Change?

 Niel Diboll of Prairie Nursery "preaching" his anti-lawn sermon.

It wasn't anything I would have expected. I've been attending the Native Plants in the Landscape Conference since yesterday (it ends tomorrow). This conference, held at Millersville University near Lancaster, Pennsylvania for the past 20 years, is one of the major native plant conferences in the US. Until this year, I've felt something of a heretic, never having been a purist where use of native plants is concerned.

This year there appears to have been a programmatic effort to question the lock-step approach to "natives only" that has characterized the native plant movement for so long in this country. This year, a definite theme seems to have emerged, beginning yesterday with the keynote talk by William Cullina, a well known author and Director of Horticulture/Plant Curator for the Coastal Maine Botanical Gardens. The title, "Unraveling and Re-raveling the Web of Life," only hints at a message I think long overdue--that the very concept of native plant is a changeable thing, subject to the changing conditions of the earth, in different times and places. Plants move in response to these changes, and their native ranges change over time. Cullina gently but persuasively broadened the definition of native, raising such difficult questions as whether isolated pockets of native vegetation on their way to extinction should be moved to new places, where the climate and conditions are more suited to their needs. The thrust of his talk was that the definition of what is native is not a simple or easy question to answer.

The second keynote talk of the day, "Perennial Plant Communities: The Know-Maintenance Approach," was really about plant sociology, plants growing in communities, though the word sociology was never used. (I think even our "experts" feel they have to be gentle, and do a little "dumbing down" to avoid alienating North American audiences.) This second keynote talk was given by Roy Diblik, co-owner of Northwind Perennial Farm in Wisconsin. Roy is the man who supplied Piet Oudolf with plants for the Lurie Garden in Chicago's Millennium Park, and he is quite a garden designer in his own right, having recently designed beautiful plantings for the Chicago Art Institute. He spoke about the necessity of growing plants in plant communities (another very important theme of this year's conference), and the need to move away from the awful American compulsion to dot a few plants about amid mounds of wood chips and mulch, toward a more natural style of planting based on intimate knowledge of plants and their individual needs. Roy's approach is very closely akin to the approaches to planting design I've read about for years in the works of English garden writer Noel Kingsbury, Piet Oudolf, the American design firm of Oehme & Van Sweden and, of course, many others in the "New Perennials" movement, and, before that, in the seminal work Perennials and Their Garden Habitats, originally written in German by Richard Hansen and Friedrick Stahl, and first published in English in 1991. The concept of plant communities, or course, raises the bar, so that we think holistically about systems of life and not about just individual plants, how communities function and grow, and how much labor is involved in their upkeep (not a lot since stable communities don't require a lot of human intervention). Roy also struck an extremely romantic note, stressing the emotional component of beautiful, carefully orchestrated plantings, and noting how ugly some native plant restorations are--because no consideration was given to these broader concerns of the garden, the gardener, and the garden visitor.

The third keynote talk, by Niel Diboll, owner of Prairie Nursery, and an acknowledged leader of the native plant revival, particularly prairie plants, declared war on the American lawn. With a passion and style that reminded me of a bible thumping preacher on a revival crusade, Diboll enumerated the extravagant costs of the American lawn in terms of what he called the four Es--esthetics, environment, energy, and economics. He's convinced the American love affair with the useless, polluting, environmentally sterile (no, environmentally harmful), and costly lawn will end, not because Americans will be converted to more ecologically sound beliefs, but because the cost of maintaining this socioeconomic shibbolith is simply too great and it will eventually collapse under the weight of its unsustainablility. Diboll's vision to use native plants to help restore the balance of nature, and the sanity of our insane culture, reflects a profound understanding of the complexity of plant communities, and of the need to think about planting in terms of community.

Larry Weaner was the major speaker this afternoon. His ostensible subject was incorporating ecological restoration techniques into landscape design. He, like Roy Diblik, emphasized the importance of understanding the whole plant community and its behavior over time. Larry's talk was much more technically detailed than Roy's, and he demonstrated the immense knowledge needed to create a successful meadow. Near the end of his talk, he also introduced the concept of allowing a certain element of chance to participate in the design of a planting (self-seeded plants, or plants introduced by animal life), an intriguing idea for the more conceptually oriented gardeners and designers in the audience. Weaner's talk helped elevate the conference to a new level of sophistication.

It was heartening to hear Roy Diblik recommend one of Noel Kingsbury's books. In the past, the Europeans have been virtually non-existent at this conference ... are we, perhaps, about to break the blood-brain barrier between British (and European) gardening and American gardening? Whether this new direction at the Millersville conference illustrates a new direction in the native plant movement, a maturing of the movement in general, remains to be seen. But it is certainly a hopeful and exciting change.

The native plant sale at the Millersville conference is one of the best anywhere.

Natural Garden Style by Noel Kingsbury

"This book aims at introducing gardeners to a style of working that engages with a sense of place, uses plants that suit the place and manages the plant community that develops when different species are combined." - Noel Kingsbury

Yesterday, on the way back from the day lily farm, Phil and I stopped briefly at a roadside nursery. At checkout, the couple in front of us were buying plastic branches of flowering dogwood and a few annuals, little shapeless blobs of color. The impulse to take something of beauty from nature, even in the form of a plastic imitation, must be a sign of hope.

Noel Kingsbury's most recent book, Natural Garden Style: Gardening Inspired by Nature, is about making natural-style gardens. It too is a sign of hope - though of an entirely different order. Kingsbury has something of great value to say to that couple at the nursery. They certainly will never read about it in this book, but the ideas he is seeding about may eventually reach them via more indirect cultural influences.

This most recent work is a 'how to' book, but a 'how to' book of ideas, concepts and examples, not techniques. A list of the chapter titles tells much: Meadows, Prairies and Borders, Trees and Woodland, Sculpture and Ornament, Gardens and the Wider Landscape, Sun and Stone, Creating and Maintaining. Call it a 'how to' book of big ideas. You won't find a recipe for making a prairie. What you will find is a description of what a prairie is, how a natural prairie differs from the simulacrum of a prairie we may choose to make in a garden. You will learn about the incredible density of plants in a natural prairie - numbers and varieties of plants in a square meter, for example - and how that affects maintenance - by, for example, creating a stable matrix of plants that 'naturally' keeps weeds out because they can't find a place to put down roots.

Unlike the couple at the checkout counter, Kingsbury works from a highly informed position. From the start, he readily acknowledges the contradiction in the term 'natural garden': "No garden is really 'natural'. Leave a garden to the forces of nature and the result will nearly always be a tangled mess of vegetation that will give little joy ... We have to be honest. What we want from a patch of land and what nature would do with it, given half a chance, are very different. The nature we want in our gardens is a refined and tidied-up version, preferably one that is pretty and keeps us interested for as much of the year as possible."

Kingsbury's garden writing is among the best you will find in the English language. This book, like his others, is well organized, based in scientific research, aware of its historical context in the long line of proponents of naturalistic gardening going back to William Robinson in England and Karl Foerster in Germany, and generous in its use of photographic examples of the work of many of today's notable garden designers - among them, Dan Pearson, Wolfgang Oehme and James Van Sweden, Piet Oudolf, Neil Diboll, Isabelle van Groeningen and Gabriella Pape, Jinny Blom, Henk Gerritsen, Cleve West, Tom Vanderpoel, John Brookes.

I expect any new work by Noel Kingsbury to be a thoroughly enjoyable, nonstop read, and this one maintains his high standard. Kingsbury has established a worldwide reputation through his many works, though I do wonder how well known he is in the U.S. His signature themes of naturalism and sustainability are right on spot for the times, and his clear, well paced, and superbly organized prose is a pleasure to read.

Kingsbury has always recognized the importance of North American contributions to 'naturalistic' garden design as well as the importance of our flora as a source of many of the plants used to make such gardens. I have never seen another European garden writer give such prominence to the contributions of Neil Diboll, founder of Prairie Nursery in Wisconsin, to garden design. I hope more North Americans can overcome an aversion to British garden writing (because thought irrelevant to our climate) and buy this book.