gentle gardener: green

countdown to spring: personal garden coach

Gentle Gardener - Garden coach | sustainable landscape design | VA.

Buy Local Virginia

via www.buylocalvirginia.org

we are proud to be part of the 'Buy Fresh, Buy Local' movement. It's been a part of our philosophy since day one......for a Garden as Pleasing to Nature as to the Eye..........
for Weddings and Events as Pleasing to Nature as to the Eye.

What is 'greener' than grass? Here's to Bringing Nature Home: Tallamy's Top Twenty for the MidAtlantic

Each February the Piedmont Landscape Association in central Virginia creates a Valentine to the plant world and its workers:  the growers, designers, plantsmen and plantswomen who paint in plants.   

This year's PLA winter symposium featured Dr. Doug Tallamy of the University of Delaware, author of Bringing Nature Home, a Timber Press release, and now, a re-release.  Dr. Tallamy and other stars of the horticultural world enthralled over 600 gardeners in the packed Paramount Theatre on the downtown mall in Charlottesville; in Tallamy's case, with pictures of - gasp! - caterpillars.

These action shots of caterpillars consuming native plants - most photographed in Tallamy's yard - were an unlikely inspiration for those who are often asked by clients to pick, smash, burn, poison, explode or just deter those caterpillars from eating any single leaf on 'their' plants. And as a result, many years of accumulated experience go into creating plant 'palettes' for 'low-maintenance' landscapes based on plants that have little appeal for these caterpillars; in other words, we prepare a banquet for our own human visual and sometimes olfactory entertainment that is also made to be un-appealing and dis-tasteful to these creatures.

 

Our landscape design clients who dislike the munching caterpillars often ask for 'butterfly' gardens to be composed by  us, their dutiful landscape designers.  (The notion of metamorphosis for lepidoptera has escaped some of us,  if not our children).   And, we and our clients often go to great lengths to feed birds year-round, when what is crucial to biodiversity, particularly diversity of migrating birds, is the availability of food rich in protein during nesting and fledging season. What food do birds prefer and need greatly at this critical time?  Well, the bugs and caterpillars.of course. 

Dr. Tallamy and his students research and publish the links between the food needed, and food provided in the regions where we live, particularly the midAtlantic.  Critical to the entire food chain in any ecosystem are the plant genera that support the greatest numbers of lepitoptera and other 'bugs'  in each region.  Plants, large and small, feed the critters, and they in turn feed the birds, and on and on.  Eventually, we too are fed.

At a time when food, and eating local, is tres chic, au courant, de rigeur, the zeitgeist, we often deny the birds in our flyways the same opportunity.  We lay a banquet of foreign, strange and sometimes unappetizing material for them, and tease them with 'melting icebergs' of  large expanses of foreign, clipped, never-blooming turf grasses, dotted with single 'specimen' trees and shrubs from other places, rather than a knitted-together community of native trees, shrubs, herbaceous perennials, grasses and forbs.  And of course, the berries and other snacks on the foreign shrubs  that birds DO find appetizing, end up being propagated by them.  In the right conditions, these invasives then roll like a mighty tide right over the native plants.  Think berberis (barberry) hosting increased tick populations in the woodlands of New Jersey and southern New England, and privet (ligustrum amurensis) colonizing the piedmont and coastal plains of South Carolina and Georgia. (There is a singular virtue, after all, in clipping privet hedges into rectangles:  denying birds the berry/seed to propagate an invasive pest).

So. What? you say.   So, many thanks to Dr. Tallamy and his researchers for providing a list of the top 20 woody trees and shrubs and top 20 herbaceous perennials, grasses, forbs for supporting biodiversity in the midAtlantic.  This single page handout was worth the price of the day's admission.  We now hand out this list at speaking engagements and to each client in our initial landscape design consultation.  Gardeners and designers love lists:  look at the back of any catalog. 

My teacher at Kew, the British landscape designer and writer John Brookes, opened our History of Garden Design lecture with a deceptively simple statement:  "Gardens are a product of the culture in the time and place they are made."

Your landscape designer, gardener, landscape contractor and maintenance crew may not tell you they have suddenly converted to stewards of the ecosystem in your yard.  In fact they will probably be quite reticent on the topic.  But stealthily and steadily they will begin to suggest different plants, native replacements for the Norway maples and other strangers in your midst.

A generational shift that began in the sixties and seventies will shift almost all gardens in the midAtlantic in the next decade.  Individual single family homes with individual yet identical turfgrass lawns - the archetypal American expanse - limitless, with no walls or hedges to define each suburbanite's plot, will become right-sized and sized for a purpose. 

Grass?  Who needs it?  Well, children do.  Players of sport do.  Those of us with Seasonal Affective Disorder do,  Rather than the development default, turfgrass lawns will become one design element, but by no means the most important element, of the designed landscape.  Our gardens will be designed for people, yes, as Thomas Church so rightly pointed out, but also for a more permanent, sustaining culture, not just human culture.  Permaculture speaks of forest gardening, and Bill Mollison's most exciting lectures in our permaculture design course were of 'weaving',  'stacking' or layering productive systems on land and water as Nature does. 

Could it be that we are on the verge of unifying our notions of beauty with a reawakened sense of stewardship? 

If so, we have a few important teachers to thank, and Dr. Doug Tallamy is among them.  A deep, prayerful bow seems the right expression of gratitude.

The twenty woody plants, and the twenty herbaceous perennials, grasses and forbs, will inspire us this spring in this blog and in our design work for some time to come.

Stay tuned, and walk in beauty.

 

 

 

Media Release:Gentle Gardener to launch campaign-Is Grass always the 'Greenest' Choice?

Virginia R. Rockwell of Gentle Gardener Green Design, will launch an educational campaign entitled 'Is Grass always the “Greenest” Choice? Sustainable Alternatives to Turf Grass for Healthy Gardens, Waterways, Rivers and Bay' via a lecture on Wednesday, March 16 at 7 p.m. at the Central Regional Rappahannock Library, 1201 Caroline Street, Fredericksburg, VA. The free event is hosted by the Master Gardener Association of Central Rappahannock Area and open to the public.

Rockwell will discuss beautiful, sustainable options for turf grass, design elements and new legislation concerning phosphorous levels in commercial fertilizers. Good gardening choices and practices have a positive impact upon waterways. Rockwell will show attendees how to achieve a garden as pleasing to nature as the eye.

Virginia R. Rockwell is a certified landscape designer, horticulturalist, Association of Professional Landscape Designers member, Virginia Society of Landscape Designers member and LEED* Green Associate. For more information about Rockwell and Gentle Gardener Green Design, please visit http://www.gentlegardener.com/green. To learn more about MGACRA, please visit http://www.mgacra.com. Media inquiries can be directed to Ann P. Reid via e-mail at Annpreid@gmail.com.

*Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design

 

4-H in Orange County, VA: 4-H Teen Hosts Sustainable Agriculture Seminar February 26

Sarah McKay, Orange 4-H teen and Blue Ridge Virtual Governor's School Senior, invites the public to attend a Sustainable Agriculture seminar on Saturday, February 26th, at the Orange Train Depot in downtown Orange. The event will be held from 1:00-3:00 p.m. and is free of charge. Participants will hear from featured speakers of Retreat Farm and Virginia Cooperative Extension about local food production methods now and in the future, as well as tips for your home garden and a demonstration of nutritional smoothies you can make at home from your own garden. The seminar is part of McKay's year-long Senior project for BRVGS. For more information, please call 540-212-3663.

via ocva4-h.blogspot.com

Sustainable Agriculture seminar
Saturday, February 26th
Orange Train Depot, Main Street, Orange, VA 22960

1:00-3:00 p.m.
free of charge

Phosphorus For Your Garden Plants – Its Crucial Importance And How To Apply It Correctly | TopPageInformationListing.info

Plants require 12 mineral nutrients that are essential for their growth and development. A shortage of any one element will result at best in stunted and poor growth. The plant however needs the various minerals in differing amounts. Phosphorus, together with Nitrogen and Potassium, being consumed in relatively large amounts, is considered one of the macro elements.

via www.toppageinformationlisting.info

#phosphorus occurs in nature and is crucial for growth. As Walter Reeves,#MG Cooperative Extension master gardener teacher at the Atlanta Botanical Garden, taught us, here's how to read a fertilizer bag:

N P K "UP, Down, AllAround":

N=Nitrogen which greens plants UP, gives them top leaf/stem growth for more photosynthesis so they can feed themselves...

P=phosphorus, which plants need to go DOWN with root development to survive drought, provide a strong foundation for top growth and for bloom development...

and K=potassium, which is crucial to ALLAROUND vascular growth.

I'm no soil scientist. "UP-DOWN-ALLAROUND" is single most important thing I learned in MG training.

The finer points of how addding highly concentrated phosphorus fertilizer to alkaline soil creates a concrete-like farming disaster in developing countries and elsewhere, I learned from Bill Mollison in training to be a certified #permaculture designer.

Most important sentence of the article is last, of course (Peek at the happy ending first!)

 

"It may be well worth your while conducting a soil test before amending your soil. If you are in doubt, it would be best to rely on organic matter only, excluding chemical fertilizer altogether."

And now #VA and other #Chesapeake Bay watershed states: New York, New Jersey Elevate Lawn Phosphorus Debate | Safelawns Daily Post and Q&A Blog

Compile all the managed lawn surface in New York and New Jersey and, conservatively speaking, you’d probably be talking about 15 percent of the total lawn care industry in the United States. That puts billions of dollars and high emotion into play when the two states’ legislatures start passing lawn laws.via www.safelawns.orgmore on bad science > bad policy > bad legislation > unintended consequence: putting organics and small businesses out of business

via gentlegardener.typepad.com

Will VA follow other states in banning phosphorus-containing fertilizers, even #organic fertilizers?

Is Grass always the 'greenest' choice? Beautiful alternatives to #turfgrass to benefit gardens, streams and the Bay

                
March 16, 2011
Time 7PM
Location: Central Rappahannock Regional Library

1201 Caroline St. Fredericksburg, VA
Speaker; Virginia Rockwell, LEED Green Associate, VSLD, VCH, APLD Associate

Topic: Is Grass always the “greenest” choice? Beautiful alternatives to turf grass that will help clean up out waterways, too.

via www.mgacra.com

Open to the public, landscape design alternatives to turfgrass on the eve of St. Paddy's Day.

Go Green!

Finding the Money in Water: The Smart Landscaping Boom | Triple Pundit: People, Planet, Profit

By David Jay

via www.triplepundit.com

As usual, California is at the forefront of this #water-saving landscape design trend. Here in the midAtlantic, a second reason to use less water in landscapes: all that water carries runoff of excess nitrogen, phosphorus and sediment into our streams and eventually Chesapeake Bay.

Landscape auditors? Creating those jobs won't satisfy the 'landscape free or die' crowd, but it's a thought. Landscape coaches, educators, first....then, the auditors, maybe.

Regardless, landscapes typically use an awful lot of water on landscapes, and the embedded energy that goes with it. We CAN do better...by catching and using the rain off the roof, by infiltrating SLOWLY into our own land the rain we get, and by planting and fertilizing more sensibly and sustainably.

Landscape for Life -- Based on the principles of the Sustainable Sites Initiative

via www.landscapeforlife.org

Woohoo! a translation of the Sustainable Sites Initiative,  from landscape architectureSpeak to down-to-Earth gardener talk ....I am a fan!

Landscape design came a little late to the LEED party...After all, if you could build a 'green' building, but trash the site while doing it, what was so green about that?

But after a long subterranean growth period, green shoots are appearing!  The ASLA, US Botanic Garden and Lady Bird Johnson Wildflower Center have worked together on this for YEARS...and while 99% of the pilot projects for the Sustainable Sites Initiative aka SITES(TM)are public, so that people can experience these demonstration projects, it's great to see a quick translation.

In the Chesapeake Bay watershed, this is the RxH20 for our soils getting healthy, our waters getting cleaner, and our people being more conscious and healthy.

Congratulations to the writers/translators at Blue Crocus Consulting for doing the necessary work of bringing this good work down to Earth.

Gentle Gardener Green Design creates gardens and landscapes in accordance with the Sustainable Sites Initiative. Virginia is now a LEED Green Associate (one of only 92 LEED credentialed landscape architecture/design people in Virginia), credentialed by the U.S. Green Building Council as a person schooled in sustainability.