Be-a-Better-Gardener – Keep Your Gardens Neat, But Not Too Neat

 

Keep Your Gardens Neat, But Not Too Neat

A shaggy garden can provide winter cover and food for wildlife

By Thomas Christopher

 

 

My house is messy and my office is a disaster, but in the garden at least, I aspire to neatness. That is the influence of the German gardeners, Karl and Steve, for whom I worked while I was a student at the New York Botanical Garden. They were both fastidious, viewing weeds or even unkempt plants as a personal insult. Their gardens thrived under their systematic regimes, and somewhere in the back of my mind, their approach has always persisted as the ideal.  So in fall I take rake and clippers in hand and make sure the garden is neatly squared away before winter settles in.

Lately, however, I have learned that it is possible to overdo this orderly approach to garden maintenance.   To begin with, by removing all the dead stalks and seedheads, I am depriving the birds of a wintertime source of food.  By tidying away all the leaf litter and plant debris from my garden I am removing cover that native bees and butterflies shelter in during their dormant months.  Lots of other insects depend on this cover, too. Some, such as ladybugs, assassin bugs, lacewings, big-eyed bugs, pirate bugs, damsel bugs, and ground beetles, are beneficial to plants because they prey on the other, herbivorous insects.  Even the plant-eating insects have their place in this garden ecosystem as they, too, provide winter forage for birds.

There are aesthetic costs as well to compulsive neatness. Deadheading – removing the fading flowers from annuals, perennials and shrubs – can help keep the garden looking fresh, but it also keeps plants from sowing their seed. This year, I’ve been spending a lot of time at Wave Hill, a wonderful public garden in New York City and the subject of a book I’m writing which outlines the gardening lessons one can learn there. One thing I found that was new to me was the Wave Hill gardeners’ use of reseeding annuals and biennials. Plants such as poppies, larkspurs, and foxgloves are not deadheaded, but instead are left to scatter their seeds, resulting in a much richer display of bloom. Similar techniques have been used at Berkshire Botanical Garden in Stockbridge, MA, where an annual ecological garden symposium, Rooted in Place, focuses on managing the landscape sustainably. This year, on November 12, the conference features several noteworthy speakers including James Hitchmough, Professor of Horticultural Ecology at the University of Sheffield, UK and author of Sowing Beauty, Designing Flowering Meadows from Seed. More information on this informative conference is available at berkshirebotanical.org.

 

 

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