This article is the introduction to our series on how to realize the full potential of your garden to support biodiversity and sustain life. We’ll go through the background behind the concept of nature-driven landscaping, leading on through in in-depth how-to to truly bring your landscape to life. We’ll cover:
- The background of the need for sustainable landscaping, and why a nature-inspired landscape should be important to you
- How to get started if you’re a beginner – How to analyze your site, identify the best plants to plant in your area, and tailor your plant selections to the needs of your local wildlife
- The tools and resources you’ll need to get set up
- A comprehensive annual plan to advance and maintain your landscape’s ecological function and sustainability
A Background Story
Before we dive into the how-to-do of sustainable landscaping, let’s set the stage.
North America is an incredibly diverse continent, spanning from the arctic circle to the tropics if we include Central America as part of North America. The bulk of the North American continent lies between the 30th parallel and the 70th parallel North, sustaining biomes from tropical mangroves to arctic tundra and everything in between.
Zooming in a little further to the southeast quarter of North America, roughly the area east of the Missouri River and the Ozarks and everything south of the Ottawa and St Lawrence Rivers excluding Florida, we find a region with abundant rainfall, a variety of landscapes and soil types, and a temperate climate with hot summers and cold winters. This area is our primary focus, encompassing the Eastern Broadleaf Forest and to a lesser extent the Tallgrass Prairies of the Midwest.
This region has historically sustained an incredibly diverse, rich cover of forests in the east grading into tallgrass prairies in the west, with many smaller niche microbiomes. Because of the abundant rainfall, temperate climate and rich natural resources of the region, this area is the most populated in North America – Nearly 60% of the population of the United States of America lives within the US portion of this region!
As a result of the human habitation in this region, very little of the original natural communities exist. Taking my own state of Indiana as an example, approximately 21% of the state is forested. Of this forest, less than 4/100ths of 1% are original old growth forest! The state originally would have been 90% covered by forest, with 10% as tallgrass prairie in the Northwest part of the state.
In Eastern North America, many of the remaining natural areas are under private ownership and run the risk of being lost to development as the population increases in these areas. Residential zoning makes up on average 75% of the land area of major cities, meaning that if any difference is going to be made for biodiversity and sustainability, it’s down on those of us who own a house with a yard to take these methods to heart and apply them to our own landscapes.
Ecological Landscaping – A New Paradigm
The Ecological Landscaping movement has been slowly gaining steam ever since Aldo Leopold’s “A Sand County Almanac” was published in 1949. Books have been written on gardening with native plants and a naturalistic style, including “A Gardener’s Encyclopedia of Wildflowers” by C. Coleston Burrell in 1997, “Natural Landscaping” by Sally Roth also in 1997, but the subject of gardening with native plants always had kind of an alternative, fringe stigma to it.
What really started taking the conversation to the mainstream was Entomologist Dr. Doug Tallamy’s first book, “Bringing Nature Home,” written in 2007 – This book sparked a wave of thought and discussion around the subject of planting native plants in human landscapes, emphasizing the importance of natural plant communities and relationships with the balance and function of the environment around us.
Dr. Tallamy then teamed up with Rick Darke, a landscape architect from Eastern Pennsylvania, to coauthor the book “The Living Landscape.” This book, building on Darke’s earlier “An American Woodland Garden,” effectively and convincingly made the case for designing landscapes that support biodiversity. They show that, with a little planning and thought, we don’t have to give up aesthetics to gain sustainability and biodiversity.
This book (Written about further on our Recommended Reading List) is one of the key resources that have sparked the idea behind Paddle Creek Gardens – Combining the basic tenets of the book with our years of experience growing native plants for sale to the trade, we have developed a systematic approach to plant selection and landscape design that helps to make the most impactful choices.
We call our approach Nature-Driven Landscape Design, a methodology which prioritizes ecological function while preserving a garden aesthetic, focusing on making high-impact decisions.
What Defines a Nature-Driven Landscape?
A Nature-Driven Landscape is a landscape designed using natural plant communities as a guide. By prioritizing using regionally native plant species – specially focusing on keystone species – and using naturally occurring plant combinations, a Nature-Driven Landscape provides ecological function to support a diversity of plants, animals and insects.
Ideally, a nature-driven landscape should be designed around locally native plant communities that would have originally been found on your site. For example, if you have a wetter property, planting upland forest species or prairie species will result in a poorly performing landscape. A little research on existing site conditions goes a long way towards making a landscape sustainable with minimal maintenance requirements, which we will cover in detail further along in this series.
In short, a Nature-Driven Landscape should:
- Be designed around naturally existing plant communities within the local ecoregion
- Support the local food chain
- Provide cover for wildlife
- Be self-sustaining with minimal input from the gardener once established
Why Do I Need a Nature-Driven Landscape?
A living landscape may sound nice, but what are the benefits for the weekend gardener, or even just the average Joe with a backyard?
Aesthetics
While a completely wild landscape may not be for everyone, there’s no reason not to consider native plant communities when planning a landscape. Many of our native plants are highly ornamental, working well in groupings and drifts as commonly found in informal landscape design.
One garden that does an incredible job at balancing ecological function and aesthetics is Mount Cuba Center in Delaware – This public garden is the top organization for research on the performance of underutilized native plants of the Mid-Atlantic. Much of their research applies across eastern North America, our focus region.
Besides “looking pretty,” a nature-driven landscape also sustains life and biodiversity. When you aren’t spraying pesticides and killing off the base of the food chain, you’ll notice an increase in the amount of songbirds in your garden as they require protein from caterpillars and insects to raise their young. A garden full of songbirds is more aesthetic from a life and vitality standpoint than a lifeless ornamental planting composed of exotics.
Environmental Benefits
A nature-driven garden provides a host of environmental benefits in addition to the aesthetics already mentioned.
- Air and Water Quality – A garden full of locally native trees and shrubs is like an outdoor air purifier, removing impurities from the air. During times of poor air quality here in the Indianapolis area, I can’t help but notice that the Air Quality Index monitors in Eagle Creek Park always read within normal ranges. This park is richly vegetated with native forest. The layers of leaves and branches above ground plus the roots and tunnels below ground act as a water filter as well, releasing clean water into the local waterways.
- Water Conservation – In addition to filtering and purifying water, a landscape with ample vegetation absorbs rainfall and prevents it from quickly running off. This conserves water resources, mitigating the effects of drought on a landscape. Without layered vegetation
- Preservation of Biodiversity – A richly vegetated landscape with a diverse variety of native plants maintains a genetic reserve of locally native species. These plants sustain insects, caterpillars, pollinators and animals, many of which have adapted over time to rely on the plants for food.
Reduced Maintenance
In addition to being aesthetically pleasing as well as beneficial for the environment, a nature-driven landscape, if designed and planted properly, ends up being much lower maintenance than a traditional suburban landscape in the long run.
A traditional garden, comprised of a turfgrass lawn and clipped ornamental shrubs, is a very high maintenance and resource-hungry landscape. While a carpet of neatly striped, deep green grass may stand out in most peoples’ minds as the ideal landscape, it takes a lot of money and resources to keep this look up. If you’re in an area that tends to dry out in the summer, irrigation adds additional costs.
In Indiana, the average annual cost for lawn care is around $1500 per acre, depending on how intensively managed the lawn is. The lush green look everyone is after usually requires a heavy input of chemical fertilizers, fungicides and pesticides, adding to the environmental cost. While you may be able to do the work yourself for less, the time investment is still very high.
A nature-inspired landscape may be more costly to install initially, but once established, the annual maintenance is nowhere near the amount as is required for a traditional suburban landscape.
Now that we’ve covered the background and theory, it’s time to really get our hands dirty!
Next Article: Restore Life to Your Landscape – Getting Started