Let Nature Happen
*In this essay I use the word “ki” as a personal pronoun rather than “it” when referring to plants or other non-human beings. This comes from the suggestion of Robin Wall Kimmerer. Referring to a plants as its is commonplace. It’s habitual. On the other hand, I would never refer to a human being as “it”. So, I am trying to break the habit and give plants their due respect by using the word ki in my writing.”Look at the oak tree, ki is so beautiful”.
September, 2025 (nearly 11 years in)
Let Nature Happen is the story of my cavalier endeavor to convert a parcel of developed land into a self-conserving native landscape. It is also an account of how the experience upended my grand visions and transformed my approach to landscaping. As the conversion progressed, the work became an interminable wrangle with Nature, and the story became a lament on the many challenges we face when the starting ground is a lawn-dominated landscape. When we vanquish the native landscape to build the houses we live in, what is our role in restoring the land? How do we even know where to begin? It is a perplexing question and my conclusion is that the most important thing we can do is to stop, just stop. We need to stop the habitual gardening practices that attempt to control everything and begin to let Nature guide the restoration work. We need to Let Nature Happen.
My tale begins in late fall 2014 when I bought a home on a 2.5-acre lot in Flintstone, Georgia. The home is sited in a clearing near the foot of Lookout Mountain and faces east toward the rising sun. The clearing is naturally quite beautiful and features several large colonies of loblolly pine and a small deciduous woodland on the south boundary. Aside from these, however, the property had few plants for founding a native landscape, and even the understories of those areas were overgrown with invasive plants. I knew that clearing the overgrown woodland areas was doable, but I was in complete denial about the challenges I would encounter on the rest of the property. Those areas were largely colonized by Bermudagrass and Zoysiagrass, invasive mainstays of the Southern Landscape. With that as my starting ground, my goal was to establish a native garden that would one day be an example for others to see, experience and, perhaps, even emulate. At the time I was full of energy, and full of myself, but I quickly learned through trial, error and exhaustion the limits of what I could do.
In the spring of 2015, while I pondered what to do with the invasive plants, I started planting native shrubs in open areas along the roadside and entry drive. It was March, the weather was cool and I was wholly gratified to get started. Soon thereafter, just up the road, I witnessed, in real time, the total obliteration of a wet, low-lying woodland for the building of more new houses in our community. This was sorrowing because it was so close to home, and unnerving because I was feeling a strange, far-off sense of déjà vu. Bit by bit, memory by memory, I deciphered those feelings. I recognized that the annihilation was not new to me. It was the continuation of a relentless, destructive wave that I first encountered early in my youth, when a large field of native grasses and wildflowers behind my childhood home was dozed into oblivion. Then creek we oft explored, along with all its living inhabitants, was excavated and piped underground to control runoff for the oncoming housing development. It’s difficult to recall how I, as a child, experienced the vanishing of natural wonder. As an adult, though, I could fathom the extinction taking place in my new neighborhood, and I mourned the overwhelming loss of life. Through the grief that followed the tree-felling, and piling, and burning, I was finally able to see the deeper connection that my own bias and self-interest had always obscured. I recognized that the foundation of my career, as well as almost the entirety of the lawn, landscape and nursery industry, was built on development’s bared soils. Indeed, it’s the ruination that largely generates the need for the industry as we know it. Now, we need replacement plants for those that were dozed and burned. Now we need manufactured mulch in a plethora of oversized plastic bags to replace the natural mulch that fallen leaves and branches once provided. Now, mostly, we need fast-growing grass to cover the large swaths of land that construction laid bare. And coming with those quick lawns are all the chemicals and machinery that lawns require to maintain them. In a better world we would not let this happen to our native homeland, but all around us, it is happening, right now, and many years ago it happened right here on my parcel in Flintstone, GA. After woodlands are leveled, the bared places become a free range for invasive plants that quickly embed themselves in the landscape. To establish native plants in their stead, we must clear them out, and it is not a one-time chore. It’s a long-term burden that lingers through every chapter of most garden stories.
As I lamented the nearby destruction, I kept at the work on my landscape. By late summer 2016, I had cleared substantial areas of invasive plants and I was primed to do more plantings. My unchecked enthusiasm brought dreams of covering all 2.5 acres with native plants. Coincidentally, we were in the middle of a significant drought, but I shrugged it off—and dreamed on. Early in September, after a few particles of rain dampened the parched ground, I was deluded into thinking that the drought had ended. I ordered scores of native plant plugs. I bought tough, robust natives: short-toothed mountain mint, wild bergamot, aromatic aster, butterfly weed, purple coneflower and more. While the drought persisted into October, the plugs arrived. It did not feel very promising; nonetheless, I chipped out holes in the dry compacted soil and planted the plugs during two long days of dry scorching heat. Then I had to water the plugs for the next six weeks—just to keep them alive. Those weeks were a trial. Fortunately, the drought came to an abrupt end in late fall; after two succeeding years of abundant rainfall most of the plants began to thrive.
The following spring, I cleared more space and planted more native plants. The weather was ideal and that planting also flourished; it appeared that my home parcel was becoming the garden I had grandly envisioned. During the warm, moist summer months that led to fall, however, the weeds surged around the natives. I doubled down and got most of them under control, but those were very tough months, and I was left physically depleted and doubting my ability to do the work. Thankfully, by this time legions of butterflies and other pollinators were arriving to garner nectar from the new wildflowers. They buoyed me as surely as the weeds brought me down. As it all unfolded, day-by-day, month-by-month—the energy and the exhaustion, the weeds, the wildflowers and the butterflies—I was more and more questioning what I was doing. I loved the beautiful garden that was coming into being and the abundant wildlife that it brought to my home, but I was disillusioned by the extent of the work. I was forced to acknowledge that something was askew. The old ways weren’t sufficing. I needed relief from some of the labor. I needed to control less and allow more. I needed, I surmised, to Let Nature Happen. Once the meaning of it all sank in, I was compelled to change my approach to landscaping.
What ensued was a new relationship, a two-way relationship, with Nature taking the lead. I relinquished my role as primary provider and caretaker. I became a supplemental worker, Nature’s helper, and furthered my ever-evolving relationship with Nature. That evolution included changing my planting habits. In those first few years, I planted hundreds of nursery-grown plants. For the most part, they adapted well. Here is the thing though: the plants I did not plant, those that emerged from the soil on their own, were almost universally faring better. Nursery grown plants, even natives, need more coddling than young plants that emerge from Nature. The coddling is another cost; at every point, in fact, this conversion work comes with costs. Those costs include limited supplies of money, time and physical energy. The cost to plant a one-acre plot—or even a half-acre plot—entirely with nursery-grown plants is extraordinary. Few people can afford to do this work and fewer still have the resources to maintain the plantings. The primary problem is that so many native gardeners have to start from scratch, from bared ground—bulldozed compacted clay. Few, if any, subdivisions leave or establish areas of woodland trees or meadows of native grasses and wildflowers to surround their houses. Rather, most new subdivision homes are engulfed with impoverished lawns sprinkled with a few shrubs and trees. Those sprinkles are not fairy dust. They will not magically restore the landscape. No, it’s costly to restore life when so much life has been taken during development.
By late summer 2018, my new relationship with native plants was beginning to sort itself out. I was allowing Nature to do some of the planting, and native plants were now blanketing large areas of my landscape with vibrant swaths of foliage, flowers and fruit, each in its season. The natives had mostly ousted the invasives; indeed, the natives were now competing with each other for space. They were behaving like weeds, but these were good weeds, essential and beautiful weeds—just what I needed to supplant the Zoysiagrass and Bermudagrass I had bought into a few years earlier. The burgeoning plants inspired me, and I expanded their home ground—I removed more lawn and transplanted some of the competing natives into the newly cleared areas.
All seemed good at the time, but plants move as time moves, and in the spring of 2019 an abundance of additional native plants emerged. By mid-summer, they too were flourishing beyond their intended bounds. These natives were relentless—they just kept coming, and I was running out of space to transplant them. Still, I felt compelled to respond, so I took the next step—a transformational step—I began proactively sharing plants with others; I sought new homes for them. In less than five years’ time my yard had become more than a native plant landscape—it had become a native plant nursery. Then, the swarm of it all came to my mind in one glimmering line, “We are the Native Plant Nursery.” Our native landscapes are more than gardens. They are vital storehouses of native plants for our communities.
Early on, in the days before my landscape practices evolved, I dreamed of a landscape that would one day sustain itself with little human handiwork, minimal actual gardening. Naïveté allowed me to believe that building this self-conserving landscape would be routinely done, but in reality, I often found myself standing alone, overwhelmed, awestruck by the sweeps of weedy plants entangling the property. On those days the awe rousted me from my dreams and the self-conserving native landscape seemed more an elusive fantasy than a real possiblity. My perception—that was the key in this scenario. I was falsely perceiving the self-conserving native garden as a human ideal to strive for. What I discovered, instead, is that it is in the nature of Nature to self conserve. It’s not an ideal; it’s not a fantasy. Every seed Nature sows is an act of self-conservation. Nature continually draws from herself to restore herself. Once I gathered that in, I could see that the gardening I knew and loved—the gardening I had practiced until the later stages of my career—had little room, little respect, for Nature’s restorative powers. Thinking I had to do it all, my work was steeped in self-serving arrogance toward our native land; it was born of an idealism that separated me from the very real place I was purporting to steward. I saw that I had based my original concept of the self-conserving native landscape on the view of Nature as a disparate entity, unconnected to myself. That’s a deception. Nature is not “over there”. Nature is always right here, right now, with each new appearance revealing the connection of all living things.
Nature surrounds us, and as we open ourselves to the ways of Nature, as we breathe in the native landscape, Nature gathers us in. And the way of that gathering is self conservation. A welcome change for us would be to bow, take a few deep breaths to draw in Nature, then emphatically breathe out the native gardening ideals that have so enthralled us. That might lead us to garden less and conserve more, reciprocally, with Nature. In fact, we must do this. The native garden ideal in which we view ourselves as separate from Nature inevitably leads to a clash, a head-on confrontation. When we force our will on the land, we ultimately come toe-to-toe with Nature’s will. Nature’s plants, all of them, are hardwired to self-conserve. Plants long to belong**, to restore themselves, invariably, relentlessly. Their restoration is not guided by ideals, but by the ancestral memory stored in the mother plants of each species. That memory is passed from one generation to the next—through their DNA. It’s contained in their seeds, and it goes back to the beginning, all the way back to the very first seed. In this way, the memories of the first plant endure to inform the growth of every succeeding plant. Those memories define each and every plant’s relationship with the rest of Nature.
And, it is just so with we humans. We also emerged from this earth, and our emergence suggests that the reproductive cells that become us also carry ancestral memories of our native land. Somewhere below the surface, buried alive in generations past, there are visions of open fields and woodland, of wild creeks, wild rivers and wildflowers. Carried in our DNA, vanished from the surface and lost to our present, but not gone, these dormant visions are surely longing for life. If we can uncover them by sinking our hands into our native soil and by surrounding ourselves with native plants, maybe we will begin to see that we are, after all, part of the earth. These visions may reveal a time when we did not unceasingly impose our will on the land, benignly calling that work “development.” They may reveal a time when plants emerging from Nature were not considered weeds to eradicate, but rather our kin, native plants longing for life, longing to heal the earth. They may teach of a time when we controlled less and allowed more, a time when we Let Nature Happen. Perhaps, we will discover that this native land, this forest of oak and hickory and dogwood, is indeed our homeland.
It was not vision, but exhaustion that moved me to Let Nature Happen. I simply could no longer control everything. Distinctions blurred. Plants I once considered weeds became acceptable landscape plants. Violets and broad-leaf plantain became essential ground cover plants, courtesy of Nature. I let both grow; they flourished. Then I relented and let white clover spread. White clover is a non-native plant brought here by European colonists, but ki* wills to grow here—with purpose. Clover provides valuable ecological services in many places where human settlements have eradicated the wild. Ki mingles well with native plants such as the golden ragwort and wild ginger that I had intentionally planted. White clover is much of what we need a self-conserving native plant to be, and it leads me to wonder where the wild ends and the domestic begins. It can surely be a physical space, as where a forest meets open field, but it is also a liminal space—a dynamic, living, vibrant place, where two disparate wills meet, an encounter of wild and domestic beings, both longing for life. It is here that our native gardening ideals must necessarly relent to allow for a convergence of wills. It is in this convergence that we are gathered into the ways of nature—we merge with the self-conserving native landscape.
Through this merging we can begin to see nature from the inside, rather than from without. We can begin to mimic what we see—and walk in nature’s footsteps. Then, as nature moves forth sowing and growing, we can join the movement that is emerging from the earth. It will happen when we realize that our native landscapes are more than yards—they are native plant nurseries, mother yards, birthing places of surplus native plants that nature freely provides to sustain the planet. Now consider the possibility that this merging conjoins us in the plant-sharing initiated by nature. Consider, if you will, that a community’s yards are organically organized, drawing plants and people together into a cellular matrix, a native plant sharing network, a network rooted in the idea that all plants long for life, and through that longing relentlessly reproduce themselves to conserve themselves. When their emergent young are released, they naturally seek an open place to tether themselves—new homes, fresh soil to grow in. Then, consider further that we gather with our neighbors to forage some of these plants and seeds from our mother yards and disperse them in our neighbors’ yards. Rapidly, new native gardens are born. These are daughter yards, yards that will one day grow to be mother yards in their own right. Together, mother yards and daughter yards are the foundation of a native plant sharing network. They are kindred.
The native plant sharing network must be locally organized, locally driven, just like nature. Windblown seeds rarely travel far, most landing close to the mother plant, into similar ecological conditions where they are most likely to survive. Similarly, a seedling tree that emerges from my yard will likely prosper in my neighbor’s yard if we transplant ki there, and seeds gathered from my neighbor’s yard will likely germinate and grow healthy plants in mine. That’s because these plants and seeds are kin to the billions of other organisms that embody and sustain each neighborhood’s natural habitat.
By mimicking nature, the plant sharing network functions as a gift economy. No money exchanges hands, only plants. Nature gives plants freely to all, and if we are going to function as a part of nature, we must in turn give plants freely. It’s not charity at work, it’s nature at work. Our role, as Robin Wall Kimmerer suggests, is to become co-conspirators in the restoration of the earth. Not at all a human-driven movement, this is a plant-driven movement, with plants leading the way. We humans can provide a helping hand, first by assisting in their movement across our own land, and then by assisting in their movement across the sidewalks, roads, fences and other artificial boundaries that separate our land from our neighbors’. Our destiny is to become conveyors of life-giving substance, free native plants, thereby furthering the biological and ecological benefits that plants provide. Moreover, because the network does not require funding of any kind, it is recession-proof. It continually regenerates itself through the gifts we offer each other. The bestowing of these gifts engenders gratitude for the gift and the giver, and that gratitude engenders yet more giving. It’s not an ideological movement, not a political movement—it is literally moving plants through a perpetual life-giving campaign led by plants.
Yes, plants came first, long before humans, and we must allow plants to lead nature’s restorative movement. If we let plants guide us, they will show us what to do, and that change will fundamentally recast our relationship with plants—for the good of all biological life. How did we surmise that we know more than plants about the ways of healing the earth? How did this knowledge come to us, we the offspring of the movements, migrations and voyages that brought us here from distant lands, we who have relentlessly subjugated the plants of this native land—and then surrounded ourselves with exotic plants from far-off places that have little or no natural connection to land we now arrogantly claim as our own?
This movement starts right here, right now. It arises out of the extant species of our native land. It’s not about which specific native species we choose to plant, when we choose to plant them, or how we choose to plant them. Rather, it’s about having the audacious courage to take our foot off nature’s neck and allow life to unfold naturally, as ki wills to do, to heal the planet. We must see that plants are not only worthy of being our partners in the native plant movement, they are worthy of leading it. We must discover how to live and work in their space, along the edges of the wild.
When we begin that work, we will soon realize that plants don’t recognize the artificial barriers we humans have created. Plants don’t observe the artificial boundaries and property lines we have drawn. The eternal winds of evolution blow seeds right past them. Plants are impelled to flow on, continuously. Our assignment is to join that movement, to enter the wounded edges of the wild, honorably forage plants there, and transport them inward to heal our scarred, domestic places. Like a healing tree wound or a human skin wound, the repair begins on the edge, then moves inward to complete the healing.
It continues the work of our forebears, gathering us back into an ancestral story that takes place in the edge of the wild. In that story we ourselves become part of the edge, facilitating plant movement. It’s forage-gather-plant, forage-gather-plant, an unbounded gift economy, a plant-led movement oblivious to maps and property lines, a cellular matrix of plants and people that melds us with ancestral memories while healing our disrupted broken communities. When we gather plants from our abundance and give them to our neighbors, we set this movement in motion. Native plants are the life blood of the movement and the native plant-sharing network is the human community that gathers and disperses the plants. We were not meant to live on an island, segregated from nature. We can join in life’s emergent edge, life longing for life—life that is sustained by being given away. Truly, as we gather, we are gathered into the ways of the self-conserving native landscape.
*”Ki” comes from the work of Robin Wall Kimmerer. For more information, a Google search “ki as a pronoun” will bring excellent results.
** The phrase “Longing to belong” came to me from the work of Stephen Jenkinson.
Thanks Dennis for sharing your journey of developing your yard in Flintstone. I remember when you invited me to look at the property with you before purchasing it. The realtor did not show up so we were unable to look inside of the house. We walked all around it and the yard and my thoughts were that both had great promise. You have brought that to fruition with your hard work and determination of skillfully renovating your home inside yourself as well as masterfully landscaping the yard with Native plants. It has been a joy to watch your diligent progress as your good friend.
Cheers,
Mike
Thanks, Mike. As you remember, the place needed a lot of work. That work, especially the landscaping, has been a long-term chore, but I have no regrets with taking it on. It’s a wonderful place to be.
I appreciate you!
Dennis
Wow – eleven years that we’ve been neighbors. It is my privilege to also be your friend.
Thanks Dennis for taking time to collect these thoughts and share them. I am excited to see what comes next. There’s much work ahead to mend communities and this world we share with ki. I look forward to co-laboring with you, ki, and other friends on the journey.
Warmest and kindest regards! -John
John, thank you! Your comment reminds me of how lucky I was to land right next door to you, Christina and the rest of your family. At the time, I had no idea that the move would lead to Let Nature Happen and sharing plants with neighbors. Now that we have that going, we must have the long term goal of teaching MTG about the concept of Ki. I think she is primed and ready to learn. Ki is!
Dennis
Dennis, I truly appreciate your transformation story, and the powerful message it conveys. Thank you for sharing it.
Warmly,
Deb
This is an interesting article with profound implications. Your design of native plants that we implemented in our urban front and back yards has brought us (and many bees, butterflies, and insects) so much joy. I have wondered how feasible it is to convert a larger, more rural plot in the same way, so this article was very informative.
I appreciate how you adapted your approach and accepted things you once considered weeds and a few non-native plants like white clover. We experienced on a much smaller scale how nature continues to emerge within our designs. One plant implemented from your design died, and the one next to it had to be moved because of an expansion of our back deck. When the deck was finished, there was an open space that I wanted to fill. Before I could, a canna lily from God knows where sprouted in the absolute perfect spot. It’s one of our favorite plants in the back yard precisely because it wasn’t planned.
I can’t help imagine how the rural landscape would look if homeowners and developers placed less value on lawns and more on preserving natural vegetation. Your before-and-after photos are inspiring.
Hi Deborah,
You are more than welcome. Thank you for taking the time to read the post and comment.
I appreciate you!
Dennis
Hi Hastings,
I am very happy to hear that your garden is bringing joy to you and Catherine’s lives, and to the planet. The cool thing (as you pointed out) is that it’s emerging from nature at every moment. We just need to welcome it as you did with the canna lily.
Ki Is,
Dennis
Hello Dennis,
This was quite an interesting account of your evolving relationship with this formerly terrorized land that has become your home. It’s a beautiful account and both the grief and longing are so evident. I recall my own process of trying to “master” my large yard in nearby St. Elmo some years ago. I have to say I did not arrive in such a wise and reoriented way of thinking at the time. Language is indeed so very important . I felt so inspired also reading Braiding Sweet Grass. Our language very much dictates how we think about things and our relational orientation.
Your process is inspiring my friend. I hope to return there someday soon to have a look at what has occurred there. Reading messages from others who are participating in this beautiful process gives me a great deal of joy. I can very much relate to your toil. I’ve taken on a new partnership of sorts here in rural Newfoundland. I’m having similar self conversations as Hannah and I try to make a home here on this previously settled land.
Thank you for sharing this journey with us all.
Much love,
Michael Plummer
Elliston, Newfoundland and Labrador
Thanks, Michael. I appreciate your continued friendship. I have a lot of respect for the journey you have chosen and for the conversations you are having with yourself and with Hannah as you work out what it means to be a human being in 2025. Sadly, the destruction of the natural world and of local culture continues. They go hand-in-hand, relentlessly across the globe, and leave us little to work with. As I said in the blog post, it’s the same destructive wave that I encountered in my childhood. In fact, it started on this continent more than 500 years ago, and before that on the European continent where people like us came from. We are both the victims and the cause of the destruction. It’s hard to know what to do when there are only fragments of recognizable culture to guide us. As Jenkinson has stated, we have to start with our poverties. That is all we have. Those poverties are the fragments of local habitat and local culture that remain. Our role is to first find the fragments (Jenkinson calls them shards) and then try to piece them together. It can be lonely work and few are up for it, but I am greatly heartened by your efforts to do so!
Ki Is, brother!
Dennis