Doing Significantly Less to Have More - A Native Gardening Philosophy
By guest blogger Meg Johnson - check out Meg's Etsy store featuring organically grown products.
Most of what makes native gardening fun is wildly unappealing. Want beautiful soil? Go collect a neighborhood’s worth of food scraps, lawn clippings, and fallen leaves from a gutter and make them into compost. Want native plants to thrive? Have one if not two piles of “dead” material so the insects that pollinate the native plants will thrive.
It’s such a hard thing to wrap your mind around. Doing significantly less to have more. Every time I go to clean up a pile of leaves or tidy up near the stumpery I think “No! There are millions of little creatures that need what’s there to survive”. So instead of tidying up, I have more time to observe the garden. In these observations, it has been my constant habit to think about the human impulse to intercede. Most humans desire to make our mark on the spaces that we inhabit; might that be for ill or good. Native gardening has forced me to step back from my desire to change what’s around me. Instead of clearing my front garden after the growing season, leave the leaves and stems. Instead of immediately moving a plant if it doesn’t do well its first year, let it have a cold season to better establish itself and if it comes back, hooray! It’s just so counter to everything I was taught about “traditional” gardening.
"It's such a hard thing to wrap your mind around. Doing significantly less to have more."
Growing up in southern California, I was used to leaving things alone, simply because of the planting that surrounded me. We had cacti and succulents and huge palms and eucalyptus that never needed any care. There was a massive camellia shrub that grew under our trailer’s awning that flourished in the shade, never needing any direct watering. But as a kid, I didn’t acknowledge those plants as being in my garden. They were fixtures, monuments, landmarks. Plants that always would be. Their perennial nature never made me think that they were part of my temporary, single season garden. Did I care about the pine tree out back? Other than it being a great tree to climb? Not at all. But did I care immensely if my radishes would come out of the craggy, parched soil on the other side of our car port? Oh absolutely. And until very recently, this was how my mind still thought of gardening.
The path towards native gardening really began with my love for food waste diversion. After taking the Composter Recycler program series through Clark County Solid Waste, I began an avid proponent of vermicomposting. Those little worms worked hard to make gorgeous soil amendment from our house’s 5-person food scraps, and they were so easy to tend to! Feed them occasionally, keep them in a room-temperature environment and throw some cardboard scraps into their container occasionally, and you’ve got gardening gold. At that point, I had two containers of lupine on our tiny patio that were chock-full with this vermicompost that those lupines were the happiest plants I had ever grown. To this day, those little lupines are the ones that come back every single year at my home. Being able to accomplish getting rid of waste while bringing life to my garden at the same time completely reframed how I saw gardening and my own role within the gardening space.
"It's just so counter to everything I was taught about "traditional" gardening."
And now, years and years later, after buying my own home and having the outdoor space I had never had access to before, I’ve gone out of my way to make it a haven to all living creatures, big and small. Having wonderful plants growing in the ground is just the cherry on top of having healthy, fertile soil and lots of safe insect and bird habitat. The fact that I have dozens of hummingbirds and corvids that take up refuge in the Sitka spruce, Douglas Spirea, Nootka rose, thimbleberry and snowberry means that they have more than enough food to make my home their home as well. The native bees are so fond of the broadleaf lupines, California poppies, rock penstemon, western wallflower and Farewell-to-Spring that my garden will never know another spring and summer without them. Do I still have non-native plants in my garden? Yes. But I would more willingly allow those plants that thrive without invading to exist rather than remove them unnecessarily.
Doing significantly less to have more truly is the key to native gardening. Do your best to not get in the way of what the plants and creatures on the land want to do naturally. Stop before digging something up that might otherwise be doing just fine where it’s at. Observe your space – are the bees consistently flying and landing in a section of long grass? Don’t mow it down, that’s their solitary home. Although some of the unappealing parts of native gardening mean that you aren’t doing much, every other living and previously living thing you bring into your gardening space has a role to play that you cannot play for it. Allow it to happen and your garden will almost certainly reward you for it.
