Be a Better Gardener, Finding Our Way to Sustainable Gardening  

 

Finding Our Way to Sustainable Gardening  

 Berkshire Botanical Garden’s “New Wave Garden” is an example of sustainable gardening utilizing native plants to create a natural habitat for pollinators, birds, and butterflies.

 

By Thomas Christopher

 

When I was a student at the New York Botanical Garden thirty-odd years ago, ecology was something that we mostly left to the scientists. It was just beginning to make an impression on what the gardeners did. The Native Plants Garden was laid out in a series of simulated habitats, but otherwise the plantings at NYBG were arranged then almost purely with regard to their ornamental impact.

Since those days, however, ecology has come to greatly enhance my understanding of, and appreciation for, gardens.  Gardening in an ecologically intelligent way is easier, of course: I’ve learned that it’s far easier to work with Nature than against it. But it also adds another layer of meaning and pleasure to the landscape.  When informed by ecology, gardening is still an expression of our personal vision of beauty and fruitfulness, but it’s also a way of modeling a life more in harmony with the world around us.

This is very much the message of the Berkshire Botanical Garden’s annual “Rooted in Place” symposium. This is being held for the third time on November 11th, from 9:00 A.M. to 4:00 P.M. at the Berkshire School in Sheffield, Massachusetts, and the lineup of speakers is, as always, outstanding.

Neil Diboll, for example, the proprietor of Prairie Nursery in Westfield, Wisconsin, is someone I’ve admired and learned from ever since he introduced me to the art of meadows and prairie gardening back in the 1990’s. Neil was a pioneer in treating the garden not as a simple assemblage of “specimens” but rather as an ecological community in which the plants all interact, for good or ill. Neil’s profound knowledge of native plants has enabled him to design and install plantings where the plants reinforce each other to create a whole that is greater than the sum of the individual parts. That should be an inspiration to all of us.

Neil will be speaking at the symposium about another aspect of ecologically-based gardening, of turning the garden into a wildlife refuge. This is especially important in an era when the natural habitat for pollinators, birds, butterflies and other creatures is disappearing at a rapid rate. In “The American Garden: A Life or Death Situation” he will focus onto the evolution of the garden in a biodiverse landscape that can provide homes and sustenance for both native plants and animals, providing step-by-step advice for accomplishing such a transformation.

From Anchorage, Alaskan garden columnist Jeff Lowenfels will be joining the symposium to share his knowledge of the soil’s microflora.

Author of Author of the award-winning Teaming With Microbes: The Organic Gardener’s Guide To The Soil Food Web and Teaming With Fungi: The Organic Grower’s Guide to Mycorrhizae, Lowenfels will speak of how gardeners can work with these often overlooked organisms to achieve better results in their plots while freeing themselves from reliance on pesticides and synthetic fertilizers.

Lee Buttala, executive director of the Seed Savers Exchange in Decorah, Iowa may be more familiar locally as the author of a weekly garden column for the Berkshire Edge and the editor of an award-winning book, The Seed Garden: The Art and Practice of Saving Seed. He will speak on the power of seed-saving to turn private landscapes into places of greater biodiversity, no matter whether you are cultivating vegetables or ornamental plants, or both.

Pollinators should be on every gardener’s mind these days – human-induced environmental change is causing an unprecedented decline of these essential organisms. Dr. Robert Gegear of the Worcester Polytechnic Institute’s Department of Biology and Biotechnology and the Director of the New England Bee-cology Project will discuss the role that an ecologically-focused approach to designing and maintaining your garden can play in bolstering pollinator populations. To illustrate his talk, he will draw on examples from his on-going field research – his special interest is native bumblebees — in Massachusetts.

What unifies all these programs is their practicality. The speakers will outline concrete steps that any gardener can take to make their plots a contributing part of the local ecosystem, as well as richer and more full of life. If that appeals to you, I hope I’ll see you at Rooted in Place.

 

 

Thomas Christopher is the co-author of “Garden Revolution” (Timber Press, 2016) and is a volunteer at Berkshire Botanical Garden. berkshirebotanical.org

Be-a-Better-Gardener is a community service of Berkshire Botanical Garden, one of the nation’s oldest botanical gardens in Stockbridge, MA. Its mission to provide knowledge of gardening and the environment through 25 display gardens and a diverse range of classes informs and inspires thousands of students and visitors on horticultural topics every year.  Thomas Christopher is the co-author of Garden Revolution (Timber press, 2016) and is a volunteer at Berkshire Botanical Garden. berkshirebotanical.org.

 

 

Author: Harlem Valley News