Making Space for Native Plants
What surprises me most is the year-to-year persistence of some weeds. I did not recognize how fertile was this area of Flintstone, Georgia, in what’s also called Chattanooga Valley. It does not suffer from the unnatural sterility of many neighborhoods where house-by-house, repeated treatments with pre-emergent (seed killing) herbicides have largely scoured the soil of plant seeds. Most of my neighbors are content to mow their lawns once every week or two. Not one of them has an irrigation system, and few, if any, ever water their lawns. Likewise, few, if any, treat their lawns with herbicides. Whether this is an ecological preference, an economical necessity, or some other choice is not certain. What is certain is that without the supplemental water and chemical treatments, the “desirable” lawn grasses that were initially planted have suffered, while the unplanted Southern lawn weeds have thrived. The result is that most lawns in our valley-of-plenty are not turf grass lawns, but weed lawns. Additionally, a significant number of wooded lots and open fields nearby are home to abundant, free-seeding exotic (non-native) plants. Chattanooga Valley is a free range for weeds, and consequently a lot of future weeds are stored up in the soil. It’s the soil’s “seed bank”. Day by day, throughout the growing season, those seeds are released from plants, and then dispersed by blowing wind and the movements of local wildlife. When conditions are suitable at their landing spots, the seeds settle in the soil, germinate and start a new life. This Valley’s weeds are very well established and they seem always to have backups. When pulled, the soil disturbance magically initiates germination of neighboring seeds, and replacement weeds come quickly. To plant native plants, one must clear out these prevailing weeds, and it is not a one-time chore. It’s a burden. This land longs to re-cover, and it will re-cover, repeatedly — but with weeds, until native plants are fully established and cover the barren soil.
Converting a lawn dominated landscape to a self-conserving native landscape is akin to the restoration that follows a natural disaster. The first plants to sprout after devastating storms are aggressive, quick-spreading plants. Their mission is to cover bared soil, and fast. These are the ‘first responders’ that begin the healing of the land. It would have been my good fortune to have allowed this natural process to take place, to have watched the first responders effect the restoration. Regrettably, it doesn’t work like that anymore. Almost the entirety of our native first responders have been obliterated through the years and replaced by exotic weeds. This debacle began with the razing of the native woodland, an open invitation to exotic weeds. Now these weeds are the first to come following a natural disaster or a construction disturbance, and they leave only grudgingly. For new native plantings to thrive, not just survive, I’ve learned that they need cleared space around them, persistently, until they are well established. There is no magic here. It’s garden work and my experience suggests that this chore is part of the garden story for three years or more.
By late summer of 2016 I was primed to plant in earnest. It remained a busy time for me, but I was ready to make the plunge and get some significant colonies of native plants in the ground. My enthusiasm still brought dreams (albeit diminishing dreams) of covering all 2.5 acres with native plants. I’d recognized that I had to contend with a swath of weeds and poor soil. Plus, we were in the middle of an extended dry spell that no one realized would turn into a significant drought. Early in September a few particles of rain fell, which I mistakenly considered “the end of dry spell,” so I cleared a new planting area in the front yard with glyphosate spray, and ordered some native plant plugs suitable for a sunny meadow garden (listed a few paragraphs below).
Then I waited for more rain. More rain did not come, but planting time came and at the end of September I was planting plugs into hard-baked clay, seriously hard-baked clay. Yes, gardeners often plant in hard-baked clay pots (indeed, terracotta means “cooked earth”) but those pots are formed with wide openings in the top to accept the plants, and smaller holes in the bottom for drainage. Here there were no openings of any sort in my soil to welcome the plants — I had to make them, and I did, but I have not forgotten those two days. The plugs were just 2” across and 5” deep, and I had the minimal goal of digging holes just a bit bigger than the plugs. I reached that goal, but I had to chip out each hole with an 8-pound long-handled, all-steel spade. That digging hurt. Almost four years later, occasional pain in my shoulder still reminds me. That’s how hard the soil was.
In my younger years there were a few days (perhaps more than a few) when I thought I knew all there was to know about gardening. Now I am just grateful for what I do know. Thankfully, in this case, I knew that tough places require tough plants. And where aggressive, invasive plants have been allowed to take hold, we’re almost required to plant aggressive plants to compete with them — even with the aid of unnatural helpers like glyphosate. I was now planting the front meadow, a large area adjacent to and surrounding the three Staghorn Sumacs that I had planted through the lawn the previous summer. Alas, two of those three sumacs died, and the third was not thriving, so a native gardening friend gave me three Smooth Sumacs. I brought the bare root plants home in mid-summer and planted them without any expectations for their survival. I am not sure why the Staghorn Sumac did not grow, and the Smooth Sumac did, but they took off immediately. Now, finally, I had a few native plants going…going… going! Sumac is always going, and it’s good that I chose to surround them with other plants that are always going too. Again, if you plant aggressive native plants to gain a foot hold on tough sites like this, you have to plant other aggressive native plants to compete with them: They must be tenacious. This is no place for hesitant faltering plants.
No faltering plants went in that fall; instead, I planted Short-toothed Mountain Mint, Wild Bergamot, Anise-scented Goldenrod, Aromatic Aster, Butterflyweed, Purple Coneflower, Giant Coneflower, Dwarf Joe-Pye weed, Tennessee Ironweed and Whorled Milkweed, along with a lot of Broomsedge Grass. With a little help from another unnatural helper, ibuprofen, I dug the holes, set the plugs in and gathered the soil (aka, clay chips) around them. It did not feel very promising, and it did not rain for another two months. I had to bring hose water to the new plants until rain arrived at the end of the growing season in late November. But they did survive. It is no coincidence that many of the species I planted have “weed” as part of their common name. These are all rugged plants, and four years later most of them are thriving. They not only survived that droughty fall, but also the wettest year in our history (2018), and one of the hottest and driest (2019), when temperatures were over 100 degrees here for several days in early October.
Now, where am I?
I am good and the plants are good, but we are at a crossroads. I now have an expansive, beautiful colony of smooth sumac that large colonies of native perennials surround. Finches now come to feed on the growing colonies of coneflowers. Many butterflies and other pollinators now come to feast and make a home here from mid-summer through fall. Hundreds of butterflies were here on many days last summer, and I expect more of the same this year. They especially love the Mountain Mint, Wild Bergamot and Dwarf Joe-Pye weed. From those original colonies I have spread plants to other areas of the yard and given some to friends.
I am living with a great abundance of beautiful plants that keep going — but two other things keep going too. The first is weeds. The weeds are coming relentlessly and it remains a larger-than-my-life challenge. I have been pulling until I can physically pull no more and then I must spot-spray the remainder. At this scale I simply cannot pull them all. It would cost days of work that I do not have, so I spray as necessary, and I am mostly at peace with this choice. What I am not at peace with are all the trees that are coming. Seedlings of pine, sweet gum, maple, oak and more are sprouting up and growing throughout my beautiful, vibrant meadow garden. If I don’t pull them, they will engulf the garden with shade, and I will lose the sun energy that grows the meadow, and consequently, I will lose the finches, the butterflies and all those pollinators. So, I have been pulling them, but I have little certainty that this is the right thing to do. What I do know is that nature longs after itself and this plot longs to be woodland.
