Book Review: The Authentic Garden: Naturalistic and Contemporary Landscape Design

Quoted from The Dirt, ASLA Blog at http://dirt.asla.org/

Artfully Naturalistic Gardens

“Those familiar with naturalistic planting design, an approach that appears seemingly natural but is actually constructed, will undoubtedly recognize the names of William Robertson and Gertrude Jekyll who pioneered the style in the late-1800s. While the approach has remained popular over the last 125 years, The Authentic Garden delves into how it has evolved from the 1800s to present day. Over the centuries, two design principles came to the forefront: first, create multi-seasonal gardens and, second, make them ecological. These principles, according to the authors, have helped to ensure the naturalistic approach endures as designers adapt English traditions to their own climates.

One of the most compelling examples of this evolution is California-based Elysian Landscapes’ design for a courtyard beside an Isabel Marant store in Los Angeles, California. Using native plants adapted to the dry southwest climate, the firm formed “casual massings,” out of “loose tufts of perennials” that are bright and exotic, but subtly pay homage to a more traditional planting system. Such examples, found throughout The Authentic Garden, provide inspiration to designers in all climates.”

Published by The Monacelli Press, 2015

Urban areas reduce native wildlife biodiversity

    (Big eared townsend bat, Wikipedia, image in public domain)

Studies have shown that some wildlife species just do not adapt to urbanized areas. Marchetti (2006) and Ritzi (2004) found that there are more native fish species the farther away from urban areas, and Ordenana (2010) showed that many carnivore species decline nearer to cities. A study just published in Urban Naturalist (No. 8, 2015) supports these observations and concluded that while a few bat species can survive in urban zones, there are many more that just don’t go there. In their paper entitled Bat Species Diversity at an Urban-Rural Interface: Dominance by One Species in an Urban Area, Damm, Sparks and Whitaker (2015) determine that while Northern Long-eared Bats were caught in mist nets in urban Indianopolis, Indiana; that others include Tri-colored Bats and Little Brown Bats were negatively correlated the closer they sampled next to the urban core. They conclude that bat-species richness may be connected to specific roosting and foraging requirements, and the possible negative influence of abundant roadways.

Some plants are just a little too weird

 Echium

Gardeners can’t help their obsessions with strange-looking plants. And usually, with the hard-core gardeners that I know, the weirder the better. But new research suggests that these far-flung oddities do not benefit much in the environment. Doug Tallamy, professor entomology at University of Delaware, and his student Karin Burghardt, conducted a three-year study to see how herbivores responded to planted yards full of either exotic or native plants. Not surprisingly, there was not as much insect diversity found on the exotic plants as compared to native plantings. They further found out that there were even less species on exotic plants that did not have a close native relative. For example, exotic Norway maples are kin to our native red maples, and shared nearly similar insect diversity. While the far flung exotics that had no close native relative supported little life. Burghardt noted that “If you think about it, you're driving around the suburban environment, and every time a new development goes in, you have a lot of decision making happening as to what plant species are going to be planted around those properties. If we do all that landscaping with non-native plants, are we limiting the wildlife and conservation support system that could be available within that given plot of land? What the gardens we constructed for the study are trying to replicate are landscaping decisions that people might make if they wanted to support native insect communities that in turn support much of the diversity around us.” Their paper was published in the October 2015 issue of Ecology Letters.

Conserving Vacant Lots in Detroit for Stormwater Control

One of the more impressive ideas for reusing vacant land in downtown Detroit is to create gardens for stormwater control. An article in the Detroit News by writer Kim Kozlowski (December 14, 2015) states that the Detroit Water and Sewerage Department and the Detroit Landbank Authority have partnered to utilize a few  open lots for rain gardens. Rain gardens store water temporarily before releasing it to city stormwater systems. And this is important in cities like Detroit that have had problems with overloaded storm systems that can dump urban water, and raw sewage, directly into the Rouge River. In 2014, polluted urban runoff from Detroit and its surrounding areas created undrinkable water supplies for parts of Michigan and Ohio. Joan Nassauer, professor of landscape architecture at University of Michigan, is leading the project’s effort to slow the urban runoff. Nassauer states in the article, “If during a storm we can keep much more water here just below the ground, that reduces the pressure on a city’s system and so there won’t be a big untreatable amount of water that comes into the system” (Article available from the Detroit News online at http://detnews.com/)

The Art Garden, Mississippi Museum of Art

Edgeland Excerpts: Is Native Purity a Viable Option?

Quoted from Dr. Colin Meurk: “But, what is “wild?” There is an appetite again for “rewinding” and using “cues for care” (Nassauer) in urban environments to make this acceptable. The niche envelopes can be as surely defined in these contrived ‘wild’ urban environments as in the real wild. With many environmental stress/disturbance combinations, native species will individually survive by chance at some points and places, in combination with some (weakened) exotic species, then reproduce and eventually find their ‘natural’ position in the gradients provided as self-sustaining populations. That may be the future of many lowland, open habitat herbs. Then invertebrates, birds and lizards will find these plants and establish their ‘natural’ interactions. Meta-populations of such plants may form on roofs, walls, pavements, rock gardens, lawns etc. These habitats can be seen as forming an archipelago in urban environments!"

Dr Colin Meurk is a senior ecologist at Landcare Research, New Zealand. Quotation from Global Roundtable Green Form and Function versus Green Nativism at the Nature of Cities.com (http://www.thenatureofcities.com/2015/11/05/green-form-function-versus-green-nativism-in-changing-urban-spaces-full-of-novel-ecosystems-and-natural-assemblages-is-native-purity-a-viable-option/)

It's Better to Leave Your Leaves

Experts from the National Wildlife Federation (NWF) reported that it's definitely better to leave your leaves, where they lay. Gardeners and landscapers know that plants grow better in mulched beds. Decomposing leaves contribute nutrients back to the soil, screen sunlight from hitting plants roots in summer, and protect from moisture loss due to evapotranspiration. But wildlifers are interested in the ground habitat that leaves provide. NWF says that worms, mammals, amphibians, reptiles, and many insects depend upon leaf litter in which to lay eggs or hide. Randall Hitchin, University of Washington Arboretum, says he rarely rakes leaves because "it changes the habitat, and makes it unfriendly for (insects)"(Dan Cassuto, KING 5 news, Nov. 3, 2015).  Areas that are currently in lawn grasses can be easily converted to planting beds by simply raking the leaves to areas underneath trees or around shrubs. Thick layers of leaves will choke out the existing turf and become soil habitat in no time. And the surrounding trees and shrubs (and critters) will immediately benefit.