by Dori Smith
(This article was published in Sanctuary Magazine of the Massachusetts Audubon Society in the March, 2004 issue entitled “Living with Wildlife.”)
I first met Diana, bird-lover extraordinaire, on a bleak day in March; we sat in her kitchen looking out at her panoramic but scruffy back yard. Diana is an avid protector of all things crawling, scampering, or flying. As we discussed how to have a beautiful landscape and support the lifestyles of the creatures she treasures, she spied an ant on the floor. Quickly capturing it under a glass, she escorted it out the back door, then returned to the table.
Diana estimated that last winter she was seeing – and feeding – hundreds of birds a day at a cost of $150 to $200 per month.
The other price of feeding birds, nowadays, is eternal vigilance. Left to their own devices, our winged friends will seed our back yards with vigorous oriental bittersweet vines, buckthorn trees, Japanese barberries, burning bushes, non-native honeysuckles and more – a host of predators termed “invasives” that out-compete the native plant repertoire. Most invasives came to these suburbs innocently enough as ornamental garden plants, and are now responsible for causing significant habitat loss and species endangerment.
Diana’s birds, at least in the short term, were delighted with the results of their work. The vines and berry brambles provided them with food, cover from hawks, and safe nesting sites. They came in droves to the bird feeders, to the delight of Diana and her husband, Rick. Foxes, groundhogs, rabbits, squirrels, and other four-footeds also enjoyed the yard, scampering out from the underbrush to amuse the ever-watchful two-leggeds.
What the animals loved, the humans abhorred. Diana and Rick were looking at woods on three sides of the house choked with nondescript shrubs and brambles, with patchy grass in the foreground. So Diana called me – an ecological landscape designer advertising “bird and butterfly habitat” and “meditation and peace gardens” – to the rescue.
My site inventory went as follows: fat and happy bittersweet vines with death grips on fourteen trees, prickly multiflora roses reaching out long tendrils over the lawn, and brambles choking out all undergrowth and blocking paths into the woods. There was way too much lawn. (I admit to enjoying a serene greensward to set off a garden, but in fact our lawns sustain very little animal life, waste water, and send chemical-laden runoff into our waterways; they put a huge burden on humans and the environment.)
Standing in the center of the lawn, slowly killing it, stood a Schwedler maple, the purplish-leafed variety of the infamous Norway maple that is currently marching northward into New England and creating deadly monocultures out of our native woods. Around the edges, standing silent sentinel, were ranks of small buckthorn trees and seedlings from the Norway maple ready to march into a nearby wetland. The only native understory plants surviving were poison ivy, woodbine, and one scraggly red-twig dogwood.
Diana expressed her landscaping desires as follows: establish serenity, order, and color for her enjoyment and refreshment; encourage butterflies and birds, particularly hummingbirds, to linger. Could she cut down her critter food bill by supplying them with live food – h’ors d’oeuvres, entrees, and desserts right out of the garden? We can try.
I discussed with her the basic philosophies and practices of sustainable design: foster the diversity of life in the air, on the ground, and underground, to strengthen the complex web of life; retain and conserve water on site; eliminate known invasives; and plant the right plant in the right place, limiting the need for excessive labor, money, water, and chemicals. We understood each other immediately and got to work.
Diana had all the right instincts but claimed to have little practical knowledge. “I grew up in Dorchester, where there was not one tree in sight. I’m a city girl with a lot to learn!” Nevertheless she was an energetic design partner, wise in her decisions.
I asked where she had gotten her empathy with animals. “I always had it. I remember being six years old, walking down the sidewalk with my aunt, and screaming at her not to step on the ants.” What is your favorite bird, I asked? “Crows. I find them totally delightful. When they caw, their whole bodies are involved. I like the way they hop -- doink, doink, doink. I love their curiosity, their playfulness. They used to steal my dog’s food, so now I put out dog crunchies just for them.” What other special animals does she encourage? “I have a tray of nuts for the bigger birds and the squirrels. I plan to put up bat houses – I love seeing them flit about at night. One summer I fed a family of foxes that had the mange and were so weak they couldn’t hunt.”
And so, launching into our project to create a veritable Garden of Eden supplying happiness and life support to all creatures, we came up with the following program:
q Create a soul-nourishing contemplative garden with color and interest in all seasons.
q Establish a rich forest edge habitat, with an emphasis on the native plants that have co-evolved with the local wildlife.
q Provide the four basic needs for animals: food, water, shelter, safe places to rear young. Accomplishing this goal will qualify the property for certification as a Backyard Wildlife Habitat by the National Wildlife Federation -- an honor designed to encourage homeowners to restore habitat destroyed by development.
q Select plants for toughness, easy care, low water needs, and pest resistance (as no pesticides would ever be used here).
The knowledgeable gardener or ecologist will be well aware that this plan is a complicated proposition entailing various trade-offs. To begin with, a landscape architecture simple enough to be contemplative may not be sufficiently wild and weedy to satisfy the needs of the birds and small mammals.
Secondly, if I were to stick entirely to the “native” New England plant material, which is primarily woodland vegetation, I would be hard pressed to create dynamic color and interest in all seasons to match the image of lush, vivid perennial beds that Diana admired in her garden book photos. And have any of you tried to purchase the native bittersweet vine, a pleasant look-alike to the oriental version and good bird food? You won’t find it at your local nursery. Searching the web, I found only a few specialty sources for it.
Finally, attracting wildlife inevitably draws predators. If you love all of life as tenderhearted Diana does, you have to live with the consequences. But she had gotten used to that. Her back yard had, from time to time, turned into what she termed the killing fields -- “I’ve just had to put a barrier around my heart.” But it is clear where her priorities lie: if a choice came between plants and slugs, the plants would have to go. “And what will you do when the deer come to nibble your tender young shrubs?” I queried. Her response was a resigned shrug. (Diana did, on a couple of occasions, work ahead of my spade to move the earthworms out of harm’s way, which I found endearing).
So we forged ahead. Diana and Rick took the machetes to the brambles and pulled down the strangler vines, then hired an arborist to remove the dead trees -- leaving a few snags behind for the insects and birds. Next, we called in a contractor, who did the only thing possible to prevent an endless battle with the invasives: he took a Bobcat to a strip 25 feet wide by 140 feet long, pulled out stumps, dug in compost, raked it level, and then covered it over with landscape cloth and a thick layer of mulch. This technique prevents roots from re-sprouting and hampers the growth of weed and invasive seedlings from seeds that can last twenty years. Regrettably, to do this he had to root out the poison ivy as well -- a native plant highly beneficial to the birds (its seeds are high in the protein they need) but not at all friendly to many humans.
And the result was peace, serenity, and … silence. The territory, which had glittered with bird life, was empty.
Now it was time to plant new trees, shrubs, and vines into the soil through slits in the landscape cloth and mulch barrier. I drew up a list of natives selected for bird fruit, insect value, and beauty. We headed for the nurseries, where Diana proved to have a keen instinct for choosing plants with personalities. She was immediately attracted to one particular ‘Molten Lava’ crabapple with a jaunty air. She fell for the white fringe tree with a distinctly feminine presence. We picked out a handsome hawthorn, ‘Winter King,’ known for holding its berries well into the winter for birds to enjoy when pickings are slim. More winter bird survival food would be offered by the red chokecherries and brilliant winterberries. We selected elderberries, summersweet, and an assortment of viburnums for a bird and butterfly banquet in the other seasons. Diana chose a few non-native shrubs such as a graceful weigela and some Chinese hollies, which I OK’d because they have no bad habits and do have wildlife value. To anchor one corner of the garden, we chose a strong eastern red cedar with abundant bird fruit. Next year we will add sassafras, a key larval host for the spicebush swallowtail butterfly; a red buckeye tree with flaming carmine blooms that feed hummingbirds; and a stunning sourwood tree with food for many creatures – completing a layer of understory trees.
Our planting plan is seemingly random, as in nature. Nonetheless each plant is carefully sited for maximum enjoyment from Rick and Diana’s vantage points. The garden’s edge curves out into the remaining lawn, giving the spotlight to our most interesting small trees. A five-foot willow fence stands as both a garden backdrop and as a screen hiding a unruly stand of blackberries left intact for the critters. Over in another corner is a big stand of forsythia (Rick’s favorite) to be left growing wild, providing the right sort of brambly texture the birds prefer. Dancing along the front edge are the butterfly gardens featuring asters, goldenrods, coneflowers, cranesbills, lobelia, and more. Near the deck, for easy viewing, are the hummingbird plants such as native honeysuckle vines and delicate red-and-yellow columbines.
And there in the garden, in just the perfect place, is where Diana chose to place her lovely stone meditation bench and statue of St. Francis with his beloved birds. She reports, “I can just sit on my patio and gaze out, and I get such a feeling of peace. I had such a stressful summer, and the garden was a life-saver.”
So the humans are satisfied, and the birds are coming back. The other day I was overjoyed to see flickers, cardinals, and other bright beings winging their way through the welcoming spaces.
The story is not over, of course. The birds will continue to plant what they eat. We must monitor every sprout to see if it belongs in the design or whether it must be banished. We are, in one sense, working against nature by trying to freeze this woodland edge in time; if not quashed, the forest would advance right on through the garden and loom over the house.
And we have more ambitions: a small pond for frogs; a mud puddle for butterflies; more food plants for butterfly larvae; a rain garden to capture roof runoff now sogging up the lawn. Then, Diana will be able to hang out her “Backyard Wildlife Habitat” sign with great pride.
There is a debate going on about whether any of us should attempt to purge the exotic invasive plants from our woods, earning us the title of “environmental Nazis” (in fact, the Nazis did invent the concept of invasive plants), or whether we should give up this enormous and costly effort to go with a more laissez-faire approach. Mother Nature, it is argued, will over time reassemble a diverse and productive landscape. She has, after all, recreated some semblance of the former New England woods after two waves of clear-cuttings in the 19th century and the great chestnut blight of the early 20th.
I, for one, am not waiting until some future generation of plants adapt to the toxic soil under Norway maples. By then all the native songbirds and migrating butterflies will have succumbed to starvation. And can our biome withstand the third clear-cutting wave – the current assault by developers chewing through the remaining patches of forest, replacing them with oversize houses, barren lawns, and a few possibly invasive shrubs uninviting to the birds?
It’s all too much to contemplate, and yet I feel inspired to do my part to strengthen our environment one back yard at a time. Along with a growing number of landscapers sharing the same commitment, I am out to prove that we can create beautiful, sustainable landscapes that give back more than they consume or waste -- even if we can never reproduce exactly what existed in some imagined past. I do not kid myself that this garden resembles an authentic restoration of native ecosystem. I am a pragmatist, so I can settle for “dramatically improved” instead of “perfect.” As Sara Stein noted in her Noah’s Garden -- a fascinating diary of her attempt to undo her own well-meaning landscaping destruction of animal habitat -- a true restoration would assemble not just native plants but a native plant community, a far harder task.
In any case, I have had the pleasure of accomplishing one of my missions: bringing humans out of their houses to pay close attention to the plant and animal world, learning that they are integral, responsible members of the biosphere. Diana, former city girl, is learning to tend her Garden of Eden and to trust her good instincts, just as her ancestors did. And I am learning from her the true meaning of “respect for all life.”
Dori Smith is a landscape designer,
writer, and educator trained in organic and ecologically sound land care. Her
business, based in Acton, is called Gardens for Life SM.
This article is copyrighted by Dori Smith, November 2003.