Subject: The American Garden Newsletter 6/24/94

From: [email-masked]
Date: Fri, 24 Jun 94 13:10:39 EDT

THE AMERICAN GARDEN NEWSLETTER
Dawn Singh, Editor & Publisher
[email-masked]
Copyright 1994 by Dawn Singh

The American Garden Newsletter reviews garden books and interviews authors.
 It is free of charge and is not affiliated with any organization.   To
subscribe or correspond, send your e-mail address to:  [email-masked]

TABLE OF CONTENTS-JUNE 24, 1994
Editor's Journal
Interview with Ken Druse, author of "The Natural Habitat Garden"
Book Reviews:  "Groundwork" by Roger Swain and "Shrubs and Vines" by  The
Chicago Botanic Garden, The Holden Arboretum, The Royal Botanical Gardens

EDITOR'S JOURNAL

You've heard of interval training?  I've been doing interval gardening.  The
heat wave that has gripped the eastern half of the country for the past week
has sharply curtailed my outside working out (as opposed to my inside working
out).  Unfortunately, I'm one of those sissies who can't handle the heat.  I
get weak-kneed, ligh-headed and generally sick if I overdo it, and overdoing
it can be doing nothing at all.  So I sit inside looking outside and making
lists of all the things to do when it cools off.  If this weather pattern
doesn't change pretty soon I'll never catch up.

We're removing our  20 some year old deck that was rotting away and replacing
it with landscaping and a raised herb garden.  While it's a gargantuan task
for us, we try to pretend that it's no big deal.  Want to go to the art fair
over in Mineral Point this weekend?  Hey, why not.  It's going to rain for
the third weekend in a row?  Cool, we can use the rain.  We're trying so hard
not to be overwhelmed and stressed out that it's stressing us out.  WE WANT
IT DONE.
Will it ever be done?  Hey, it'll be done when it's done, ok?

After reading Ken Druse's three books (see interview that follows) and Roger
Swain's new book, I'm convinced that  " lawn" will not be part of our
gardening vocabulary by this time next year.  As Ken says, I have too many
other important things to do with my time than mowing, so after we get the
old deck removed and the new landscaping done, we'll start tearing up the
grass just in time for fall planting.  Ah, next year we'll just sit back and
enjoy.  Yeah, right.

INTERVIEW WITH KEN DRUSE, Author Of "The Natural Garden,"(1989, 296 p. $35),
 "The Natural Shade Garden," (1992, 280 p. $40)  and "The Natural Habitat
Garden," (1994, 248 p. $40) all by Clarkson Potter

Ken Druse's trilogy on natural gardening  answers just about every question a
gardener would have before tackling a new project or overhauling an existing
site.  Accompanied by exquisite photos (taken by Druse), the text is
chockfull of info on how, why and what to plant.

Singh:  I've just finished reading all three of your books and I'm really
impressed.  At first glance they look like coffee table books, but there's so
much substance.  They're really valuable resources.  The detail you go into
on how to do it surprised me.

What is natural habitat gardening?

Druse:  It's giving back a bit of your property to what might have been there
in the years before development. You can't really restore a prairie in a 20 x
20 ft. space or a tenth of an acre, for example.  I think there are a couple
of important points:   first, it  just provides some more area for native
plants to grow as their habitats are being destroyed everywhere by the
minute.  When you do this a lot of nice things happen and one of the nicest
things is that members of the food chain can seek out this small area.  Even
if it's tiny, it's surprising, and the animals that rely on certain plants
often come back. 

A lot of people make butterfly gardens or bird gardens and they use Asian
butterfly bush or a viburnum or honeysuckle or something that isn't a native
plant.  Some birds will eat them, like you might get catbirds or cowbirds,
but when you bring back the native that's local to the area, often a bird
that hasn't been seen for many, many years in the area will find that plant.
 Birds especially, and I don't know that much about other animals,  but I've
been learning about birds and people think, oh, they need berries or
something.  But, actually, they need a whole series of different kinds of
foods with high lipids for certain times of the year or high sugars for
energy for other times. So they really are very closely allied to very
specific plants and the times that they bloom.  They've formed an alliance
that's evolved over centuries.

A friend of mine has some berry plants and she replaced them with native
berry plants and she got warblers that hadn't been in her area for 20 years.
 They were back that year eating the berries.

Singh:  My next question I think you've already answered but maybe you could
elaborate a little bit.  Why is it important for people to do this?  Even
though it's more difficult in a small space, that's probably where most
people are, is in the city.  Could you tell me a little bit about the
advantages of even doing it in a small city space?

Druse:  Yes, in a small garden, there's any number of things you can do.
 Even just providing a water source, which could just be a basin of water, is
going to make a difference to the local animals.  So, there's no spot that's
too small.  I have a very small garden.  I live in Brooklyn and my garden's
20 x 50 ft. approximately, and I have a lot of native plants.  They're mostly
mixed in because my garden's more of a collector's garden.  Actually, the
book has gotten a lot of--well, I've been attacked.  I'm kind of glad,
because it's bringing attention not only to the book,  but also to the whole
idea.

If I can digress, one of the reasons I wrote the book, not only because of
the love of this whole thing, but there are a lot of people, a lot of people
in Wisconsin and around the country, who are doing restoration, etc. on
various large scales, and there was no book that addressed the residential
level of this.  I thought what was really needed was a book with pictures of
small scale applications for professionals, who were desperate for this, but
also for Americans.

I hope one of the byproducts of this book is that people will become more
aware of native plants in their communities and in the government
applications.  Still here, where I live, the highway departments are planting
honeysuckle and crown vetch and plants like that on the highways and I think
of all the things, as much as I think we have too much government, there
really  should be more legislation about planting native plants along the
highways and other public areas so that if people can see that native plants
are not the scruffy things they imagine they are, they will take a more
active role.

I know talking to someone in Wisconsin, of course, you know this; but around
the country a lot of people don't know it and in some parts of the country,
like Southern California, so many native plants have been lost.  It's
interesting, as I've toured around the country, the places that have
forgiving climates have the least support for native plants.  I went to the
Pacific Northwest and thought I would find a lot of native plant interest,
and there is, of course; but there are many more English style gardens with
the plants that people love to grow in England because their climate's so
forgiving.  But in a place like Wisconsin where you're dealing with water
problems and wind and extremes in temperature, the native plants are a
natural choice because they have evolved to survive--they're really tough.
 So in those places people are embracing native plants and in places like
California and the worse case of all--Hawaii.  Hawaii is practically lost.
 They can grow anything and they grow all these tropicals from around the
world and they make their beautiful gardens with their birds of paradise and
the native plants are practically gone.

In the book I never say, you don't have to grow native plants exclusively on
your property.  I say that's an option.  But I talk about developing certain
areas for native plants, especially if you have a property that's surrounded
by woodland on the outside, then it's great to rennovate the woods, take out
the trash trees and try to bring the woodland back to what it might have
been.  Then if you want to grow certain other plants you can think of them
like collections, and keep your exotics in a contained, corralled type of
situation.  It could be a perennial border or a rock garden by the house.  Or
it could be a small city lot where you know that if you grow certain things,
they'll be controllable.

Another thing in the book I think of as a rule--there are a couple of
rules--one is to never knowlingly introduce an invasive exotic to the
country.  And even in small city lots, you'd be surprised--someone will plant
bamboo and then three yards down there's bamboo, or people will plant
honeysuckle and eight yards down there's honeysuckle.  Then the birds come
and eat the berries and poop out the berries and they come up in other places
too.  That is a problem no matter what size of the garden.  But I do think of
the smaller gardens and small spaces as collections.

In the [press] attacks, they say I want all native plant gardens and any
other kind of gardening is no good.  If you look at my other books, or at my
own garden, they would know I'm really not saying that.

Singh:  I agree with you, I didn't get that message at all.  I did want to
ask you though, living in such a small place in such a populated area, aren't
you tempted to buy a large piece of property somewhere?

Druse:  Tempted or desperate?  I'm practically desperate.  I've got to do
something about that and I will.

Singh:   I noticed in the first book you talked about the carefree nature of
this type of gardening and why it would appeal to people on that basis .  By
the third book you were talking more about environmental concerns and you
just mentioned local legislation, and it sounds like you're becoming  more
political about this and it's kind of reached a new level with you.

Druse:  Yes, definitely.  The first book was an introduction of a style that
was naturalistic--it's a design style where you use all different kinds of
plants to make  more relaxed gardens, informal gardens, which we call natural
gardens.  In the new book, it's really gardening with native plants and the
style is similar but the stock has changed, the components have changed and
I've changed.  Unfortunately, I've found that some of the plants that we all
embraced in the mid 80's have turned out to be thugs and dangerous in some
cases and I wouldn't necessarily recommend them again unless they are in
collections and I've even written in the book that people consider if they
move from a property that they remove some of these plants or if they think
they will be there forever, to put it in their will that they have some of
these plants removed.  When I tell people that they laugh, they think that's
so funny, and maybe it's amusing, but I'm also serious.  I'm not going to get
into all the plants because it's very controversial--not the most
controversial, but fortunately, that hasn't been attacked yet.

Singh:  What other kinds of responses have you gotten?

Druse:  I think it's really early--this whole idea.  It's interesting about
my books, maybe it's just whatever I'm interested in, but I seem to be ahead
of things and The Natural Garden came out in 1989 and it's now in its sixth
printing and is selling  just like it was selling in the beginning.  I
actually think the shade book is going to be the bigger one [The Natural
Shade Garden].  When I started talking about shade three years ago,  people
would always say "I don't have enough sunlight, what can I do.  Can I remove
some trees?"Now they come to a lecture and they realize this is an
opportunity to develop a cooler area with different plants, plants they
hadn't thought about before.  It's a new opportunity to garden.  So that
whole thing in three years or less has completely flipped.  Sometimes people
will ask questions like "how can I get more shade in my garden?"  People
don't want to be out in the middle of the day in the sun in their perennial
border like they thought they did eight years ago.  We also have so much more
consciousness of sun.  So that's really changed.

I hope the habitat book will be around for a while and people will use it.
   That's a really important thing, that designers use the book.  I know they
use my other books.  They take them to the clients and  clients may be
reluctant to do something and they show them how beautiful it can be, and the
clients say, "oh, yes, I see."  It happens all the time, and yet a lot of
designers don't realize the value of my  books as tools to show prospective
clients what things might look like.  In the next three years I hope they
start using the habitat book that way and I hope in the next three years
people embrace this idea--even the idea--for doing a small scale of it.  

Someone will say to me "what's the problem with having an exotic plant?"
 There aren't that many problems if it's not invasive, but the last kind of
rule is that only one plant can exist in one place at one time, so if some
plant is growing somewhere then some native plant isn't and that native plant
might have been a food source for one animal which in turn was a food source
for another animal, so it really does interrupt the food chain and the
natural, indigenous diversity of plants.

Singh:   That gets back to the issue of perennial borders versus natural
gardens and the care that they take.  I think that's a real major issue for a
lot of people--they want something that looks realy nice but they don't have
time to get out there and maintain it.

Druse:  Yes, and native plants are certainly much less maintenance when
they're established, but I can't and will not say that they're less
maintenance to establish.  It's not an instant panacea.  But it depends on
what you're doing.  If you have a woodland that's in pretty good shape and
you  just clear out some of the brush and put in some wonderful wildflowers,
it's not so difficult--although clearing out the brush can be difficult--but
that can be quick.

I hope that people start getting into propagation for plants, because it's
something I'm very into because we worry about where these plants come from,
especially the woodland plants.  Sometimes you see them for sale so
inexpensively and I know these plants take years to grow, for example
trilliums, which can take seven years to flower.  If you see one for $3.00 it
has not been grown in a nursery.  I've written a few letters to try to have
more legislation, believe it or not, to try to have labeling that
distinguishes between nursery grown and nursery propagated.  A nursery can
wild collect, put it in a pot and say "nursery grown."  I think things should
be certified nursery propagated, but these things don't happen overnight.
 Some nurseries do it because they care and their clients care.  That's
another good thing that might happen from the book is that people will have
more of an awareness.

Singh:  Do you think this is what you're going to be doing for the next 15-20
years?  You're becoming such an expert and you seem to have such deep
feelings about it--do you think this is what your message is going to be?

Druse:  No.  Not necessarily.  I'm always going to like informal gardens--I
just do.  If I have a limited space, I'm not going to have a boxwood hedge
and lawn because I want to grow a thousand plants.  I'm a collector, first
and foremost.  So, as we were talking about these alien plants or mixed
plantings as collections, my next book will be about that.  I think these
things are going to coexist.  I'm not going to introduce exotic, invasive
aliens.  I am going to develop the outer areas to be as natural as possible
and grow native plants, because I love them, and I'm going to have contained
and corralled collection gardens of the wildest things I can get my hands on
or get from seed.  This book is revolutionary, but I'm not
anti-gardening--I'm pro-gardening.  I'm a little bit anti lawn,  but I know
that it's the best living groundcover for recreation,  it breathes and keeps
the ground open.  It's a thousand-million times better than asphalt, which
there's too much of all over the country.  I can coexist with lawn too, I
just think that the rolling acres that you have to mow--I'm not interested in
mowing.  I have many more important things to do.

Singh:  I agree.  After I read all three of your books and Roger Swain's new
book, "Groundwork,"  I'm convinced.  We have about 15 mature oaks on our
property, so we have a lot of lawn problems anyway, lots of bare spots, and
we haven't used chemicals for 7 or 8 years, we're having a real problem with
the grass.  I thought maybe for the next couple of years we'd  repair the
grass until we were ready to move ahead with more flower beds or whatever.
 But I've changed my mind.

Druse:  You could also use moss.  I would start hand weeding out the grass
and have a moss lawn.  You'd be surprised--you can walk on it and it's
gorgeous.  Another thing I would do in that situation is do a "succession
intervention."  I would think about what's going to happen when those trees
go and maybe discover which trees are understory trees that would replace the
oaks when they go.  150 year-old trees are really heading toward the end of
those oaks.  Maybe plant some small oaks among them and get ready for the
next 100 years.  If those oaks all go at once, you're going to really have a
changed environment.  I think about the people who mow lawns today for a
living and I want to make them succession managers and teach them a little
about it.  I heard about one garden that was actually planned for succession,
where birch trees were put in, which live about 40 years, and oak seedlings
were put in about the same time, which will take the place of the birches.
 This garden was really planned for 150 years.  It's not that hard to do when
you think about it, but people don't think about it.

Singh:  Well, Ken, it's been real interesting talking to you.  I will look
forward to your next book.  Any idea when it will be out?

Druse:  Probably around January, 1996.

Singh:  Thanks a million and good luck to you.

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BOOK REVIEW

"Groundwork" by Roger Swain
Houghton Mifflin
162 p, $18.95

If someone had told me ten years ago that a dissertation on topsoil would
bring tears to my  eyes I would have thought they were nuts.  But Roger Swain
managed to do it in his crusty New Englander style.   These thought provoking
essays, subtitled "A Gardener's Ecology," address issues you won't find in
most glitzy gardening books.  Major problems of erosion, recycling,
chemicals, water shortages and monocultures are brought directly home.  As
gardeners, these are issues we should think about and we must think about.
 If gardening is the number one pasttime in the country, as it has been for
some time, just think that every lost opportunity to recycle, compost or
collect seed is multiplied every day millions and millions of times by other
gardeners.  

Swain bases his essays on life at his New Hampshire farm which his parents
bought when he was an impressionable teenager.  He has farm life down to a
science and, you know? He makes it sound appealing.   He discusses topics
like returning nutrients to the soil ("biological gardening"), water
conservation, cultivating diversity, canning and root cellars and the
importance of life-long learning and teaching.

It's a valuable insight into farm life, the joys and back-breaking labor
necessary  not only to provide for yourself, but to keep your land healthy
and productive.  Swain recognizes the threat to his property of encroaching
 development and sympathizes with others in his place who are struggling to
keep the land, and the culture, alive.

But it's not just about farming and rural life.  It's about gardening and the
impact we each have on the land and why it's important for every individual
to practice responsible stewardship. Not only are his suggestions
environmentally correct (and then some), they're also gardener friendly.
 Isn't it easier (and cheaper) to toss yard waste onto a compost heap instead
of bagging it for the garbage people to collect?  And wouldn't it be an
entirely different experience to mow with a highly efficient rotary machine
instead of an ear-busting power mower?  We old dogs must incorporate these
new/old ways of gardening and land maintenance so that our "young pups" grow
up knowing no better way.

I highly recommend this book to those interested in the "big picture" and how
we may each contribute to a healthier environment.   It has no photos
(beautiful line drawings instead) or how-to's on perennials.  The only
criticism of this book?  It's too short.

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BOOK REVIEW

"Shrubs and Vines" by  curators at The Chicago Botanic Garden, The Holden
Arboretum, The Royal Botanical Gardens
Pantheon Books
223 p., $25 softcover

This book is one of four in a series called, "The American Garden Guides"
(great name, eh?).  The series was compiled by experts from botanical gardens
and arboreta from the US and Canada based on their experiences with plants.
 The philosophical approach, however, is a bit unusual:  1) they advocate
 gardens that are water conserving and controlled by integrated pest
management (IPM); 2) they recognize that each contributing expert may have a
different approach to a plant and  emphasize there is never one correct way;
3) many of the plants included in the books  are uncommon and, in numerous
cases, natives or endangered.

In the "Plant Selector" section you will find more than 200 color photos of
shrubs and vines accompanied by descriptions, cultural requirements, growing
cycles and zones.   Periodic sidebars highlight opinions from the consultants
on climate-specific plants for their region--very informative.

The section on garden design emphasizes careful planning for shrubs, in
particular, because of their size and the difficulty in moving an established
plant.  Lovely photos suggest several different design ideas, such as
borders, woodlands, foundation plantings, arbors and walls.

The last section, "Techniques," covers site selection, soil improvements,
planting techniques (critical for many shrubs), propagation, pruning and
maintenance, accompanied by clear black and white photos.  There are brief
discussions on desert plants, container plants, plants for cold climates and
the Great Plains and "enabling" gardens (for disabled gardeners).

The drawback of this book is, of course, that it doesn't include every plant
you could ever possibly want to look up, but it includes every new shrub I've
purchased in the past few years, all of which had to be special ordered.
  Used in conjunction with say, Graham Stuart Thomas' encyclopedic
"Ornamental Shrubs, Climbers and Bamboos" which is 544 pages but only has 32
color photos, it will get a good workout in my house. 

NOTE:  The book on Herb Gardens, also from The American Garden Guides, will
be reviewed in the near future.

Copyright 1994 by Dawn Singh