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jaeleslie at 08:19am on 16/06/2003
jaeleslie at 08:19am on 16/06/2003Yesterday we went on the "Better Lawns and Gutters Tour" sponsored by the Dane County Lakes & Watershed Commission, Healthy Lawn Team, Audubon Society, and UW Arboretum. We made it to nine of the twenty sites listed in four hours.
In our own neighborhood first we saw a small back yard that was intensively cultivated by the French intensive method or "square foot" gardening. Light fencing surrounded the veg garden to keep out the raccoons and rabbits. The beds were not raised so much as the path was dug in (lined with old carpeting). She had tomatoes interplanted with late onions and carrots and beets, and very dwarf fruit trees with rhubarb beneath, and pots and pots of hosta propagated. In the front she had a lot to tell us (as a soil scientist) about how the lawn is maintained entirely without inorganic fertilizers or pesticides, and it looks pretty good. Then we stopped by a house next to the bay where the sump pump in the basement feeds a very small pond, just a couple of feet across, with a couple of fish in it and some nice healthy waterplants.
Then we went out to the east side, stopping by the Willy Street Co-op where they have a new prairie planting in back of the store to utilize the runoff from the roof, and then saw a stunning suburban garden largely of native prairie plantings, with a winding grass path around the yard. While the plantings looked very naturalistic, some of them (particularly ferns) looked like they were probably thinned pretty ruthlessly, and the edges maintained very strictly. I saw a resident wren very close up, who was not pleased with all the visitors. Another larger pond here with circulating pump (and koi) is fed by the roof runoff.
So you get the idea: this was a tour of places that have designed a garden to use the water that falls on the roof from their raingutters, so that it soaks into the ground, instead of letting it run into the storm sewers and lakes.
Far out on the east side we visited a large property where the owner propagates native plant species, and had labeled them professionally with nursery signs. The part near the house is maintained more like a traditional lawn and borders, with play equipment and veg garden, and a couple different uses of water runoff and water pumped from the basement, but away from the house under the trees the ground is not mowed but left in woodland plants. There we got some very long plant lists, including a very colorful catalog from the plant company (Agrecol) where he works.
Then we drove to the west side, and first saw a new planting where the owner had just had the entire roof of her modern style house revised, when the roof membrane needed replacing, and garden installed at the outlet of two downspouts. She had help on the planting by a local group of volunteers, but dug a lot of it out herself. The diversion of water toward the garden and street instead of around the house and downhill the other direction still looked a little problematic, and the overgrown yews from the original planting still rather needed replacement to my mind but were usefully screening the house. She had plant lists too, with photos of before and after. It will be interesting to see the front planting mature.
Farther out on the west side we stopped at the house of a limnology prof, who has been collecting prairie and woodland plantings at the Arboretum plant sales and a specialist nursery. There were so many people at this site that he was having trouble keeping count. He confessed happily to not knowing all of the species, when we quizzed him (as one does), and to combining peonies with his prairie plantings. I particularly like this commonsense approach that allows intrusions of non-native plants in an amateur's garden. His woodland planting in deep shade under pines featured mayapples (with the apples) with their strikingly shaped foliage, and wood violets, which are like the other kind only taller and white-flowered.
This was also where I heard someone admit that it looked like a lot of weeds to her -- like what she would pull out. This is the interesting thing I think when you have not yet been introduced to plants by name: the only word we may have for them is Weed. The prof gently explained how whether something is a weed depends pretty much on whether you want that plant there, and how he keeps different combinations of plants in different parts of the garden, so that he may remove a plant in one area when he is trying to keep that species in another area. Then on the other hand I heard a fellow say "Nothing is a weed, if it's green it's good, except dandelions"! and I wanted to smack him for such a simplistic reduction of all complexity.
By that time we only had time for a couple more sites, across the street from each other. One was a decade-old garden, a spectacular combination of waist-high prairie plantings including white baptisia, vegetable garden, oak nursery, and garden variety roses etc, and the other more recently installed (1999 and subsequent years). This was another site where the owners were not the gardeners who selected the species, but they did have another plant list; lovely blue baptisia, and some champion-size cup plants and shooting stars (just past bloom). We found a shrub with wonderfully shaped blocky leaves there between the viburnum and gray dogwood, which turned out to be witch hazel.
My new word for the day, besides Baptisia (indigo), was Penstemon. Smooth, or grandiflora. I'd seen them before, but they were in bloom, and it finally stuck.
Of course now in the summer we don't talk about the four months or so when what falls from the sky here is not usually rain. Then whether your soil holds water (we have clay in our yard) or drains quickly (sand) puts another spin on the situation. The advantage of using native plants -- and plants propagated in this area instead of elsewhere -- is that they may be better adapted to the very irregular flood-or-drought weather conditions in the midwest.
On abandoned farmsteads you can find bits of tulip plantings, or daylilies, or crabapples, mixed in happily enough with the natives. But the exotic invaders are here now, including the highly successful dandelions, so we have to work out how to live with them.
In our own neighborhood first we saw a small back yard that was intensively cultivated by the French intensive method or "square foot" gardening. Light fencing surrounded the veg garden to keep out the raccoons and rabbits. The beds were not raised so much as the path was dug in (lined with old carpeting). She had tomatoes interplanted with late onions and carrots and beets, and very dwarf fruit trees with rhubarb beneath, and pots and pots of hosta propagated. In the front she had a lot to tell us (as a soil scientist) about how the lawn is maintained entirely without inorganic fertilizers or pesticides, and it looks pretty good. Then we stopped by a house next to the bay where the sump pump in the basement feeds a very small pond, just a couple of feet across, with a couple of fish in it and some nice healthy waterplants.
Then we went out to the east side, stopping by the Willy Street Co-op where they have a new prairie planting in back of the store to utilize the runoff from the roof, and then saw a stunning suburban garden largely of native prairie plantings, with a winding grass path around the yard. While the plantings looked very naturalistic, some of them (particularly ferns) looked like they were probably thinned pretty ruthlessly, and the edges maintained very strictly. I saw a resident wren very close up, who was not pleased with all the visitors. Another larger pond here with circulating pump (and koi) is fed by the roof runoff.
So you get the idea: this was a tour of places that have designed a garden to use the water that falls on the roof from their raingutters, so that it soaks into the ground, instead of letting it run into the storm sewers and lakes.
Far out on the east side we visited a large property where the owner propagates native plant species, and had labeled them professionally with nursery signs. The part near the house is maintained more like a traditional lawn and borders, with play equipment and veg garden, and a couple different uses of water runoff and water pumped from the basement, but away from the house under the trees the ground is not mowed but left in woodland plants. There we got some very long plant lists, including a very colorful catalog from the plant company (Agrecol) where he works.
Then we drove to the west side, and first saw a new planting where the owner had just had the entire roof of her modern style house revised, when the roof membrane needed replacing, and garden installed at the outlet of two downspouts. She had help on the planting by a local group of volunteers, but dug a lot of it out herself. The diversion of water toward the garden and street instead of around the house and downhill the other direction still looked a little problematic, and the overgrown yews from the original planting still rather needed replacement to my mind but were usefully screening the house. She had plant lists too, with photos of before and after. It will be interesting to see the front planting mature.
Farther out on the west side we stopped at the house of a limnology prof, who has been collecting prairie and woodland plantings at the Arboretum plant sales and a specialist nursery. There were so many people at this site that he was having trouble keeping count. He confessed happily to not knowing all of the species, when we quizzed him (as one does), and to combining peonies with his prairie plantings. I particularly like this commonsense approach that allows intrusions of non-native plants in an amateur's garden. His woodland planting in deep shade under pines featured mayapples (with the apples) with their strikingly shaped foliage, and wood violets, which are like the other kind only taller and white-flowered.
This was also where I heard someone admit that it looked like a lot of weeds to her -- like what she would pull out. This is the interesting thing I think when you have not yet been introduced to plants by name: the only word we may have for them is Weed. The prof gently explained how whether something is a weed depends pretty much on whether you want that plant there, and how he keeps different combinations of plants in different parts of the garden, so that he may remove a plant in one area when he is trying to keep that species in another area. Then on the other hand I heard a fellow say "Nothing is a weed, if it's green it's good, except dandelions"! and I wanted to smack him for such a simplistic reduction of all complexity.
By that time we only had time for a couple more sites, across the street from each other. One was a decade-old garden, a spectacular combination of waist-high prairie plantings including white baptisia, vegetable garden, oak nursery, and garden variety roses etc, and the other more recently installed (1999 and subsequent years). This was another site where the owners were not the gardeners who selected the species, but they did have another plant list; lovely blue baptisia, and some champion-size cup plants and shooting stars (just past bloom). We found a shrub with wonderfully shaped blocky leaves there between the viburnum and gray dogwood, which turned out to be witch hazel.
My new word for the day, besides Baptisia (indigo), was Penstemon. Smooth, or grandiflora. I'd seen them before, but they were in bloom, and it finally stuck.
Of course now in the summer we don't talk about the four months or so when what falls from the sky here is not usually rain. Then whether your soil holds water (we have clay in our yard) or drains quickly (sand) puts another spin on the situation. The advantage of using native plants -- and plants propagated in this area instead of elsewhere -- is that they may be better adapted to the very irregular flood-or-drought weather conditions in the midwest.
On abandoned farmsteads you can find bits of tulip plantings, or daylilies, or crabapples, mixed in happily enough with the natives. But the exotic invaders are here now, including the highly successful dandelions, so we have to work out how to live with them.