Nature Skills

I was pleased, yet dismayed, to come across someone's short-lived wildflower patch on the side of a less traveled road in my community. It inspired me to think that guerilla gardening like this could be done in many other places, with no permitting needed. I just wished that the native plants could have out-competed the countless weeds that had come to dominate. Perhaps, with the right soil preparation, the best plants for the location, and attention to plant spacing, it could have looked something like this without much follow-on maintenance. 

Photo by Richard Ashley

Even with the array of information easily available on numerous native plants to consider for various purposes, the art of garden design requires first-hand detailed knowledge of plant appearance and behavior. For example, I can see that a Great Blue Lobelia might be a lovely addition to a butterfly garden, but how well does it play with others in its root space? The answer is not easily found in documents, and is probably best discovered through consulting more experienced gardeners and naturalists.

Master Gardeners should be able to design gardens and use available online tools and references to make informed plant selections. Yet, it wasn't until I was trained as a Master Watershed Steward that I got exposed to enough of this material to feel confident in garden design. I have also come to realize that even both of these designations won't fit me to single-handedly design conservation landscapes or many other planting schemes. It's going to take collaboration.

Master Naturalists are skilled in wetland restoration, among other things, so they could be good resources for rain garden plant selection. There are many Master Gardeners who seem to have a good amount of native plant knowledge. +Kurt Reitz operates an outdoor native plant nursery at the Elms Environmental Education Center and would be one of the first people I'd ask, partly because he will give away plants for public gardens and restoration projects.

Let's face it. Most of us who take on these volunteer roles are amateurs. However, maybe one-third have had careers that make them extraordinarily valuable sources of information in their particular area of expertise. If you want to make your conservation landscaping or other restoration project have lasting value, asking enough of these kinds of folks until you find the expert on the matter in question could be critical to your project's longevity.

Your Own Little Rainforests

Lawns do a fair job of capturing runoff, but just putting an average-sized house on a lot can double the amount of runoff from that property. Much of that increase is channeled to gutters and then downspouts, at which point an owner can take a number of further measures to reduce problems downstream. Outlets from downspouts, be they splash blocks or French drains will often evince erosion where the water is let loose to run freely on the soil. This is the place to intervene with a rain barrel and/or a swale. These may still lead to erosion wherever the water discharges, so a garden can be added to infiltrate the excess.

By concentrating the captured runoff, areas of Maryland properties typically receiving 44 inches of rainfall per year can easily get double that amount, making them like miniature rainforests.  Forest gardens are very good absorbers of groundwater, as are rain gardens.

Photo by Dion Gillard

One of my rain barrels discharges through a 25 foot garden hose into a French drain which discharges to a rock filled swale that empties into a rain garden 80 feet from the house. That easily meets the minimum distance requirement of 15 feet from the foundation and is also at a low point on the corner of my property. The rain garden contains a good deal of biochar and compost and I am planning to fill the cracks between the swale rocks with biochar once I obtain plants that grow well in rock gardens. I also have rain barrels for the other three downspouts on my home, two of which are for keeping mushroom logs watered and one for watering the five terraced garden beds in the backyard.

For water coming off an impervious surface such as a patio onto a lawn, a swale or series of them can be added that run on contour. These are interspersed with raised bed gardens that use the water captured by the swales. Yards with slopes up to 33% can use this device, so where such slopes themselves are the source of runoff, these would also be very helpful. The key to making all these alterations efficacious is gardening. To some that may create the impression of unending toil, but it needn't since the gardens will be watered by the rain flowing to them and can be kept moist and fed with the help of biochar.