Call of the wild: create a naturalistic garden that will entice and exhilarate birds, butterflies and people alike

Natural Health, May, 2004 by Nancy Stedman

The neighbors thought he was nuts. About three years ago, Tampa, Fla., landscape designer Brian Schatz ripped out his traditional front yard of lawn and shrubs and replaced it with a pine flatwoods, an eco-system that used to cover 50 percent of Florida. Into infertile, acid soil he planted long-leaf pines, saw palmettos, wire and muhly grasses, and colorful wildflowers like goldenrod and beebalm--all of which supply wildlife with food and cover. A dead (but not precarious) pine was allowed to remain in the ground to provide shelter and meals for the local woodpeckers. "The yard is pretty darn wild," Schatz admits. "We really stick out."

Slowly, the neighbors changed their minds. They'd walk by and say, "Look at all the birds and butterflies. How'd you get them?" They also noticed that Schatz's garden changes with the seasons, while their suburban plantings look the same most of the year.

For centuries, the beauty of a natural landscape has sent poets and painters into lyrical rapture. Ever charming, ever new/When will the landscape tire the view?, wrote John Dyer nearly three centuries ago. But in the last few decades, the supply of open space has rapidly dwindled. With much of the country now paved, "we're searching for a bit of wildness," says Rick Darke, a landscape design consultant in Landenberg, Pa., and author of The American Woodland Garden. In place of conventional gardens, people across the country are creating naturalistic gardens--ones that reflect each area's native ecology.

While perhaps not remaking habitats to the extent that Schatz did, wild-minded gardeners group together plants suited to local conditions, putting woodland plants in shade and plants from drier climates where rain is scarce. Eschewing "artificial" blooms, such as dinner-plate-sized dahlias, they pick simpler plants, scattering them in sweeps so it looks like nature, not humans, did the design work.

In Wisconsin, prairie plants like purple coneflowers, black-eyed Susans and wild grasses fill front yards; cacti reach the doorways of New Mexico houses; and backyard woodlands in Delaware light up with white-flowered dogwood and purple-flowered redbuds in spring, then burgundy-leaved viburnums and golden-leaved spicebushes in autumn.

let freedom grow

These plantings connect you to the piece of earth you're standing on, declares Jill Nokes, an Austin, Texas, landscape designer and author of How to Grow Native Plants of Texas and the Southwest. "Naturalistic gardens make you feel a sense of place--that you and the garden belong in one certain area."

Wilder landscapes can make grown people swoon. Says Darke, who grew up playing in Eastern forests, "The woods inspires and exhilarates me. It is a place of lightness and darkness, enclosure and exposure, discovery and familiarity."

Prairie gardens evoke the American frontier for Nell Diboll, owner of Prairie Nursery in Westfield, Wisc. "The vast open spaces of the prairie signify freedom in its purest form," he says. Americans, Diboll notes, respond powerfully to the image of "fields of flowers and waving grasses stretching off into the horizon. The potential to re-create this effect in one's own personal living space holds a very real and strong appeal."

Naturalistic gardens are also gentle to the environment, especially when compared to high-maintenance grass lawns. Since the plants in native gardens are adapted to the local climate, they usually don't need additional watering beyond normal rainfall once they become established. Keeping lawn grass green in summer heat gobbles up an enormous amount of liquid--some 30 percent of the water used in the urban East Coast goes to lawn care. Naturalistic gardens also require little or no fertilization, while conventional American lawns take in 3 million tons of fertilizer a year, with an estimated 60 percent of the nitrogen used in lawns ending up polluting the ground water.

Finally, naturalistic gardeners rarely resort to chemical pesticides. "Up to 40 percent of the pesticides used in the United States are applied in urban and suburban environments," according to the Connecticut-based organization Smaller American Lawns Today. Switching to ecologically sounder practices means that birds and butterflies are likelier to come visiting.

garden matchmaking

Purists may insist that all plants be native, but most wild-inclined landscape designers are more flexible. Diboll, a leading proponent of native plants, confesses that he has hostas, an almost indestructible East Asian plant, in his backyard. And it's unimaginable that people who suffer through northern winters would want to give up harbingers of spring like tulips and daffodils, which are native to East Turkey and the Mediterranean, respectively.

To get a naturalistic look, choose native varieties for the largest plants, which are a garden's framework, advises Nokes. "Start with native trees and shrubs that tend to grow in association with each other," she says. Some examples: Sitka spruce and Alaska huckleberry from Washington state; Delaware's tulip trees and spice bushes; and southern New York's hickories, hemlocks and swamp azaleas.