Advice for yards in the ugly duckling phase

Dear Avant Gardener, I was so excited to return to Florida to see how our garden had flourished over the region’s rainy summer. Sadly, we found much of our front yard covered in spent stalks of gangly native Spanish needles or, worse, invasive grasses. Almost none of our seeds sprouted, most perennials planted in spring have disappeared, and planted trees and shrubs are the same size or have died. What’s your advice for yards in transition? — Heather Evans, Cedar Key, FL

Well, that IS embarrassing, you writing this column and all! Let’s dispense with the second person charade and speak directly to our readers:

Yes, I am struggling with the slow, ugly transition from mowed weeds to dense native plantings. I know it takes at least three years for a native garden to flourish — a year each to sleep, creep and then leap. I had hope my Florida garden would leap, but it has really been less than two years since the initial plantings.

Still, I was feeling pretty incapable until joining a webinar hosted by my garden design teacher Rochelle Greayer and heard:

I frankly don’t care if some of the plants die in a year or two. My goal is to pack in those plants so we can get things going. . . . Fifty percent of your plant learning comes after planting. — Ben Vogt, author of A New Garden Ethic

Huh. I guess this is all part of the process. So how am I handling what Vogt calls “responsive management?”

1. Remembering the why

Sure, I’m aiming for an extraordinarily beautiful garden — and I will keep working on it until I achieve that goal. But the No. 1 reason we are planting natives in our yard is for the birds — and the bees and the butterflies and even the snakes and raccoons. In fact, my passions for aesthetics and the ecosystem have become so intertwined that only ecological gardens enchant me now.

2. Finding encouragement in what’s working

Most of the Florida native shrubs and trees we planted are alive, though barely creeping. And some meadow perennials planted 18 months ago on the sunny south side of the driveway are thriving: mimosa, seaside goldenrod, silkgrass, and blanket flower. And the structure of pea gravel paths is holding up and highlighting the intentionality of the plantings. Yes!

3. Learning from what’s not working

None of the meadow perennials we planted and seeded immediately north of the driveway are alive. I’m thinking an allelopathic effect of the eastern red cedar nearby must have inhibited them. The shrubs we planted on the opposite side of the cedar are doing OK, so I’m going to add more like them, selecting young plants to fit among the cedar’s roots. Tropical-looking understory shrubs will actually work better from a design standpoint — screening neighboring houses and providing visual interest in winter when we’re here. (Why didn’t I think of this before?)

4. Tidying up (a bit)

Unlike Lolly Jewett’s gorgeous pictures of spent stalks, the Spanish needles stalks just look messy. I weed-whacked most of them, as well as the invasive grasses, leaving everything where it fell to function as mulch, fertilizer, and insect habitat. I also cut back the invasive bamboo and crepe myrtle and am going to trim or transplant any plants growing into the paths.

5. Adding more plants

For the coastal hammock understory shrubs, Pete and I visited Chiappini Farm Native Nursery for the first time. We spent two hours zipping around their 40 acres in an electric cart, ferrying several dozen plants to our car. I was ecstatic! (See below for what I bought.) I am also going to reprise my most successful propagation experiment from last spring: dividing and transplanting the silkgrass (Pityopsis graminifolia) that’s thriving on the south side of the driveway.

Something else Vogt said that resonated: He doesn’t like the work of gardening, he likes the results. Me, too. What I describe above will take about 12 hours of work in the garden over a few weeks, then manually watering the new plants deeply once a week for several weeks. The long-term goal is to create an ecosystem that mostly sustains itself, much as our glorious backyard wetland does. I’ll keep you posted.

— The Avant Gardener

Why, How, Wow!

Why?

North America has lost close to 3 billion birds since the 1970s, almost a third of the entire bird population. It is not just rare or endangered birds that we are losing, our familiar backyard songbird populations are disappearing too. The die-off is primarily attributed to loss of habitat and the use of pesticides.

Our yards are filled with exotic plants and empty of insects. Our birds have fewer and fewer bugs and berries to eat, no cavities for nesting, and no thickets for protection from predators.

Birds are the messengers for a much larger problem: canaries in coal mines, they are warning us about ecosystem-wide biodiversity collapse. — 234birds.org

How

By planting these magnificent tropical-looking evergreen shrubs under the eastern red cedar, I’m turning bird losses into gains.

If we could plant even half of our 40 million acres of lawn in 2/3 native plants, and keep them pesticide free, we could turn the bird losses into gains. — 234birds.org

Wow!

When we bought our property, it already had several live oaks, the No. 1 keystone species here, hosting 395 moth and butterfly species’ caterpillars, the primary food of terrestrial birds. Seaside goldenrod (Solidago sempervirens), the No. 1 keystone forb, is one of our own successful plantings. These plants help attract the 62 bird species we’ve seen on or from our property — including a painted bunting on the goldenrod.

Related Resources

• Ready to commit to plant two thirds natives for the birds? Register your property and learn more at 234birds.org.

• Want to identify keystone species in your county? Go to National Wildlife Federation’s Native Plant Finder.

• Have two minutes right now? Protect natural landscapes by signing a petition to stop Home Depot from selling invasive plants.