What better way to kick off this blog than with a report on Plant-O-Rama, the terrific, mid-winter horticulture symposium & trade show sponsored by MetroHort and Brooklyn Botanic Garden (BBG). I've been to this show in each of the past few years, and some of the speakers are a big hit, while some are a definite miss. Last year's speaker, Michael Dirr, was a big hit in my estimation, not because he presented something I was unfamiliar with (I know his books and plant introductions well) but because I had no idea he was such an exuberant and funny guy. Knowing now that he is not the dry morphology-splitting professor I had previously imagined him to be has changed my whole experience with his extremely thorough — even encyclopedic — books. How much more fun is it to 'hear' his enthusiasm and biting wit while reading his descriptions of plants in their myriad variations.
If it weren't for Dirr's memorable performance, I might have given this year's event a miss. Not because I wasn't interested in speaker Darrel Morrison's work (interesting back-to-back UGA here), but because I was all too familiar with it. He was my unofficial thesis advisor in graduate school and I have seen him speak a number of times. But I needed a break form my heavy work load, and so I hauled myself over to Brooklyn to see the show.
How glad I am.
Darryl was excellent as usual — His meadow work at Storm King always blows me away — but what a pleasant surprise to come across Roy Diblik, of Northwind Perennial Farm, and his work. Like Dirr, talk about an exuberant character; he can tell stories and ascribe personality traits to even the most seemingly uninteresting plants. Example: "Leave your perennials be, they don't need you; they're saying, "go, talk to your tomatoes; leave us alone and stop hanging around.""
How true, and how amusing. But beyond giving every plant a voice and personality (which he does with a surprising flair and sarcasm), and his insistence that there isn't a plant alive that evolved to survive a yearly application of wood chips; Diblik is an unapologetic proponent of mixing native with non-native species in his planting designs. If you're unaware, such independent thinking is bordering on heresy amongst some horticulture, Landscape Architecture, and ecological design cognoscenti.
Now, if you know Darryl Morrison's work, you know he is one of the premier go-to guys for native design, so having someone with a more Rambunctious Garden approach provided an interesting foil. If you aren't familiar with Emma Marris' recent book of that name — which it seems few, if any, in the auditorium were — then I recommend that you rush out and buy it. It's probably the first meaningful shot over the all-native all-the-time proponents intrepid bow. In a nutshell, Marris proposes that the entire planet has been disturbed by the hand of man and that we have so screwed it up that we must now tend it as a "Rambunctious Garden." Especially compelling are her accounts of alien plant incursions on otherwise pristine Pacific islands that result, not in the expected invasive monospecies, but in unique forests that are far more species-rich than their undisturbed antecedents. This recent addition to ecological literature is provoking a knock-down drag-out fight among theorists. So with that in mind, I half-expected to see some feisty exchanges in the follow-up panel between Plant-O-Rama's two key speakers.
Alas, that was not to be. Both are too professional, and Darryl is far too much of a gentlemen. And you'd have to be a fool to rush in against Diblik's imaginative storytelling. None-the-less, I feel the seed of a debate has been planted. My own growing dependence on non-natives for low-maintenance plantings has now been emboldened. My experiments with 100% native plantings in urban, disturbed environments just didn't perform as hoped or predicted. And no wonder, today's urban environment bears less-and-less semblance to the supposed historic environment in which these species and their local genotypes evolved (no matter how much the likes of Ed Toth of Greenbelt Native Plant Center insist otherwise). To paraphrase Diblik's mulch-averse quip: no plant evolved in a soil island, in deep shade, surrounded by paving, with an annual application of winter salt — that among many other anthropogenic environmental alterations.
So what is the debate? Basically, it's plantings of entirely appropriate native species (Morrison) vs. plantings of some natives interplanted with enough non-natives and cultivars to make the planting successful, both ecologically and socially, under low-maintenance management (Diblik). The pragmatist (and client-pleasing businessman) in me now prefers the latter.
One problem with the all-native all-the-time solution is the disagreement over the definition of 'native'. Each of the panelists (Morrison, Diblik, and one representative each from BBG and NYBG) had a different definition. I know first hand that NYBG's criteria of the Northeast, stopping at the Missouri River in my native state of the same name, seems incredibly arbitrary — I'm familiar with both banks of the Missouri there and they are not that botanically dissimilar. The varied definition aside, now that the New York City metro region is USDA Hardiness Map Zone 7b, a full zone warmer (and still warming) than the previous 6b, there's no longer any native environment in which historically native species can thrive. As Bill McKibben made clear in his 1989 book, we have witnessed "The End of Nature" as we know it. So how can anything be 'native', if there is no 'nature' left to live in?
Anyway, I encourage every garden designer, landscape architect, ecological restorationist, and so on, to read Rambunctious Garden: Saving Nature in a Post-Wild World and join the debate, both in your practice, and in your theory.