Design

We've embarked on our second restoration project, in the landscape of our small house in the mountains of North Carolina.  I was reminded of this, prompted to reflect on how I became a gardener. I was an ecologist first, as was my gardening companion (aka my husband Tim), but we were glad to transform our barren (read lawn-rich) landscape in the Piedmont, to a habitat garden full of life today.  It's what I count as being one of the most rewarding experiences that I've had as a gardener. It wasn't hard, or especially time-consuming; it just required finding the plants we wanted (largely native), digging holes (Tim did most of that), and getting started. I added vegetable garden beds in two areas (and would love to expand them, but, you need to be mindful of the time it takes to tend to pampered domesticated crops!...) In the mountains, we had nothing much more than mulch with a few plants in front, and below the house, a few plantings descending to an invasive-rich fore...

I've been thinking quite a bit about 'sustainable gardening' lately.  I promote (what I consider) are sustainable gardening practices in the classes I teach -- minimal inputs of water, fuel, pesticides, herbicides, and inorganic fertilizers, don't let leaves leave your property, don't kill things, promote diversity, plant mostly natives, think naturalistic planting design, minimize areas devoted to lawn, etc.  We've been happy with our 'natural garden' created with this approach in our own home landscape in the Piedmont of South Carolina.  And we're continuing this in our second home in the mountains (where we'll probably 'retire'), where we're populating the slope around our small mountain house with native understory shrubs along with native trees. Vegetable gardening is a bit more problematic;  vegetables, by their domesticated nature, are nutrient and water hogs, so the gardener is ALWAYS grubbing around for more sources of organi...

About 15 years ago, a garden board member mentioned Sara Stein's book Noah's Garden: Restoring the Ecology of Our Own Backyards to me. It was transformational to read. She described the arc of her learning as a gardener from tidy ornamentals (the wildlife vanished) back to ecological gardening, and restoration. I was reminded yet again of this coming back from a recent trip (to Garden Writers Association's annual meeting). Returning into the Greenville-Spartanburg airport, visible through the small jet window, there were subdivisions, barren of any actual plantings, with red clay subsoil visible through the window.