Adrian Higgins’s Washington Post column this week turned readers on to a wise native-plant designer of such projects as the New Jersey Pine Barrens – Darrel Morrison, now a hearty 84.
(If you don’t subscribe to the Post, you can probably access it through your public library’s website.)
Anyone wanting to enhance their home landscapes with native plants could learn a lot from Morrison. From Higgins, too. Here’s the meatiest passage:
In the gardening world, designers turned to perennials and grasses in the 1980s, and this naturalism later evolved into a popular and sometimes simplistic insistence on native plant gardens.
My mantra, as ever, is that gardens don’t need to be native; they need to be objectively beautiful. Great beauty can be achieved with native plants, but planting a few coneflowers here and some switch grass there isn’t enough; you need to plant en masse and in layers, drawing lessons from how these plants grow in the wild.
“People collect native plants and put them in a design and consider that to be an ecological design. It needs to be so much more based on whole communities of plants,” Morrison told me. Why? Not just because they are ecologically sound, but also because they are pleasing to the human eye and spirit. “You can’t really improve on the aesthetics of functioning plant communities, so they become the best models for design,” he says. And we are not just speaking of the prairie.
First, I appreciate both writers citing the importance of aesthetics, affirming that it’s right and natural for us to want beauty in our yards.
Second, they’ve pinpointed why so many native-plant gardens don’t look very good, why they don’t look like gardens at all. To look their best, native plants need scale – enough space for sweeps and masses, more space than most gardeners have.
Morrison’s memoir is Beauty of the Wild: A Life Designing Landscapes Inspired by Nature.
Yes indeed. You need considerable space to “plant en masse and in layers”–spreading that among multiple front yards in collaboration with neighbors–but we Americans are not much for communal actions or mutual cooperation.
Sad, but true.
Great article, but way too short!
Yes, I agree & I want more !
Nothing personal, Susan, but let me see if I understand: So if a gardener doesn’t have the scale afforded by acres of land, then is their small to mid-sized garden doomed to ugliness when he/she plants native plants? Is this what is being said? Is this always the case? Should those of us drawn to the idea of using native plants–to attract pollinators, feed birds, and to possibly lower our water use while potentially boosting our success by growing plants proven to do well in our area–give it up because we have size limitations and by default the garden will be ugly? Further, who sets the standard of what is ugly and pleasing in the garden? Are cookie cutter rows of annuals in a small garden lovely because they are orderly? Should rambunctious wild gardens in small places be given the boot because they are, by definition, wild and chaotic? Who sets this aesthetic? Just because I prefer jazz and you like country music or your husband likes brunettes while mine likes redheads is one less than the other?
I think what the authors are saying that I agree with is that the smaller the garden, the more difficult it is to make it beautiful using just native plants – in their eyes and mine. I think we’d all assert, too, that well-adapted nonnatives can provide the benefits you ascribe to natives, in addition to adding beauty in the eyes of the beholder. The important beholder always being ourselves, of course.
5 years ago I removed the fescue from my sloping front yard and bit by bit i added Kansas Native plants and xeric perennials. I had a fear of what my neighbors would say but the reaction has been quite pleasant. the slope of the yard had added qualities with draining during occasional downpours and my son hard landscaped with found lime stone from a destroyed 150 year old house, It’s not only quite lovely but requires very little water. I only wish I had done this when we built the house 47 years ago. One never stops learning.
Monarch Gardens, LLC at https://www.monarchgard.com/ has a different view to keep native garden looking at least kept up. (I subscribe to their newsletter. No, I’m not trying to promote their business.) I also grow non-native plants in the landscape, but the longer I garden, the more I feel natives are important, not necessarily for their beauty although many are beautiful, but for our ecosystem.
I apologize if I wasn’t supposed to link to a website with photos of small gardens that I think look good comprised entirely of native plants. I do think native plants can look messy, but I do feel it’s possible to make a beautiful small native garden I agree that everyone’s idea of “beautiful” is different. Benjamin Vogt wrote an entire book on the subject (I don’t agree with everything he writes either), but he does have examples of native gardens in small spaces online. (Hope it was okay to say this.)
It was fine. I just hadn’t gotten to my desktop yet to approve it. Comments with links always have to be moderated, which is a pain.
It would be useful for someone from the UK to know more about why native plants (though we’re not allowed to call them that here) in America are fundamentally different from others, so that they impact on design this way?
Excellent question and fodder for a whole post about it! Coming soon.
Excellent!
And I want to know why you can’t call them native plants in Britain?
I did not pick up that size matters all that much from the bit of Higgins’s article you posted. It certainly doesn’t hurt. What I got was ““You can’t really improve on the aesthetics of functioning plant communities…”
A layered plant community can fit on top of a single rock. A plant community can be a 2’x2′ square of ground. It is the natural plant community native plants grow in that gives them their beauty. Layered can be three feet high at the end of season. That is the design aesthetic and planting approach needed to help native plant gardens look better.
Planting a bunch of native plants hither and yon because they are natives is no better than planting a bunch Big Box bushes hither and yon because they are on sale from a garden design perspective.
What I learned from my “gardening with native plants” class at the local botanical garden was that it’s all about structure. This is true whether you’re using natives or exotics, but especially important if the plants you choose and your gardening style are “messy.” Do you have obvious paths and beds with strong borders? How about a trellis to mark the back of the bed? Are the shapes created by your hardscaping cohesive? If so, what you do between the lines doesn’t matter so much. “Messy” is much better for wildlife than “neat” but you can get away with a lot more if you have strong hardscaping lines. And it’ll still look like a great garden, even if it’s small!
Anyway, the climax ecosystem here (NC) is hardwood forest with spring ephemerals underneath. If you’re lucky enough to have one big tree you can still do it.
What if I think strong borders and defined spaces are confining and mind-numbing? How is a wild-looking garden full of mostly native plants, designed to benefit wildlife as much as humans, deemed “ugly”? Who are these beauty police deciding whether my garden meets their standard? (I will add that we are likely going to be bringing in non-native plants in future decades, as our local climates change and native plants may no longer be as appropriate to our spaces.)