Author: Judith Fetterley

October 5, 2021

Perfect

It’s October. The days are getting shorter and the air is getting cooler. Soon the peace of the neighborhood will be shattered by leaf blowers working over-time, vicious even when idling, doing what a rake could do far better if properly sized and properly handled.

Late September and early October offer the perfect time to transplant. By August the garden is at maturity. It is easy then to see exactly what needs to be changed to create the desired effect – what needs to be moved, what needs to be removed, where new plants need to be placed, spots that are empty and spots that are too full. This year it was impossible to get new plants in August. The nurseries were laid bare as wave after wave of gardeners, birthed by the enforced stay-at-home requirements of the pandemic, swept through in May, June and July, doing what new gardeners always do – buying at least one of everything, then coming back for more. Of course you don’t want to transplant in August. In August you want to take detailed notes. Then when early October arrives, you can grab the spade and start to dig.

This past Friday, the first day of October, Kevin and I spent the morning transplanting. We relocated three of the native late-flowering Boltonia, purchased this spring from my local native nursery. Their scraggly foliage compromised the look of the main perennial garden where I initially planted them. I had remembered how their hybrid cousins looked and had forgotten that hybridizing happens for a reason – to make plant features better. We placed them in a semi-circle in front of the Joe-pye weed, which dominates a garden closer to the house. Here they look perfect, backed by Joe’s purple umbrels, fronted by Phlox and Amsonia, and bounded by a dwarf Physocarpus. Flowering, they are delightful, and in their new home other plants will complicate their foliage so that the effect is not ratty.

We had to take out a large Nepeta (catmint) in order to plant the Boltonia. Earlier this past week I had finally tackled the weeds in the patio garden. There I discovered some holes. What, I had wondered, would make sense underneath the sweet young Magnolia soulangeana ‘Jane,’ part of a series of crosses in the magnolia family designed to produce a later flowering tree, good for colder climates. Aha, I thought, let’s see how the catmint looks under the magnolia. Yes, dare I say it, perfect.

Back in the main perennial garden, we returned the ‘Jackmanni’ Clematis, with its wooden tripod support, hand-made by an artisan in Stockbridge, mistakenly moved in the spring, back to its previous home. In the hole this left, we plopped a large Baptisia. Noticing a hole between the newly-plopped Baptisia and the already-there Baptisia, Kevin suggested we fill it with the swamp milkweed I had found in August at Faddegons despite the depletions of June and July. Kevin grabbed his phone and we quickly checked for its ultimate height. At 4 to 5 feet at maturity it would work. Into the space between the Baptisias and slightly in front of them it went, and, yes, we both cried “Perfect.”

The triumph of the morning, however, involved a red chokeberry and a Viburnum ‘Mary Milton.’ The red chokeberry was a gift I received several years ago from a beloved fellow gardener. For many years it had lived in the “nursery” but it had not been happy there — too much shade. This past spring Kevin and I had moved the chokeberry to a garden where it would, I thought, get more sun. It didn’t. If I was going to save it, I needed to move it.

‘Mary Milton’ had been perfect for its spot when I planted it as a small shrub some years ago, but by now it had exceeded its bounds and was an eyesore, distracting from the nearby camelia-like Stewartia and the golden Chamacypaeris. This past spring, in an attempt to bring it back to size, Kevin and I had pruned it severely. Like our efforts with the chokeberry, this had not worked. Now I had decided to get rid of it. Fortunately, ‘Mary Milton’ sat in a sunny part of the garden and there I would move the chokeberry. Here, I felt sure, it would finally flourish.

Kevin, however, can not kill a plant unless it is absolutely necessary. I love that about him, despite the fact that it contradicts my own prescription for success which is that to be a successful gardener you must be able to kill. When I gave Kevin our work orders for the day, he immediately proposed a swap: “Let’s put ‘Mary Milton’ where we take out the chokeberry.” Why not, I thought. We quickly checked the Viburnum’s light requirements, found it could tolerate part shade, and Kevin began digging.

The chokeberry came out easily and weighed practically nothing. ‘Mary Milton’ was a different story. When Kevin finally got her out of the ground, she weighed a ton and was extremely unwieldy. Kevin tugged and pulled and hoisted and finally wrestled her into the wheelbarrow, moved her to her new location, and planted her. Then we both stepped back to admire the result. Definitely not perfect. Indeed, far from perfect. In fact, not right at all.

I said, “Time to kill.” Kevin said, “Let’s see where else we might put her.” And then ensued a search of every part of the garden for a space for ‘Mary Milton.’ And yes, reader, we did find a spot, down in the far corner of the garden, the part that sits along the road, the part where I keep the compost and the mulch and the extra dirt, where Sara has her compost bin, where the native Indian cup (Silphium perfoliatum), a plant I should get rid of, grows to 6’ and is covered with huge brilliant yellow flowers. A native invasive, even Kevin was willing to consider reducing its presence.

Kevin pulled the Viburnum out of the perfect hole he had dug for her where the chokeberry had been, I grabbed the dolly, Kevin dragged her to the street where we maneuvered her onto the dolly and Kevin wheeled her down the road to the new hole he had prepared. Here she would have a chance to reach the 8 to 10’ she had in her and to spread to 6’ if she felt like it. After we had dug out a substantial amount of the Indian cup, and after Kevin had made a whole large enough for ‘Mary Milton’, and after we had finished planting her, we stepped back and murmured, “Perfect.”

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September 14,2021

September

In September it occurs to me that my favorite time of year in the garden is the fall.

In early September Sara and I try to find a way to see the ocean. Usually we go to Cape Cod. The crowds are gone but the water is warm and the shops are still open. This year, however, we explored the Rhode Island shore. Next year we will find a way to get back to the Cape.

I am all for our September trips, as long as we are back home by the end of the second week of the month. Because, echoing Lancelot who admits that there is no season when he can imagine leaving Guinevere, why would I leave my garden in September?  Like Monet, I am obsessed with light and September light is clear and tender, so different from the harsh middays of July and August. The sun’s lower angle softens all its light touches, bathing the garden in a golden haze, even at midday.

The September garden satisfies as well my passion for color. Like Matisse, I am mad for color, craving it more and more as the days get shorter and the dark times longer, needing to stuff myself with red and yellow and blue and orange so that I can survive the brown of winter. From my kitchen window I can see the blue of the Little Bluestem grass, streaked with shades of rose. I can see the bright yellow of the volunteer black-eyed Susan’s, backed by the lipstick pink of the Phlox ‘Robert Poore,’ backed in turn by the bruised purple of the Joe Pye-weed. To one side of this feast of color, I glimpse the yellow plumes of the Amsonia hubrechtii; to the other side lies the dwarf ninebark, its purple leaves interwoven with the golden leaves and orange berries of the barberry ‘Aurea nana,’ though ‘nana’ is a stretch for this largish shrub   It’s an explosion of color and it is happening everywhere.

For years I bought chrysanthemums every fall, seduced by their designer color combos. I could never get them to return reliably. Finally it occurred to me that I ddin’t need chrysanthemums when I have the pink and white Japanese anemone ‘Robitussima’ (and it is); the tall spikes of bright yellow Rudbeckia nitida ; purple, white, orange Echinacea in bloom or in seed head and pecked at by goldfinches;the rosy-hued ‘Autumn Joy’ Sedums, the bluish-purple perennial Salvia, red Lobelia.

As I tend to the lesser needs of my September garden, I actually have time to enjoy the palette it presents, for September is not October when I must begin the hard work of taking down the garden and preparing it for winter. Of course there are weeds to pull, but their end-date is on my calendar so why bother?  Of course there is pruning to be done, but that is a November task. Of course I could edge but this chore can wait until next spring. The one task I focus on is the occasional transplant, a job best done in the fall when I can see the holes that need to be filled, the design that needs to be tweaked, and when regular rain is more likely.

Abundance leaps out at me as I take my time in the garden. At full growth the plants tumble into and over each other. A red lobelia, fallen to the ground because there is not much point in staking it now, snakes its way through the gray-green leaves of the lamb’s ear. The large perennial (who knew?) Hibiscus continues to produce deep red flowers the size of saucers. My ‘Snowflake’ Viburnum, queen of the spring garden, unexpectedly puts forth a final burst of flower, defying the “natural” order, demanding to be seen, refusing to die. If I am lucky the profuse late blooms of my Buddleia will bring me multi-colored butterflies, swooping and swirling and sucking, taking off and coming back, over and over, bulking up for the flight to Mexico or elsewhere, taking a bit of my garden with them.  Everywhere I look there is more than enough to satisfy my need for color and motion and light. Sometimes, I say to myself, more is really just more.

Out in the garden one September, working in a bed infested by thistles which need to be managed no matter the month, I felt something prick my finger. I thought “thistle,” so I drew my finger back. The prick continued, so I drew my finger back even farther. Then it felt like pincers and I got a bit panicked, thinking “snake.”  I jerked my finger out of the thistle patch and discovered that I was being grabbed by a praying mantis. I had no idea that a praying mantis could or would grab my finger, but I was not in the least afraid.  Rather, I was inexplicably moved by this experience and began to think, a bit sentimentally, that the mantis was clinging to me in order to cling to life. I knew it would not survive the winter, I knew it just thought I was food, but I imagined a different recognition..

I gently detached the mantis from my finger, watched for a few minutes as it moved ever so slowly away from me and went back to work. For days afterward, however, I could feel the grasp of that insect on my finger, clinging to me, clinging to life, against the odds, against the coming end. Out in the garden in September, working in the thistles, I still can feel that insect’s touch..

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August 31, 2021

Generous Landings

Last Friday, temperatures in the 90’s by 8 a.m., I enlarged the circle around the single-stemmed Acer griseum (paperbark maple). I could no longer stand looking at a circle that was too small for the size of the tree in its midst. When Kevin arrived at 8:30 to spread mulch around the tree, I announced that the circle was now sufficiently generous. We marvelled at the capacity of the human eye to judge proportion and at its demand that proportions be generous, not stingy.

As a garden designer, I abhor stinginess. So many of the sites I worked on were afflicted by one or another form of it. Paths were too narrow. Decks were often so small that you couldn’t imagine sitting on them without being afraid of falling off; if you didn’t want to fall off, you were forced to sit backed up against the house.

Foundation gardens should anchor the house to the surrounding space, assuring the viewer of stability, proportion, and the naturalness of the relation between people and plants. The foundation gardens I encountered were regularly  too small for the size of the house in front of which they sat, and too small to accommodate the shrubs landscapers had planted in them. What might have looked good the day the landscaper left had become oppressive by the time I arrived. Shrubs had grown, as they are wont to do; their setting had become more and more cramped, the imbalance between house and garden had increased, and the effect was one of closing in rather than opening out. As the shrubs appeared to turn on the house and attack it, I imagined my clients huddled inside in the dark, awaiting the inevitable green invasion.

My mentor in garden design, Walter Cudnohofsky, continually reminded his students that gardens require attention to movement and landing. You want to guide guests through your landscape by paths, but you want to provide landings for stopping, looking, taking in. He stressed that generosity was required to succeed in fulfilling both obligations, He was particularly fierce on the subject of landings:

“Landing places are often severely undersized or left out entirely. The result can be awkward, unsettling, or downright unsafe. If the landing in front of a door is undersized, visitors must back down the steps or risk getting hit by the door. An inadequate drop off space in the driveway forces car passengers to step onto the lawn or planting bed in order to close the car door. We need sufficient room to pause, converse, rest, or change direction.”

In other words, as he liked to say, we need generous landings, a precept that I like to think has metaphysical significance. Because generosity is also about time, about taking the time to see what is there.

Through the garden that lines the driveway and creates the entrance to the property, I have built a path. It winds from the driveway to the front door, but traversing it takes time. The path is composed of gray and white limestone, attractive to the eye but a bit rough on the surface. It must be carefully navigated to avoid a stumble. I chose rough stone on purpose to ensure that guests would not be tempted to race up the path and fail to experience the garden on either side of it.

The path is also curved to slow down the approach to the house even more and to provide view lines to specific plantings on both sides. Generous in its width, the path spreads out even more where it curves, offering stopping points, landings, where I hope guests will pause and look.

I want the gardens people pause to absorb to themselves express abundance, generosity, the conviction that there is enough of everything to go around. I loathe the economy of the pie, a model in which there is only one pie and it is finite, so if one person gets a bigger piece another person’s share gets smaller. What kind of pie do “they” have in mind, I sometimes wonder?  I hope it is pecan, because even a small piece of this pie satisfies. I know the model of the pie is designed to create specific emotions that lead to specific actions that benefit specific groups, but I am not an economist and I can’t change the metaphors that govern that field. I can, however, use my garden to challenge a view of the world based on scarcity and stinginess.

I use plants that are big and that sprawl, plants that promise more and more of themselves. I rely on large Hostas and let them rub up against large clumps of the mounding, tumbling golden Japanese fountain grass. I use Hellebores because they flower early and the blossoms last, often until August, and the foliage persists through the winter. Painted ferns fill in among the Hostas and Hellebores, joined by white and drought tolerant Astilbes and by the ever-helpful big-root Geranium which covers any holes that might be left. Spiky variegated iris and feathery Thalictrum, strewn throughout, are intended to create vertical plenitude. There are no empty spaces in this garden.

“Climb to paradise/By the stairway of surprise,” says Emerson, hoping to surprise us with words that promise an exact rhyme but don’t quite deliver it. Surprise implies that there is more to see and more to learn than at first appears; it is its own kind of abundance. The large Hosta, “Sum and Substance,” sits in full sun in front of a lamp post that supports a ‘Jackmanni’ clematis. Since Hostas are shade loving plants this one, especially this one because of its size and color, should not be in the sun and it certainly should not be consorting with the sun-loving clematis.  Surprise! I use the upright ‘Ghost’ Japanese painted fern to provide a backdrop against which the mounding white Astilbe ‘Bridal Veil’ can show itself off.  The ghostly foliage of the ‘Ghost’ fern illuminates the whiteness of the Astilbe even in daylight.  Who would have thought this possible? Surprise!

Despite my intentions, however, most guests in fact use the driveway to get to the house. It is more direct and easier on the feet. However, they often comment on the garden when they reach the side door and join Sara and me. It is a universal favorite. I like to think they are attracted by generosity and have grasped my intention.

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August 10, 2021

Thinning

Sara and I have begun the process of thinning out our respective libraries. Last week we took several bags of books to a secondhand bookstore in Catskill. After unloading, we browsed both floors of this charming bookstore. Predictably, we each came home with a “new” book. Yes, we are still buying books. Our only rule is that more must leave than arrive.

Walking to get a cup of coffee before returning home, we also browsed cats.  The main street of Catskill is lined with large cats made of fiberglass and decorated by local artists. They will be auctioned off in September to raise monies for local charities.  We were charmed, we considered placing a bid on “Tropicat,” then we remembered — we are trying to downsize and acquiring a large ceramic cat does not qualify as downsizing.

I have, however, succeeded in deaccessioning two of my large American literature collections.
The University of North Carolina at Greensboro has accepted my collection of 19^th century editions of fiction by women for its Martha Blakeney Hodges Special Collections. The Center for Mark Twain Studies at Elmira College has taken my library of books by and about Mark Twain.

When I started graduate school at Indiana University in 1962, I planned on getting a Master’s degree, writing a thesis on the way black Americans were portrayed in canonical American literature, and teaching in a high school. I had just completed a year of working for the American Friends Service Committee organizing northeastern college campuses to support the Southern Non-violent Coordinating Committee’s civil rights movement. I had begun thinking seriously about race.

In rapid succession, I fell in love with research, accepted an offer to enroll in the Ph.D program, and discovered Mark Twain. In Mark Twain I found a writer I admired, a writer I identified with, and a writer whom I felt I understood. I wrote my dissertation on a pattern I saw in his five major fictions. In each of these books, he tries to tell a certain story, and in each he becomes disillusioned with the possibility of ever writing something “true.” Yet at the end of each attempt, he finds the beginning of the next one. To wit, Huckleberry Finn’s announcement at the beginning of his book: “You don’t know about me, without you have read a book by the name of The Adventures of Tom Sawyer, but that ain’t no matter.”

Ultimately, the only way out of this pattern lay in leaving his final fiction, The Mysterious Stranger, unfinished.

Recently married and struggling with whether or not I would even have a career once I lost my job at the University of Pennsylvania – my chair had made it clear that no woman would ever get tenure in his English Department – I did not think about trying to get this dissertation published. Had I been a man, I suspect I would have been encouraged to do so, but I believe my dissertation chair felt it would be presumptuous of me to reach so high.  “Articles,” he said, “try for an article.”  There were no women on the faculty of the English Department at Indiana University at the time. I suspect he could not imagine a future for me that looked like his.

I have always regretted this lost opportunity, not so much for my own personal career where a book on Mark Twain would have helped, but for the story I told that no one ever read and that I still think rings true.

I made one request to the director of the Mark Twain Center in return for my donation of books: please order a copy of my dissertation to add to the collection.  He has gladly done so. Perhaps now someone will read it.

My collection of fiction by 19^th century American women writers ran to over 100 volumes. In soliciting a home for my collection, I wrote the following “advertisement.”

“The collection as a whole reflects primarily the determination of one woman to tell a different story about 19^th century American literature and about the women who participated in its making. When I first began to explore the work of 19^th century American women writers of fiction, I knew nothing of the field. In my entire undergraduate and graduate training to be a teacher and scholar of 19^th century American literature, I read not one single prose work by a woman. Jealous of the success of his female contemporaries, Hawthorne sneered them off as “that damned mob of scribbling women.” Hawthorne, once elevated to canonical status, ruled. 19^th century American women story tellers were ignored, ridiculed, and despised, all by those who had read not a word of what they had written.

So I was curious. What really was out there?  Who were these women and what did they have to say? Were they really as bad as I had been told or might they, if given a chance, tell a different story from the one the men were telling?

I began to read. I read everything in prose that I could get my hands on that had been written by a woman between 1800 and 1900. I was fortunate enough to have access to the New York State Library which has a substantial collection of works by 19^th century American writers; it also possesses complete runs of relevant 19^th century literary journals and newspapers. I began to haunt barns and used bookstores. I became expert at picking out 19^th century editions by their color, texture, feel, and shape from the mass of books the seller had labelled “fiction.” I did not know what I would find, and so I bought everything and read everything.

Given these origins, my collection is not particularly one for collectors. It contains few first editions or rare books. Rather its value lies in the way it marks a moment in history. The field of 19th century American women writers of prose did not exist when I began my work in 1980. It had to be created, and the only way to do that was to read, widely and wildly. I bought whatever I could find and whatever I thought was interesting. Then I chose what to reprint and write about in order to begin the work of creating a field.”

We now have some empty shelves.  Sara asks, “What are the books I cannot live without? What are the books I must take with me if I move from this house?” I ask, “What is bone?”  We both answer, “Beowulf.”  But that’s another story.

July 27, 2021

“the greater perfection”

Come this August, I will have been gardening at 29 Columbine Drive for twenty-four years. This spring I informed Sara that the two paperbark maples, the single-stemmed one planted in 2004 and the multi-stemmed one planted in 2007, were no longer adolescents but had become young adults, thirty-somethings. Later in the season I mused that many of my gardens were beginning to look mature, and I announced to visitors that the garden as a whole had finally come together and looked settled, done, even “perfect.”

My illusions have been not lasted. Last week I went out to weed the front corner garden — the one with the ‘Betty Corning’ Clematis; the ‘Snowflake’ double-file Viburnum that blooms from May to October; the dwarf white pines; the creeping (wrong word for this expander) Scotch pines; and the various lilacs, dwarf, reblooming, and ancient. I have for many seasons now considered this part of my project “finished.” Dubbed my “Pinetum,” it requires little maintenance, the mix of plants pleases me, and, except for the vigorous Scotch pine, the rate of growth has kept the plants in proportion to each other.

As a corner garden, however, it is something of a show piece, and to pleasure my neighbors I have tried to create a colorful planting in the part of this garden that faces the side street. I have relied on multiple varieties of daylilies and the sedum ‘Autumn Joy.’ This summer, the rain has kept the deer away as the daylilies have come into bloom, and the color has been stunning. Arriving last week with my weeder, however, I discovered that the grace period was over, the four-foots had come back, and every blossom, every bud was gone. Calming down and taking a harder look, I realized as well that daylilies were no longer the right plants for this garden anyway. I just went out to weed and I ended up doing a major redesign.

Once again, I learned the hard truth: where the garden is concerned, one is never “done” and “perfect” is a word best struck from the gardener’s vocabulary entirely. Last Friday, Kevin and I tackled the corner garden. We pruned the overgrown lilacs, dug out daylilies, edged the bed to accommodate the voracious Scotch pine, and analyzed my plan for a redesign. A passing neighbor stopped to compliment us on our work. “Looks perfect,” she shouted. “Looks better than it did,” we replied. And then we laughed, acknowledging that this is actually our measure of success.

Nothing in the garden will ever be perfect, or, perhaps, if perfect for a moment, not perfect for long. Our art involves the living tissue that will not stay in place or remain the same from month to month or year to year. The dwarf lilacs refuse to stay dwarfed, the creeper continues to creep, the deer devour the daylilies, and my replacements as they grow may fail to harmonize.

In my work, however, I am comforted by a lesson I learned from garden designer,Julie Messervey whom I first encountered through her book, The Inward Garden. Messervey believes that “deep within each one of us lies a garden. An intensely personal place, this landscape grows from a rich blend of ingredients – imagination, memory, character, and dreams – that combine in wonderful ways in our innermost selves.”  As a designer, Messervey sees her work as giving outward form to these inward gardens, though the translation may never be perfect.

Messervy trained for two years in Japan learning the art of the Japanese garden. At the heart of this art lies a perception about “perfection.”  Here is the story as it is told many places:

“Centuries back, in the height of the Japanese autumn, in one of Kyoto’s majestic gardens, a tea master asked his disciple to prepare for tea ceremony. The young man trimmed the hedges, raked the gravel, picked the dried leaves from the stones, cleared the moss path of twigs. The garden looked immaculate: not a blade of grass out of place.

The master inspected the garden quietly. Then, he reached up at a branch of a maple tree and shook it, watching the auburn leaves fall with haphazard grace on tidied earth. There it was now, the magic of imperfection.”

If pressed to explain this magic, I would say – it lies in freeing us from the illusion of perfection, an illusion that drives and damages. And better than any other art, gardening delivers the magic of imperfection. No gardener works long under the illusion of perfection. Design, plant, mulch. Then edge, weed, prune. Then observe, rejoice, take pride. Then turn your back, then turn again – and gone. The Scotch pine has grown, the edges are sloppy; the top knot of the Viburnum has shot out at a weird angle, the lilacs are tangled; the new plantings no longer keep pace with the old, the proportions are wrong. The garden disillusions us quickly but often with such delightful results. Random maple leaves on raked gravel appeals. That angled branch on ‘Snowflake’ charms.

Francis Bacon once described gardening as “the greater perfection,” distinguishing it from the lesser perfection of architecture which is the work of human hands alone. Gardening, we work with forces beyond our knowledge and control, and we come to realize that the greater perfection is the one we cannot see. And so, relaxed within our limits, we keep on pruning and revising.

To begin again. Yesterday I went out to weed the small oval garden that sits at the end of the back lawn in front of the row of blue spruce that marks the boundary line between my garden and my neighbor’s. Several hours later I finished because — no surprise — once there I realized it needed a re-design. I uprooted and tossed the overgrown Spirea, thinned and re-routed the Echinacea, and ripped out all but one of the daylilies. I moved the dwarf golden-rod to a more prominent position, thieved the necessary third Liatris from another garden, and trimmed the Abelia into shape. Collecting my tools and heading up to the house, I heard myself say, “It’s perfect.”

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April 27, 2021

“No-mow April”

Justin came yesterday to mow my neighbor’s lawn. He did not mow mine because I have taken a vow to be part of the “no-mow April, no-mow May” movement.

I learned about this movement when I took a webinar on “Good Bugs” from Dr. Mary Gardiner, an entomologist at Ohio State University. Her point is simple: dandelions are one of the few sources of food for pollinators in the early months of spring, so don’t mow them down.

I was persuaded, and I must admit, I have come to like the look of the dandelions. More challenging are the other plants that could be called weeds because they don’t belong in a lawn and don’t provide anything useful to pollinators. I can, of course, remove these plants by hand, but how long can I tolerate the result of the wildly different growth patterns of my various grasses? I have tufts and clumps everywhere, thick spots and thin spots. How quickly and how thoroughly can I change my aesthetic so that I like a ratty-looking lawn? I might have to capitulate and mow in May.

Over the past few months, I have become intrigued by the pollinator/native plant approach to gardening and by the work of Doug Tallamy, a professor at the University of Delaware, whose books – Bringing Nature Home (2007) and The Living Landscape (2014) — have become guides for the effort to restore our native ecosystem.

A more recent book, Nature’s Best Hope (2019), proposes an extraordinary idea:
“What if each American landowner made it a goal to convert half of his or her lawn to productive native plant communities. Even moderate success could collectively restore some semblance of ecosystem function to more than twenty million acres of what is now ecological wasteland. How big is twenty million acres? It’s bigger than the combined areas of the Everglades, Yellowstone, Yosemite, Grand Teton, Canyonlands, Mount Rainier, North Cascades, Badlands, Olympic, Sequoia, Grand Canyon, Denali and the Great Smoky Mountains National Parks. . . . I suggest we call it Homegrown National Park.”

Tallamy’s primary concern is to create habitats that support the insect life that in turns supports other creatures, particularly birds. Birds need caterpillars to feed themselves and their young, and moth and butterfly caterpillars turn out to be quite particular about what they chew. Therefore, Tallamy and others have developed lists of plants that are organized according to the number of caterpillars they support. Just google Native Plant Finder, type in your zip code, and you will get a list of Tallamy-approved plants for your zone. Native oaks, willows, cherries, and birches come out on top for trees and shrubs for my zone. Goldenrod, joe-pye weed, Helianthus, and wild strawberry top the list for perennials. Violets are good too.

I breathed a sigh of relief when I discovered that my birch, Betula nigra, was a native. I patted myself on the back for having left the violets alone, allowing them to cover much of the ground in my rear gardens.

I love Tallamy’s concept of Homegrown National Park, and I am promoting it wherever I can. I think it a brilliant marketing tool, something that people can understand and buy into. If you turn part of your lawn (or current garden) into a Tallamy planting, you can get a sign that says you are part of Homegrown National Park. People like signs.

A Tallamy planting, however, is very specific and somewhat limited. There are other approaches that are equally valuable. I suggest that we think of the larger movement to restore our native ecosystem and support pollinators as composed of three overlapping but not identical circles. There is the circle composed of plants native to the northeastern United States. Not all of these plants support pollinators or desired caterpillars, but they may interact in beneficial ways with those that do. There is the circle composed of plants that support pollinators, which can include plants that are not natives. And then there is the circle labelled Homegrown National Park, where the plantings are determined entirely by the number of moth and butterfly caterpillars they support.

All who write on this issue agree that, since we have so seriously disrupted our native ecosystem, restoration is complicated. Because the science is so complex, my own approach is to plant some pollinators, some natives, and some of Tallamy’s first choices. So, yes, I have ordered a red oak seedling, though I do not know where I will put it or how I will keep it from being eaten.

The last few Fridays, Kevin and I have played the red oak game. He will stand in a spot in the garden and pretend to be an oak, stretching up as high as he can and spreading out his arms as wide as he can. Then I will go to the spot and do the same. So far, we have not found any place to put an oak seedling. I have a lot of trees already, and they are situated so as to have sufficient space to accommodate future growth. I know, however, that Kevin and I will persist until we find a space. The problem is: you don’t want to move an oak once you have planted it.

To be clear, I am not about to rip out all my current plantings just because they do not fit in any of the three circles. Many fall into the category of “deeply loved exotics.” Luckily, I have support for my passion.

In 1470 B.C. the Egyptian queen Hatshepsut fell in love with trees (Boswellia sacra and Commiphora myrrha) from Somalia and ordered them dug up and brought to her, their roots protectively balled in baskets. We know of this event because the journey is recorded on the walls of a temple in Thebes. After I encountered Hatshepsut, I felt better about my Japanese Stewartia and my Chinese Heptacodium. She continues to remind me that there is a long history to human beings wanting plants from elsewhere.

Still moderation and balance are essential in this matter as well. Some exotics, introduced for their ornamental value and their appeal to the Hatshepsut in us, have become nasty invasives. They have escaped the confines of our gardens and set up shop in the native landscape, sometimes with devastating ecological consequences. Take, for instance, the Japanese barberry (Berberis thunbergii). Until you have seen a forest floor covered with thousands of baby barberries, you cannot realize the full meaning of “nasty invasive.” Once you have seen this sight, you will never ever want to plant a barberry again.

So I adopt the approach of balance and moderation: 1/3 for the birds, 1/3 for the bees, 1/3 for my own personal pleasure. I will keep my lawn unmowed for as long as I can tolerate the ratty look and plant as many natives as I can cram into already full gardens. But my blackberry lily, a perennial native to eastern Russia as well as China and Japan, stays. And so does my ancient Hydrangea paniculata ‘Tardiva,’ a native of China and Japan. It continues to show me how beautiful aging can be.