Garden Design Goes Native

A new movement of native planting advocates is showing us how we can help sustain the matrix of biodiversity upon which all life depends – including our own.

The American entomologist, Douglas Tallamy, author of Bringing Nature Home, champions a gradual approach to going native. For example, he suggests considering a native species or its cultivars over an alien ornamental. Tallamy also suggests reducing lawn in favour of wildlife-friendly habitat; digging out invasive species; and embracing the free-flowing concept of an open border.

To delve deeper, I spoke with Toronto ecological designer and former wild plant nursery owner Charles Kinsley to learn how urban gardeners can create and sustain a native garden.

There’s an old Japanese saying that it takes 300 years to make a garden. But we don’t have that much time.

Make it beautiful

Charles Kinsley sets the design bar high: “It’s important that if you’re going to plant native gardens, that they be beautiful – because no one’s going to be convinced of their value if they’re not.” Far from being messy or dull, the fusion of ecology and aesthetics can offer an ever-changing source of wonder – it’s nature scaled down within a living frame of growth and change. The design challenge is to create an experience that immerses you in a strong sense of place that offers what Kinsley calls, “the value, occurrences and experiences” of the natural world.

Work from a living model

Draw inspiration from wilderness itself. Kinsley confesses to having some place he’s been to that provides a model for each of the gardens he designs. For a backyard residential project in the Annex neighbourhood, for example, a particular forest setting at Silent Lake (near Bancroft) was the inspiration. “It became my model for how to structure the garden,” he explains, adding that the space itself also determines his approach. It’s a marrying of the two things, he says, that together drive the design.

Go for a walk

Search out the native in your neighbourhood. “Try to find natural areas close to your house,” says Kinsley. “[This can be] difficult in some urban settings, because it’s hard to distinguish what’s truly natural from what’s been changed because of re-grading, backfill and landfill,” he explains. “We can’t go back 500 years.” In Toronto some areas are more unique and easier to find than others. In the West End and High Park for example, it’s sandy oak savanna woodland. Elsewhere it’s oak and hickory.

Fit to urban scale

Scaling down the vast complexity of a natural environment to the confines of an urban garden setting is the design challenge, as well as visualizing how the garden will sit within the greater landscape. Scale is extremely important – both from a sustainability and an aesthetic perspective. As Kinsley explains, “I think from the point of view of the metric scale and how everything will fit in. From 100 metres to 10 metres to 10 centimetres: everything has to make sense at all those scales to me.” In an urban setting with a limited lot size, establish some dominant elements and don’t go for too much. And remember to explore the vertical dimension with trees and vines because while your space may be limited in terms of width and depth, you can go as high as you like to create a truly forest-sized sense of scale.

In nature, things are more fractal, sinuous, all different shapes.

Be natural

Practicalities such as light, water and soil need to be considered, but they can be manipulated to advantage. For example, most gardens tend to be flat; so give the land some subtle mounding and roll to create a more natural effect, shape the landscape by digging down to make the conditions wetter or elevate it to create drier conditions. In this way, you can suit the landscape to your choice in plant material. Kinsley is highly sensitive to form, too. “People use triangles, circles and ellipses as standard shapes to site things in a garden,” he explains. “In nature, things are more fractal, sinuous, all different shapes.” His advice is to find a compromise between these standard shapes and the more organic ones found in nature.

Source locally

One of the best ways to make nature feel at home is to use locally sourced materials like native wood and stone and for the hardscaping elements of the design – for walkways and ponds or for sculptural elements like glacial boulders. For the planting plan, visualize the design in layers, starting with the tree canopy and understorey of small trees and shrubs working down to smaller-scale shrubs and vines and naturalized plantings of perennials, grasses and sedges that mingle with ferns, groundcovers and mosses. The new-to-native gardener may want to test the waters by creating a small native feature such as a butterfly habitat of milkweed or a specialized native microclimate such as an alvar (limestone steppe garden) within their existing garden scheme.

Digging deeper

Ecologically aware designers anticipate maintenance issues within the design itself. For a natural garden, Kinsley recommends using the existing soil as the base whenever possible – assuming it is relatively undisturbed and not just a generic subsoil. He lays about four inches of sand as a top layer and then plants directly into the sand. This method helps to minimize weeding, create drainage and encourage the roots to grow downwards into the soil – and after a few years, you’d never know it was there.

Time is the best gardener

“There’s an old Japanese saying that it takes 300 years to make a garden,” Kinsley chuckles, “but we don’t have that much time.” He advises home gardeners to keep it simple at first and then patiently observe the results: “Start your design with a bare bones plan,” he advises, and work from the plan over time. In this way, we can learn from the garden as we design. “It’s something that feeds both ways,” Kingsely explains. “It’s different than painting a wall. A wall can’t tell you its colour – but a garden can.”

Natives vs. nativars

There’s much debate about how native plant species fulfill their role in the ecosystem compared to grower-designed cultivars or “nativars”. Entomologist Tallamy believes that insects treat the nativars exactly like the species – because the essential genotype of the plant remains unchanged. Belinda Gallagher, the former Head of Horticulture at the Royal Botanical Gardens, is more skeptical “We don’t know if they perform the same services as the parent.” Kinsley’s view is that, “in our striving to select out features that we want, it’s quite possible there are passenger features that get neglected or changed – the amount of nectar, scent, things that might be imperceptible to us.” Because it’s impossible to know, we need to be mindful of provenance in terms of how and where the cultivars are grown.

Nature finds nature

When you plant natives, they will attract native insects – which according to Tallamy is the result of encouraging biodiversity. Butterflies and moths, shield bugs and soldier beetles, for example, will manage to discover your garden, and given the right conditions, go larval. The obstacle for many gardeners is to get over the hate/love affair we have with insects – to realize that from a bug-eyed perspective, plants are both nectar and salad bars.

If a human eye can tell a bordered or edge shape too easily, the design will fail.

The finer points

Kinsley might start with a planting plan but he never follows it to the letter, preferring to keep his options open based on plant availability and spontaneous creativity. His methodology is supported by knowledge of how specific native plants behave in nature. “I try to maximize the density of plants. Placement is intuitive, based upon the topography of the design – height of soil and shape – usually with respect to light angle, and moisture run-off.” All factors which directly affect the planting conditions. The shape of the plantings work with and against the general contours of the area in a variety of shapes: into drifts, deformed circles, ellipses, and repeated asymmetrical patterns. His last piece of advice is, “If a human eye can tell a bordered or edge shape too easily, the design will fail” because it won’t look natural.

The mechanics of planting is an art form. “Little in the wild has hard edges – there is almost always a transition. That being said,” Kinsley adds, “individual items or small clusters do occur, but usually as an introduction to a larger area.” He maintains that there’s a crucial distinction from traditional planting methods. “Much standard design is like items positioned next to one another. With my designs, the plants (or plant groups) are within a larger community.”

Once established, Kinsley’s native gardens become remarkably self-sustainable, requiring minimal weeding or watering and nourished by the leaf layer left in place over the winter. Perhaps the greater beauty of the native garden is simply to let nature take its course – as sooner or later, it always will.

 

First published in Trellis – the magazine of the Toronto Botanical Gardens

All photos by Charles Kinsley