comes will be disposed of neatly and a significantly large chunk of it will end up supporting a major Canadian conservation charity … but I was quite taken by the thinking in the quote above. Gardens matter A LOT to J and I. While I know our gardens, all gardens, are ephemeral and will undoubtedly be transformed when we can no longer care for them, at least we will know that for a while we made a garden that we enjoyed and that made life easier in some small way for wildlife. I am confident that our final garden will be “ … changed from the way it was before we touched it, into something that’s like us after we take our hands away.”
Happily, the social norms of gardening are changing a bit for the better lately. There is still far too much unimaginative monoculture lawn care going on, too often outsourced to noisy contractors busily cutting the grass to within an inch of its life. For all that, the gardening media and the internet carry increasing numbers of articles about rewilding, habitat restoration, native planting and pollinator gardening - important things that we strive to apply ourselves. Our garden is predominantly managed for wildlife. Over the years, neighbours and friends have visited us asking to see what we are doing on our plot – and clearly they like the concept but often don’t know where to start for themselves.
We garden in suburbia. It is large enough for us to manage without help (1/3 acre but that includes the house so let’s say 1/4 acre of growing space) but is still a modest suburban garden, and not huge. A typical visit starts with a youngish family coming around the side of the house on a summer weekend to be faced with a wall of green, bursting with native flowers (50+ species and counting) in all colours. Quite a lot of the plants considerably taller than the children. On a warm day, it is buzzing with bees and other pollinating insects while birds sing from the bushes. Before the questions start coming (“Beautiful, but I wouldn’t know where to start”), the children almost always run down the paths between the plantings and disappear into the small wooded area to the rear under the trees and behind the pond where they lose themselves, while we adults talk. This is the part that I always like the best and a good way to spread the word by example – especially for the children, who have usually never seen a garden corner where they can lose themselves unsupervised, without adults watching their every movement. Of course, there is a place in the world for more formal and traditional garden design, heaven knows we have done enough of it ourselves in former years on another continent. This is not the place to be prescriptive about what others should do. Each to their own, so long as it doesn’t involve leaf blowers.
My grandfather was a gardener, as was J’s father. A good start for the nurturing of future gardeners. As a kid, a lifetime ago, I enjoyed nothing more than the couple of weeks each summer we stayed with him. He let me have the run off his land in a small village on the edge of the Exmoor National Park in the West of England. It was just a regular garden, like ours, not the parkland around the “Big House”. At the front there was a lawn because this was the sixties and he was a Victorian, born in the 1800s. In the back he had a small fruit orchard, vegetable beds, trees, and bushes and a chicken run and that was where I liked to be. I learned about digging and soil preparation and pruning, and spent hours picking raspberries, for the family to eat, and collecting eggs for breakfast. There was no formal instruction, but I learned a lot just by watching and “helping” as kids do. Subsequently, we lived in several houses, all with at least some garden. Our last house in England before we came to Canada in 1998 was an average bungalow but the garden was large and I had beehives at the bottom of it. Wonderful things are beehives. Mostly, we learned our craft by trial and error and much reading. Hands-on training is best, getting a feel for soil and seeds and recognizing what the leaves on plants are telling us about their needs.
Today, in what is more than likely our last garden, we have removed the lawn entirely, installed a pond with a “bird magnet” waterfall and filled the open space with multiple (mostly) native plants. Many of them grow as tall as we are and by July and August are heavy with gorgeous flowers. Insects abound – though not as many as there should be due to climate change etc. The trees and bushes are the homes of many species of birds. Our garden bird list after 25 years stands at 124 species, of which we regularly see 80 or more in any given year. If they come to our garden, they could come to yours if you invite them.
It’s quite wonderful.
Terry Pratchet in his fiction book “Reaper Man” wrote this, which is along much the same lines:
In the Ramtop village where they dance the real Morris dance, for example, they believe that no-one is finally dead until the ripples they cause in the world die away - until the clock he wound up winds down, until the wine she made has finished its ferment, until the crop they planted is harvested. The span of someone’s life, they say, is only the core of their actual existence.
… and so:
I reiterate, you do what you want in your own garden. Nothing I write is about what readers should do, but I hope it provides information and support for those who are interested in making their gardens more welcoming to wildlife. I you want a lawn, that’s fine - just know that compromise gardens are possible and work well.
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 though. Anything, to replace all those boring, sterile monoculture lawns.
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 actually attract them. Start with some food, maybe. 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 those 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 - what do they do in their free time? A picnic in the park is nice, but 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 the vegetables and fruits you have raised by hand.
Comment on the preceding paragraph - rather than rewrite it, I should say that I was remiss in not stressing that are people who for reasons of finance or job location do not have the option of having a garden outside their door, even if they would like to … and I was not aiming at them. That was me when I was much younger. My “unable to understand” comment was for those who are gardenless by choice. I genuinely do wonder what they do after work or in a weekend when there is no garden, however small, to work in? Personally, once I have read the newspapers I need to get my hands dirty and pick some lettuce for dinner. Chacun ses goûts, j’suppose.
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.
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 surrounded by mature trees (we were lucky there, some are older than us, and we are not young). There is a self-dug pond with a waterfall that 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… that’s the bit visiting children seem to migrate towards. The main area, however, now hosts mostly, but not exclusively, native plants – we did a census a couple of years ago and found that there are at least 52 different species - considerably more than we planted intentionally. Echinacea, rudbeckia and golden rod are dominant in summer. Lots of colour there. The main thing 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 through regularly – raccoons, skunks, rabbits, chipmunks, groundhogs, sometimes a fox, mice, and moles. Almost none of that would be here if we gardened conventionally.
My 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”
And this, from an 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?
To finish …
I am posting this now as it won’t be many weeks before we can get outside and get our hands in the dirt. Readers living elsewhere will already be doing that. It’s time to start making plans, roughing out ideas, and deciding how welcoming your garden will be to wildlife in the months and years ahead.
Remember … “the difference between the man who just cuts lawns and a real gardener is in the touching, he said. The lawn-cutter might just as well not have been there at all; the gardener will be there a lifetime.”
… and:
Should your town bylaws or neighbours not be happy with the appearance of your natural gardening style, refer them to this Ontario court decision:
https://wolfruck.com/municipal-by-laws-naturalized-lawns-and-charter-protected-expression/
Web Resource - Bird Gardening
If you are wildlife/bird gardening in North America please have a look at the Cornell Laboratory of Ornithology new website that promotes Bird Gardening.
https://gardenforbirds.org
It has a lot of information and helpful ideas to help you make workable decisions … even more “thrilling” is to know that it features a couple of before and after photographs from our own garden.
Birding Extra …
A few weeks ago I shared some tips for identifying raptors. I just read the article linked to below and it may interest you … it’s nicely done.
Sometimes living in the 'stacked condos' isn't entirely a choice, in many cities most of us can't afford the houses with gardens on the edge of town, which would also require we get cars and make long commutes into town to work. And there are plenty of ways to enjoy nature without having a garden!