It’s everywhere.
Various Chelsea Flower Show gardens this year included the newly fashionable weeds.
Interestingly, I saw someone quoted as saying that that was ok because ‘it was just in the naturalistic gardens.’
Being a naturally difficult person, I wondered why that should be the case. Why are we beginning to assume we want gardens which look as little like gardens as we can imagine? And what do we want them to look like instead?
In a wild garden
‘Wild’ is the current buzz word, naturalistic has been fashionable for longer. I’m not sure whether we think these things differ. Let’s be totally on trend and use ‘wild.’
I appreciate that many people want a ‘wild’ garden because it’s good for ‘wildlife’. But does this mean it has to look wild?
I think in the UK we have begun to think of a particular garden style as ‘wild’ and therefore in some way also morally good. Monty Don has suggested: “It is as though a so-called ‘wild’ garden that mimics natural conditions is somehow worthier and more moral than one in which mankind’s creative skills are more obviously played out.”
It’s hard to define wild, since the UK has been extensively managed by people for thousands of years and most of what people think of as ‘natural’ or wild is usually part of farmland: like hedgerow, meadow, pasture, field margins, stream or river bank, ponds. There is no reason why we shouldn’t incorporate farmland into gardens, and we certainly have at Veddw, where we have kept ancient meadow as part of the garden and gardened it as if it were a traditional hay meadow.
Ours has certain rather unnatural aspects though.
Or a wild garden may basically be woodland. The idea of being permitted to wander in someone’s managed woodland can be a great delight to someone living in a city, surrounded by housing and traffic. I say managed, because it is very hard work making your way through unmanaged woodland, where the understory will probably be like this. (Unless it’s a conifer or beech wood)
Local wild: bracken, bramble, and our UK most poisonous wild plant, Oenanthe crocata
And woodland may be good for much wildlife – ours boasts deer, rabbits, squirrels, badgers and stoats, as well as a great many more obvious creatures and things like plants, lichens, mosses, birds, bats, owls, snakes and insects. (pollinators and refusing to pollinate ones, whichever they are).
Beech wood. Good for walking in, but if you were a wild thing, would you prefer this or a gardeny garden?
But these things possibly thrive even better in a flowery ornamental garden than in the wood. (especially if it’s a conifer wood or beech wood, where not much clutters the woodland floor) Most of them seem to prefer our garden to the wood, however hard we try to persuade them differently. The complexity of biodiversity in gardens is well demonstrated by the Biodiversity Audit of Great Dixter
So your garden doesn’t need to look wild to be wild or full of wildlife and those pollinator things.
I have always loved the contrast between wildishness and formality.
This is a bit of ancient grassland/meadow, full of oxeye daisies, with a nice formal hedge setting it off.
Vita Sackville-West, described the garden at Sissinghurst as: “The strictest formality of design with the maximum informality in planting” and that has certainly influenced me.
So is the fashionable wild garden really more about the choice of plants?
Not just weeds/native plants, but plants which look like weeds/native plants?
Not so much like this.
But
More like this?
And you need an absence of familiar features of gardens:
such as borders, straight lines, clipped edges, lawns, hedges, containers, topiary and so on? If it’s a bit formless, random, chaotic, it will look wild?
But, my point is this: if you’d like borders, straight lines, lawns, containers and many other possibilities (a New Perennial garden, perhaps?) you can still be virtuous, pollinator and deer friendly. You can still grow delicate plants which look wonderfully weedy, or indeed, weeds. It doesn’t have to look as if someone gardened it thirty years ago and then walked off. Or as if it once grew veggies and there are still some struggling on as forlorn remnants. Or as if the Forestry Commission will soon come and chop it down. How does all this translate to America? Are you all going wild???
Never forget that Chelsea is an RHS show. I’ve noticed that the organisation is currently promoting ‘ nature ‘and in that context the wild trend makes sense.
Unfortunately,in the rush to to save nature,there is a cloud of general ignorance and a belief that planting one ‘ great for pollinators ‘ plant will save the world. I hope that the pendulum will swing to a point where good practice naturewise will be promoted with equal vigour.
Hopefully some Rant readers from America and Australia will weigh in – they’re ahead of the curve in the battle between native \non native,yet appear to be able to produce some fine gardens.
I hope so too.
In the USA, i recently gave a public talk called Curb Appeal for Pollinator Gardens. It was my way of saying the same thing. People are so intent on getting these plants in that they are abandoning any and all design principles. In some cases they never knew them in the first place, they just started tossing plants in. It gives the pollinator movement a bad reputation. It was fun to put together and people got it. By the way, I LOVE your gardens (from afar) and hope to visit someday.
Sounds as if your talk is just what’s needed. And thanks for the kind words about the garden: do come!!
I’m not going totally wild in my garden in Iowa but do have some native plants in it, which we are encouraged to plant by the experts over here. I do grow swamp milkweed for the monarch butterflies and dill for swallowtails. I tried prairie grasses for our lawn but they didn’t grow well. I think we have too much shade. I would have appreciated it if the USDA guy who gave a lecture on this idea had mentioned that. One neighbor was upset about my milkweed, especially the few stems I allowed to grow in the lawn. There is a generation of men who obsess about their lawns here. Just one street over is a section of restored prairie on city lands, so a wild garden is very close.
I watched the Gardeners’ World shows at Chelsea and wasn’t impressed.
i had to look milkweed up – looks a perfectly good plant, quite apart from butterfly appeal. So much of this is about labelling things, it seems. I love the way the world has shrunk, so that we can discuss this and you can watch Gardener’s World.
Well, over here in “Yankland” we are seeing similar trends towards more naturalistic gardens, but the large majority of residential landscapes are still lawns with some shrubs and trees for structure. The problem is that most people are so horticulturally ignorant that keeping things simple the only realistic option for them. There is the Ecolawn or Meadowscaping or Prairie Up movements that get some interest but those participants soon realize that nothing is maintenance-free and without some human inputs things soon just devolve into a mishmash of noxious weeds, which for us in the northwest is Himalayan blackberries, Canadian thistle, Japanese knotweed or Scotch Broom. I do see a gradual awareness that landscapes need to be more diverse and management practices need to be more ecologically friendly. As for the battle over what is the most morally correct, as long as landscapes are kind to nature and all of its inhabitants, it shouldn’t make any difference.
It’s true that nothing is maintenance free – and I just read someone saying that a wild garden is higher maintenance than a conventional one. Perhaps.
Longtime reader, first time commenter. In Washington state (where I live) and other western states where agriculture dominates the economy, many native plants that thrive in grasslands and edge lands are actually classified as weeds. Some examples: hemp dogbane, lupines, yellow rattle(!), milkweed (asclepias spp.), docks, hawthorn, and elderberry. This is because they might be unhealthy for livestock, lend a weird taste to milk, host pests to tree fruit, or threaten the vigor of industrially farmed fodder crops. Many of these “native-but-noxious” plants are valuable as fiber, dye, or medicine to Native Americans. So, I let them grow in my meadow project and share with my Indigenous friends, county weed board be damned!
A ‘county weed board’ is a very strange idea to a Brit. Yet, of course, we do have cows….
I’ve been hearing a lot of talk about “native plants” in the Northeast in recent years and one thing I’ve noticed is that many native plant enthusiasts don’t seem too concerned with how horribly invasive some of these native plants can be. There’s also a weird kind of purity issue, as if non-native cultivars are somehow too foreign or too fancy to have in one’s garden if you’re trying to feed pollinators and encourage wildlife.
Yes, it does seem as if pollinators and other wildlife are frequently less fussy than their reputation, and are willing to experiment. Slugs and rabbits seem to operate on the principle of trying anything new.
As a garden I’m currently struggling with this. I live in a large city in the Pacific Northwest. Due to life events the back half of my backyard got away from me and is now “a mishmash of different weeds” surrounding some fruit trees and overgrown raised garden beds. I don’t think of it as a garden. But at different points in the past year it’s been really beautiful and I’m enjoying that I’m now sharing my yard with raccoons and possums and rabbits and a much more diverse group of birds. I’d like to clean it up and have beds and, maybe, a bit of lawn again but I also like having these plants producing seeds for so many different birds and cover for city wildlife and I haven’t figured out how to balance what seem to be competing ideas.
It sounds as if you have inadvertently gone fashionable and, what’s more, can enjoy it. It doesn’t sound as if you need to make any dramatic changes?
The native plant movement is popular here in western Pennsylvania. Unfortunately, some of its strongest supporters have become native plant snobs and insist that only strait species natives are acceptable in the home landscape. No cultivars allowed!
My husband and I have adopted a more moderate approach. We’ve reduced the size of our turf grass lawn and have incorporated some native plants (and their cultivars) in our traditional front yard sunny perennial border and shady woodland garden. We’ve received many positive comments from neighbors because our native plantings are restrained and in maintained beds that complement the architecture of our house.
The “wild garden” occupies part of our private backyard. It’s not truly “wild” but planned. We have included native plants that spread aggressively: Packera aurea, striated violet, Solomon’s seal, blood root, Ohio Spiderwort, Green and Gold, Virginia waterleaf, etc. and also use aggressive non-native species such as the stinking hellebore, comfrey, and sweet woodruff. Basically, anything deer-resistant. The lawn is gradually shrinking to become wide pathways between these garden beds. It is a “wilderness” of controlled chaos.
Controlled chaos is a very appealing idea!
Some people in my Cheyenne, Wyoming, neighborhood haven’t mastered lawn care. During last year’s dry summer, anyone who didn’t irrigate had a nice variety of invasive, non-native (and very hardy) weeds. This year is much wetter and the weeds much taller. When we lose our Colorado River water, there are going to be a lot of yards getting their green from weeds.
I’ve been digging up bits of my lawn for 30 years, trying regular garden plants, native plants and native cultivars. Not much of a design except a sharp edge between the grass and flowers. But I’ve come to realize that straight natives are healthier for native bees. So slowly, whenever there’s an opening, I put in a straight Wyoming plains native. Some I start from seed, some come from the High Plains Environmental Center.
Every gardener likes a growing challenge and this is mine. Maybe I will still have flowers when water for landscapes gets cut off.
Those plants should be well adapted and may well cope with water restriction and drought. Even wet summers too. It’s the nature of ‘weeds’.
I live in the Midwest in a very pollinator aware neighborhood. We could definitely use that curb appeal lecture here! My neighbor has a wild “pollinator friendly” boulevard with native plants. She does nothing to it, and it looks positively awful. The shorter coneflower is completely hidden by goldenrod, which is taking over. Looking at it, it’s just a 4 foot high solid mass of plants. I’m trying for the “curated” natural look for my boulevard. I’ve planted native perennials to look attractive and go well together, and I intervene to keep plants in check. It’s nothing fancy, but I like how it looks. Plus, I just like being out in my garden and doing stuff.
That is my point – it really doesn’t have to look horrid.
Anne,
Nicely written and quite rational!
Reading the comments convinces me that we, ‘Merikuns, continue to value the freedom to choose differently. This, I think, will save us from adopting a uniform orthodoxy when it comes to gardening. Good!
We continue to have much in common after all….
I try to keep the native plant chaos controlled behind shrub or structural perennials. Unfortunately, I was unable to garden at all last year, so things went to rack and ruin. A vegetable bed was overrun with invasive Veronica persica, which was impossible to dig out. Shrubs didn’t get pruned and some of my native thug plants (I’m looking at you Baptisia and Amsonia) overgrew their allotted space. I spent spring racing to catch up with mixed results. Now the hot and humid weather has arrived in New Jersey, US, and not everything is as it ought to be. The biggest mistake was not giving the Vernonia (New York Ironweed) the Chelsea chop; it is now competing with a dogwood for height and ruining the view out my back window. On a positive note, I weeded, mulched, and planted out the hellstrip with prairie grasses; it has a look of modern restraint with a hint of virtue. Another positive note is that I finally got a new trellis built for two large native honeysuckles, so they have a place to climb out of the reach of the Awful Neighbor. Also added a native clematis planted to grow up a Serviceberry tree that is boring in summer. But this morning I was still grubbing out Amsonia and killing overreaching Baptisia, pulling weeds and poisoning bindweed and pokeweed, along with all the usual garden tasks. Another positive note: Adding natives to the garden has improved the contrast of fine and coarse foliage.
You have introduced me to the hellstrip, and I love the idea of ‘modern restraint with a hint of virtue’. However, Awful Neighbours are not especially native to the USA…
Like the foliage tip.
As with many things, it takes great artistry to create a garden that looks natural and “wild” but still looks good; some amazing American landscape designers do pull that off, like Oehme and van Sweden. I content myself with adding native plants that are also loved by pollinators to the existing garden we inherited. I’ve gradually shrunk our back lawn by adding mixed borders in front of a tall old hedge of evergreen magnolias and a terraced bed of large old azaleas that run along the sides of our small lawn. After many years of trial and error, I’m quite happy this year with a mix of phlox, bee balm, coneflower, daylilies, heuchera, yarrow, hostas, and ferns. Some are native to the US, some aren’t. In one of the mixed borders, I have native azaleas and dwarf winterberries combined with a few roses and more coneflowers, yarrow, and daylilies. Hellebores are everywhere, they grow like weeds here! We put in a dry creek and rain garden a year or two ago; that has a mix of native and non-native ferns, hellebores, native and non-native irises, milkweed, Solomon’s seal, and more hellebores. The back part of our garden is the “wildest” area, and it has several dogwoods and redbud trees, both native to the US. It also has a patch of trilliums that come up every year, planted decades ago by a former owner, which I cherish.
My favorite wildflower/weed that I actually encourage in my garden are common wood violets. I have been pulling up the English ivy that the original creator of my garden planted everywhere as a groundcover and letting the wild violets sow themselves as a replacement, especially under the old azaleas. I love violet flowers, and I think their leaves look very orderly, plus in this climate they stay green. I’d rather have them as a groundcover than the English ivy, which tries to strangle everything in its path.
that artistry is also my greatest ambition.
Many eco-friendly trends and initiatives end up as “greenwashing” and virtue-signalling: the appearance of eco-friendliness without the hard work and understanding that must precede an actual eco-friendly landscape. Take the nonsense that is “No Mow May” for instance. Pollinators don’t benefit much at all from fools not mowing their turf grass for a few weeks. It’s just a highly visible thing to do so that you look sufficiently crunchy (there’s some USA slang for you, Anne) to your neighbors.
I’m agree with Monty Don that gardening artistry is to be celebrated and appreciated, and with you that we should look critically at all aspects of our gardens. If one of the aims of our gardens is to be wildlife friendly, we need to actually think hard and research what that means in the context of our real gardens and real wildlife, not just create some simulacrum of “wild”.
Oh, I hadn’t come across ‘crunchy’ before – love it!
“Wild” gardens are increasing here in the US, but it’s a hard sell. Most don’t like the disordered look. We tend to use the term “pollinator friendly” or “native” gardening. I encourage pollinators, but maintain some semblance of order since I live in the suburbs with an order loving hubby. It is possible to mix the two styles. The main difference for me is avoiding the use of insecticides.
I guess that meets my point – avoiding insecticides is a good thing no matter what style of garden you make. Though, is that more of a challenge for veggie growers? (I don’t know, don’t grow veggies)
I absolutely giggled when you mentioned having to look up milkweed. It is a 10 year obsession on the eastern half of the US.
Monarch butterflies have been an asset in encouraging people to grow pollinator friendly gardens. Of course most prefer to grow the showier tropical versions, not the straight species that is pretty coarse.
I still don’t know if the tropical versions provide the same benefits as the straight species to the Monarch caterpillars. The straight species makes the Monarch taste awful to predators. There is even a lookalike butterfly using the Monarchs bad taste as a defense mechanism.
Invasive foreign species have become more of an issue here. My beloved red berried nandina has been removed. It has seeded around the garden everywhere.
Pretty obvious it has joined the Invasive trifecta of Chinese privet, Asian honey suckle and English ivy. Those 3 infest our woods to the point of being the “natural world” to people who don’t know any better.
I’m not giving up the Japanese reblooming azaleas or the lorepetalum or the Kousa dogwoods or the half dozen other exotics that make our yard beautiful. But I am much more aware of the problematic plants.
Various Miscanthus species are one of the few stately grasses that exists. It’s also horribly Invasive here. There are fallow fields full of some varieties.
“Pollinator gardens” have a strong tendency to look like abandoned property.
The desire to help our native bees (over 1000 varieties (?!)) hasn’t entirely caught up with basic good gardening principles yet. Some pretty nasty looking yards have been promoted as desirable. People approaching “Save the native pollinators” as an evangelical purity mission have to finally meet more regular gardeners halfway.
Thankfully, more garden designers have taken up an interest in making pollinator gardens a place you don’t have to defend against your neighbors or HOA.
One of the fascinating aspects is learning that insects see into infra-red. The blooms look different to them. As we produce more pleasing cultivars (too us) the value to the pollinators may remain similar, or be completely reduced.
I still think the number 1 beneficial thing that most everyone can do is stop using broad spectrum insecticides.
Would people use insecticides if they didn’t grow veggies?
That aside, everything seems so much more complicated in the US compared to the UK!
We grow peppers and cherry tomatoes insecticide free. But those are pretty effortless.
We don’t have to worry about squash vine borers or everything that loves to devour eggplant plants, etc. Fennel exists as a butterfly caterpillar host plant.
Learning what to add for maximum benefit to the wildlife around us (that still looks absolutely beautiful!) has been a fun journey.
Adding more purpose to my esthetic garden has been enjoyable.
Like a tax write off that I actually enjoyed.
It’s the beauty bit that is getting underestimated now. Hang on to it!
Retired history teacher here: the USA was largely settled by people desperate to own some farmland. Apparently there’s some sort of genetic memory of that urge, linked to males. And a *LAWN* of lush greenness signifies on an atavistic level that one is a good farmer. And prosperous enough not to have to just grow food. Men of my husband’s elderly generation were literally embarrassed if their lawns were inferior to the neighbors’. Hence the endless quest for more and stronger chemicals to killkillkill the weeds and produce photogenic turf. Even at this distant era, my husband still complains, mildly, that we don’t have enough lawn and it isn’t sterile enough. Usually while l’m installing another flowerbed.
This reminds me of men here who took pride in their wives not having to work. I remember my mother in law saying ‘tough’ when her husband changed his mind!
I have a pollinator garden in my front yard (formerly lawn grass) and since passersby read the sign which so idenifies it, no one has objected to non -natives like asiatic lilies, dayllies, garden phlox, gladiolas, among the so-called natives.”A flower garden is still a flower garden by any other name.”
It is!
Here in Roanoke, Virginia, I formed a group to address our outdated weeds laws pertaining to front yards to allow people to put in more beneficial plants. But we all agreed that guidelines are still necessary to provide some semblance of order. My front yard is now 80% native (and very little lawn), but no one would say it looks wild. I give talks to gardeners on the glories of native American shrubs for form, flowers, fall color, and fruit. I fill in with native perennials. It’s a peaceful result, with something in bloom all season, but still in keeping with my very manicured neighborhood.
I don’t think I will ever understand people being ‘allowed’ to have certain plants. How on earth did this happen?