This spring I went camping at Big Spring State Park in southern Missouri. In one day of hiking, I saw 52 species of flowers blooming in the river bottoms, forests, and glades. So much diversity of colors and species and all the bees and butterflies they attract. It is amazing. Mother nature seems to know best how to support a diverse and healthy collection of blooms. Once I have caught my breath, I think about this natural display as inspiration for garden design. Some plants like to group up while others are scattered. Some like to grow in a line across the hillside while others dangle their roots in the creek. The magic is hard to understand and even more impossible to reproduce. I grasp what I can and try to put it on paper. Naturalistic design mimics nature. Plants drift, there are no straight lines, textures contrast, and layers of green compete for light. We try our best to recreate the beauty we find in wild places and bring it home. But we can’t quite build the same experience. As much praise as I get for my garden it is still a poor comparison to preserving a natural area. These beautiful wild spaces are where we find our inspiration and see what nature is capable of. We must visit them often to learn from them and keep them safe for future generations.

This March is the Honeysuckle Sweep for Healthy Habitat Month. "In an effort to energize the greater St. Louis region around improving habitat for our native plants and animals, area conservation organizations join together to spotlight invasive bush honeysuckle and the need to remove it so that large swaths of land can become productive areas for native habitat, recreation and enjoyment. To that end, organizations will host public events and volunteer removal days during the month of March." The idea is based on Missouri's very successful operation clean stream, a yearly river cleanup event that has been going on for over 50 years and involves over 2,000 volunteers. Operation Clean Stream introduces Missourians to a day of floating on a beautiful river while picking up trash and for many is a day to remember.  Children enjoy hunting for beer cans in the rocks. Adults brag about how many tires they have pulled out of a stream bank and fit into their canoe.  Once someone learns the value of picking up trash out of our streams, they make a habit of picking up trash wherever they go. Honeysuckle Sweep brings the same hope of public education and responsibility.  Many people do not know what a honeysuckle bush is or why it is a problem.  Educating the public with this focused event will help bring the problem to the front of our minds.  Once people spend a day removing honeysuckle in their neighborhood park, they will learn how to identify it and see that it also lives in their backyard. As we see invasive shrubs during our daily lives, we should do something about it by removing them.  Gradually we will get the problem under control with a lot of help from our friends. Although honeysuckle can be found in almost all public spaces it is possible to imagine a different future. The task may be daunting, but can be achieved with a concerted effort from the community. Back in 1967 the rivers of Missouri were filled with trash.  Any river was a convenient place to dump whatever you didn't want, even old cars.  The amount of trash was so overwhelming it was hard to enjoy a float trip. Today our rivers are clean and the public values them as beautiful places for recreation, not trash cans. Come to the Honeysuckle Sweep. Let's make honeysuckle choked parks a thing of the past that is unacceptable in the public eye. We are going to educate the public to remove honeysuckle where they see it. Help us make the Honeysuckle Sweep for Healthy Habitat an enduring and successful event this March. Learn more at http://www.missouribotanicalgarden.org/sustainability/sustainability/biodiversecity-st.-louis/honeysuckle-sweep-for-healthy-habitat.aspx

It saves a lot of work later to make sure all the grass and weeds are killed in new beds before planting them. The best part of preparing a new flower bed is planting day but be sure to put in all the preparatory work ahead of time. If the grass is not all the way dead or some bind weed is coming up, deal with that first and postpone planting until it is all dead. Weeding around new plants is hard on them and disturbs their roots. If the weeds are allowed to grow alongside the flowers they will compete for space, water, and nutrients and flowers may not be as robust. Even if a bed does not appear to have any weeds growing, seeds and root fragments may remain. Leave the bed empty for a month to see if any weeds sprout. Do your future self a favor and start off with a clean bed.

Planting a garden requires some math. Finding the area of all the weirdly shaped garden beds can be an unwanted flash back to geometry. This might be why there are so many rectangular beds, to avoid the math. However, in my experience native plants don’t like straight lines. To calculate the bed area, I measure my beds as if they were a lot of smaller rectangles.  Height times width of every rectangle gives me their area. When I add them all up, I come up with a close enough measure of the total area. After the area is found, then the number of plants needed still must be calculated. Different species have all different types of spacing requirements. I put my plant spacing as two-foot centers in an offset pattern that looks like a triangle between plants. Not all plants are two-foot centers but a lot of them are. If I’m planting a group of larger plants, like asters, I can calculate that bed separately to give them a larger spacing. With my plant spacing and bed area the calculator gives me the number of plants needed. I divide up this number by the number of species and find out how many I need to order. The calculation of the bed area can also be used to figure out how much mulch is needed. I prefer to mulch lightly with 2 inches of mulch. Bed area times height of the mulch will tell you how much mulch you need. Converting from feet and inches into cubic yards can be done using conversion tables. Next, we calculate watering. Tree and shrub watering in the first year is five gallons of water per inch of trunk, spread around the root zone once a week. Herbaceous plants should also be watered once a week to wet the soil to a depth of one inch. Calculate the amount of water by multiplying one inch by the bed area and then convert that to gallons. Or I usually just water and then check that the soil is wet to one inch down. If the soil is already wet from rain, then there is no need to provide supplementary water. After the first full year of watering, plants do not need to be watered regularly. In the summer and winter there may be times of drought and supplementary water on the garden will help plants stay healthy until the rains return. If the new garden is a rain garden, you will want to calculate what size of basin you need to capture your roof water. For that you will need to know the area of the roof connected to the diverted downspout, and how much the average rainfall event is. The depth times the area of the rain basin needs to match the area of the roof. To find out how fast the ground can absorb all the water, do a percolation test by digging a hole in the garden plot, fill it with water and time how fast the water disappears. To help with all these calculations I have added a few online calculators to this website. They can help to calculate bed area, mulch, plants, and water needs. As well as how big to make a raingarden. Geometry, who knew it would be so important. Another math problem to solve is always how much garden can be made within a certain budget but that will have to wait for another day. However, a few of the calculations here will get us started on an estimate.

Instead of adding a beehive to the garden think of the other bees. Honeybees aren’t native anyway. Native bees don’t live in hives, they are mostly solitary insects. Bees can be attracted to the garden with several manmade living situations. Many bees nest in decaying trees either by excavating a hole or using premade holes. Removing dead trees will eliminate bee habitat. Bee blocks are just wooden blocks with holes drilled in them. Untreated scrap lumber chunks can be used or pieces from a tree being removed also work well. The larger the bee blocks the more bees they can support. Some bees nest underground. Bumble bees can sometimes form colonies of ground nests. The bees need bare ground in loose soil to excavate a nest where they are not disturbed by foot traffic. Mulching every inch of garden soil can eliminate the type of habitat some bees need. Sand boxes can make good nesting areas for some bees. Vertical stems also form nesting opportunities. Bees can lay their eggs in the stem or overwinter in there for protection. Some native plants that have nice hollow stems are blackberry, hydrangea, elderberry, cup plant, milkweed. Cut pieces of bamboo can be bundled and placed vertically or horizontally for bees to occupy. Built bee houses do better if they have protection from the elements. They can be tucked under the eaves of the roof or placed under a deck. I like to keep mine on the front porch so I can watch them traveling in and out. Predators might also find built bee habitats easier to exploit. When all the bee nests are close together it is easy for a woodpecker or racoon to cause a lot of destruction. Putting wire fronts or bee blocks can help protect them. Keeping bee houses in high traffic areas, like next to the front door, also reduces predators. Bees come in all sizes so they will want a wide variety of hole widths to choose from. Larger width holes will need to be deeper to accommodate more bees. When bees use a tube to lay eggs, they place the female eggs in the deepest part of the hole with the males towards the outside. If the holes are not made deep enough, they will only hatch male bees, and we need females to continue the population. Find out more about how to make bee houses and what size holes to make at https://www.xerces.org/sites/default/files/2018-05/12-015_02_XercesSoc_Nests-for-Native-Bees-fact-sheet_web.pdf

Some would say that the words conservation and horticulture do not go together. However, I know an awful lot of people who have gotten into conservation because they are into horticulture or became interested in horticulture because they care about conservation. Personally, I’m with the latter group of folks. I’m a lover of wild outdoor places and it was such a joy when I discovered that I could recreate tiny pieces of the nature I loved at home. My first native garden happened when I was living at a research station and decided to transplant some of the forest wild flowers around the back porch of my cabin so that I would be sure to notice their blooms and pollinators. My little woodland garden was such a relaxing place to hang out and enjoy nature and I felt pride that I was able to nurture it. After that I wanted to learn how to care for all the native plants I knew in my garden. Just like that, I was obsessed with my garden, collecting plants, cultivating new species, and finding how to make plants happy. Can our gardens be a place for conservation? While I don’t suggest poaching wildflowers out of the woods like I did before I knew any better, many native plants are well suited to the garden. Putting native plants in a garden does not equal conservation. Conservation is the whole picture, food webs, soil, ground water, habitat, and our relationship to the land. Sticking a native plant in the garden is just step one in conservation horticulture. Conservation is the act of protecting Earth's natural resources for current and future generations. Horticulture is the art or practice of garden cultivation and management. So, in practice, we are protecting Earth's natural resources for current and future generations with garden cultivation and management. Conservation horticulture could be a garden that is planted to have blooms and berries throughout the year to feed birds and insects. Especially focusing on having food sources available at the beginning and end of winter when wildlife is most vulnerable. Flowers would be a variety of colors and shapes to host the maximum number of insects. Various berries would be ripe in all seasons to feed visiting birds. Gardening for a species of concern, such as the Monarch, is conservation and horticulture. The garden must provide all the necessities of the species such and habitat, places to raise young, water, food, and shelter. For Monarchs the garden would include a variety of milkweed species for monarchs to lay eggs on and caterpillars to eat. It would have a reliable water source and places to rest out of the wind. A variety of other flowers would be planted to boost food resources to fuel migration when adult monarchs are in the area. Conservation horticulture could be killing plants instead of growing them. Many of us take on new gardens that are choked with invasive species. Recognizing and removing invasive species is often step one for a new gardener. Step two may be stabilizing and improving the bare soil to get ready to the more fun steps to come. There are many ways to practice conservation in our gardens. We don’t have to turn our yards into natural areas to be conservation horticulturalists. We can each pick which conservation practices sound right for our gardens and rewarding for us and start with that.

In addition to all their other virtues, plants can also be a building material. Historically we used plants in many parts of our lives, to build our houses, clothing, and weapons. There is a native plant called bedstraw because it was used to stuff mattresses as it stayed fluffy and repelled bed bugs. The milkweed seed fluff was called upon during WW2. Part of the war effort at home included civilians collecting milkweed seeds to stuff life jackets for soldiers. Milkweed stem fibers are also used to make rope. Stinging nettle fibers are used for cloth. Nettles have been used since the medieval times and have great tinsel strength, are fire retardant, and are light weight. Nettle fabrics are produced commercially but can also be made at home. Nettle leaves must be soaked, dried, broken down, and then spun into yarn. I have a friend who makes cute little baskets out of pine needles that she sells at craft fairs. Utilitarian and decorative baskets can be made from the inner bark of trees that is soaked and then woven into the basket. More rustic baskets, chairs, and fencing are constructed of whole willow branches woven together while the cutting is fresh and flexible. Bamboo or any other flexible stick can also be woven into fencing. Some branches can create new roots if they are fresh and shoved into the ground as part of a fence. Using fresh stakes of willow is commonly used to create a living fence. Elderberry cuttings will also root into a living fence, but they are too stiff to be woven. Cordage can be used to fasten the woven branches together. Cordage is a form of rope. Plant fibers are repeatedly twisted into ropes and more fibers are added as the rope gets longer. Well-constructed cordage can be very strong and was used often by native Americans, pioneers, and survivalists. The fibers from the stalks of Milkweed and Rattle snake master make good cordage. I have tried my hand at basket weaving and cordage, but my efforts prove that these skills need a lot of practice to be useful.

“There are four ecological functions every landscape must perform if we are to achieve a sustainable relationship with the natural world that support us (and continuing to insist on landscapes that do not sustain mother nature is not and has never been a realistic option). It’s really very simple; our landscapes must do the things that enable ecosystems to produce the life support we and every other species requires. 1) They must support a diverse community of pollinators throughout the growing season. 2) They must provide energy for the local food web. 3) They must manage the watershed in which they lie. 4) They must remove carbon from the atmosphere where it is wreaking havoc on the earth’s climate. How well a landscape accomplishes these goals depends on how well we, as landscape managers, choose and deploy the plants on our landscapes.” Doug Tallamy Simple gardening has become a practice of biology, ecology, and sustainability. There is a lot more science than we initially thought would be involved. But meeting Tallamy’s goals does not require a master’s degree. Being an observant participant in our landscapes lets us know that diversity is good. Learning from other gardeners, scientists, and restorationist and applying those principles to our garden continually improves our landscapes to become more sustainable. Mimicking natural processes will slowly increase biodiversity on our little plot of earth. Every small thing we do is beneficial. Every square foot of lawn we remove, every native we plant, every tree we protect, helps meet Tallamy’s landscape goals. Some actions are more beneficial than others but every action counts. Gardening may begin as a selfish act to have a pretty yard but eventually we all get swept into the native landscaping movement, saving the earth one garden at a time.

Are you thinking about trying to improve your garden to invite pollinators? Sometimes all the options can be intimidating. Remember that any improvement, however modest, is better than none at all. Take care of the basic requirements first; flowers to forage from, suitable places to nest and lay eggs, and an environment free of pesticides. Your native plant garden probably already provides habitat for many insects. Before you make any changes look for existing pollinator habitat that is already present and plan to protect it and any pollinators already using you garden. Make positive changes in a way that minimizes disturbance to existing pollinators. Simple steps can be successful and satisfying. https://www.xerces.org/bring-back-the-pollinators

There are a lot of ways to compost. They don't all involve stinky piles and pitchforks and raccoons. In my garden I have been experimenting with some different composing techniques that you might want to give a try. I love the fact that I can compost my kitchen scraps. It makes me feel less wasteful when I throw things into the compost bucket instead of the trash and also my trash stinks less without the moldy fruit etc. As a gardener I like to give back to my garden and composting just makes sense. Composting begins in the kitchen. In my kitchen all of my food scraps go into a large plastic bucket with a lid. This includes all vegetable scraps, fruit scraps, coffee grounds and filters, paper towels, salsa that has gotten moldy, old pasta, stale bread, tea bags, house plant leaves, wilted cut flowers, dust bunnies, sprouting potatoes, egg shells, and many other things. I avoid putting meat, cheese, and oils into the compost because it can make it smelly and attract animals. When my kitchen compost bucket gets full I take it out and dump it into where ever I am currently collecting compost materials. My smallest composting station is my vermicomposter, worm compost, in the basement. This is a plastic bin made out of three plastic trays nested into each other but the two top trays have many holes slightly larger than a worm. The top tray holds the fresh kitchen scraps and shredded news paper, about 50/50. The worms will begin eating the scraps and mixing it with the paper to make a nice compost. The second tray has older compost that has already been worked over by the worms but they might still be getting every last bit out of it. The third tray catches the liquid produced during the composting called a compost tea. The liquid can be used as liquid fertilizer in your garden or houseplants. When the worms have finished eating all the scraps in the middle tray they will travel up through the holes into the top tray where the newer food is. Once they have traveled up then you know that your compost in the middle tray is ready to harvest and can add it to your garden as a very rich soil amendment. Take your empty tray and put it on top and start filling with food scraps and paper while the tray below is finished off by the worms. The worms used for vermicomposting are called red wigglers and you can find them at bait shops. My vermicomposter is homemade but you can also buy them. I feed this composter the most when the weather is nasty and I don't want to go outside. Because it is small it can't take all the compost I produce so most of my compost does not go into the vermicomposter. The bulk of my yard waste and food waste goes outside into my pit compost. To pit compost I dig a large pit in my garden. Usually about 2 ft deep and 5 ft wide. The hole should be about the size of the amount of material you have available for composting. I pick a site in my yard to dig my hole that has shown to have low soil fertility or weed problems or compaction issues. The soil removed from the hole can be used to contour other parts of the garden or stock piled to go on top of the pit when it is full. First into the hole goes sticks, woody stems, and rotten logs, these help to provide air during the process so it doesn't go anaerobic and stink. Next in are plants that might have weed seeds, vines, and tomato stalks, they take the longest to decompose so I want them at the bottom and not growing. Next goes in my leaves, cut grasses, and other dry plants. After that go food scraps and then the rest of the garden waste. I top it all off with left over soil and a layer of mulch. The finished product should be slightly higher than the ground level because it will settle as it decomposes. It takes about a year for it to become compost but all you have to do is sit back and wait. Tomatoes and other heavy feeders will grow well if planted immediately around the pit so that they can send their roots in for nutrients. The following year you will have a nutrient rich bed ready to plant. Each fall I select a new place to dig a pit and am gradually amending my entire vegetable garden area with this approach. I also do some more traditional composting in a commercially available bin that I dump my materials into the top and scoop the compost out the bottom. It tends to be slow and sometimes drys out in the summer and I have to water it. It works but it can't keep up with the amount of yard waste I produce in my vegetable garden and kitchen so I just use it intermittently. I think the main reason I keep the traditional composter is because I support composting and when people visit I want them to see a composter. My other two methods of composting are invisible to the garden visitor. The vermicomposter is in the basement out of sight. The pit composting is completely unrecognizable on the surface unless you happen to be there on the day I make it. Maybe I should call it stealth composting. I hope that if you have been frustrated by earlier composting attempts you will give it another try. Even a small amount of composting will benefit your garden and the landfill. There are so many methods of composting. I'm taking a class on one called bokashi composting later this year. Talk to your gardening friends about their composting and try a few things at home. I'm sure you will find the right method for you.

I seldom see mammals in my yard besides the ever-present squirls. Once there was a family of skunks in our front yard which led to our slightly delayed departure from the house, waiting for them to clear the area. I do see evidence of many footprints, burrows, and scat. However, my game camera tells a story of a very busy yard. There is a band of five racoons that visit my water fountain every night to get a drink. A family of seven woodchucks travels from their burrow along my fence line to raid the neighbor’s vegetable patch. Two old and battle worm opossums inspect my bird feeding station. There are also infrequent rabbits and once a nest of baby bunnies near the edge of the path. My game camera seems to be most successful when I point it at the pond or down our main garden path. I use a cheaper camera, so the photos are not great quality, but they are good enough to identify the critter. On occasion I will be weeding and come across moles, voles, and mice. The moles and voles build their tunnel burrows through my woodchip paths seeking out the worms and grubs that are breaking down the decaying chips. They can be a problem when they eat plant roots. Voles have a reputation for eating liatris roots. Planting liatris with wire cages around the roots is a solution for yards with big vole problems. The mice sometimes nest in my potting bench over the winter which forces me to clean out my bench each spring, which I guess I should be doing anyway. I also find their snug nests out in the little blue stem patch. I view them as cute little troublemakers that feed my owls. I like to know that my garden is providing shelter for so many. A part of me really wants to tame the animals enough so they feel comfortable being in the yard during the day, but I know that is a can of worms. The racoons already cause enough damage when they go frogging in my pond and tear up all the plants. My vegetable gardening neighbor would rather loose fewer vegetables. And we don’t really want a skunk making a home near our front door. The number of mammals already is quite a lot for the area of my garden. I guess I will just need to be content with knowing they are there and shelve my dreams of being an animal whisperer. One mammal I’m lucky not to have, are deer. Deer are beautiful to look at but often cause destruction. They can also bring chiggers and ticks into a garden. I’m very fortunate to not need to worry about those pests while working outside. The absence of deer in my yard is a sign that my yard is not connected sufficiently to wildlife corridors for them to feel safe traveling to my yard. Yards connected by safe travel corridors are better for wildlife, so that their young can disperse to new territories to find mates. Animals like deer, that need a larger feeding ground then just one yard can provide, depend on connected habitats. If a yard does have deer already it would still benefit from more wildlife corridors that allow the deer to travel and decrease the burden on just a few yards to provide all the needed food.

Rush lights were commonly used back in the middle ages. It was a cheap way to produce light from easy to find materials. The light is produced from burning the plant, Juncus effusus, after the pith has been dried and soaked in cooking fat or fish oil. These rushes are still commonly found in wetlands around Missouri and are a favorite landscaping plant today, found in the gardens of many native plant enthusiasts. The soft rush, Juncus effusus, is an excellent native plant, great for use in rain gardens. I have a big patch of it at the outlet of my roof gutter and it does the job of soaking up the rainwater where it used to flood my yard. Soft rush likes to grow in wet sun and is good for erosion control. The stems stand up about 2ft high and stay green through most of the winter. In spring, new shoots will sprout from the base, so many gardeners cut down the old shoots to give the new shoots space but in nature they just grow up through. The resulting thick patch of vegetation provides shelter for many creatures. To make the rush light, I find a few stalks of soft rush and clip them off at the base. I need the inner pith so I peel away the outside green layer and try not to break the spongy pith inside. Slitting the stalk lengthwise with my nail is easy but scraping the pith out in one piece takes a few tries. The pith is laid out to dry for a few days and then after breakfast I throw it in the dirty bacon pan to soak up the fat. The greasy mess is left to dry for a few more days, I try to lay the piths straight because they have curled in the grease. On the day of testing my newly made rush lights I take the fat-soaked piths out to the BBQ grill for safety. It is easy to light one end with a lighter. I try to pick one up but they are still flexible and droop causing me to toss it back on the grill. The light burns even through the tossing and emits a good amount of light. These candles are very smoky and don’t stay lit for long. Into the 19th century, when rush lights were a regular way of lighting at night it would be placed in a dish called a cruisie. The cruisie holds the rush at an angle so it will burn consistently and catches the oil drips so they can be reused the next night. Knowing how to make a rush light could be a good survival skill if I was lost in the wilderness and needed some light at night. I think most importantly this activity helps me to connect to the past and how the soft rush helped my ancestors to have light in the dark. Their connection and knowledge of the plants around them helped them survive and make productive use of the time after sunset.