I have recently attended three very different garden shows that together reveal a big shift in our society’s gardening attitudes and interests. Yet I also found that a troublesome old belief – the idea that people’s garden dreams are more important than the health of the natural world – not only persists but is being re-invigorated in a surprising new way.
The Rhode Island Spring Flower and Garden Show, held in a huge convention center in downtown Providence, is a pretty familiar sort of event. Four days, three floors, thousands of visitors strolling past hundreds of vendors selling everything from heirloom seeds to hand-painted garden tiles to jewelry with just a vague garden-y theme. Here, lining the wide curvy corridors, are all the usual exhibits: koi ponds, bird houses, wind chimes, local banks, botox services (whaat?).
In the poorly-lit cavernous hall, twenty garden “vignettes” have been constructed, all looking more like parade floats than gardens that real people would actually have at home. Upstairs are the lecture rooms: vast echo-y spaces, filled with row after row of hard chairs rigidly aligned, 500 to a room.
But here at this rather traditional event is also an interesting thing: of the eighteen speakers in the roster, only five focused on traditional topics like growing flowers and making pretty compositions. Five others showed how to garden in support of the environment and wildlife, and six more speakers gave advice about growing food at home. (The remaining talk, mine, on landscaping to save energy, either belongs in none of these categories or encompasses all of them, depending on how you look at it.) And nobody talked about lawn.
This is great news. The subjects of environmental health and growing more of our own food have made their way into the gardening mainstream! Even better, the “Best in Show” display was a naturalistic young woodland complete with a small wetland, native plants and leaf duff on the ground instead of bark mulch, all a refreshing break from the highly manicured norm.
Garden Wise, a one-day symposium of the York (PA) County Master Gardeners, occupies the other end of the spectrum from the Rhode Island show. This intimate gathering was attended by just 230 dedicated gardeners, pre-registered and eager to learn from an organization whose message is bolstered and informed by the very enlightened Penn State Extension.
Picture a tidy, low-slung high school. Tables in the lobby offer goods for sale: bluebird houses, solitary bee houses, gardening tools, veggie seedlings, old books and magazines free for the taking, concrete birdbaths (each one weighing perhaps more than some of the smaller attendees). Along the locker-lined halls, handmade displays explain and inform. In the auditorium, comfy seats face a nice wooden stage. The projector works fine and yay! so does the remote. Unlike in Rhode Island, all the chairs are full, and I’m the keynote speaker so everybody’s listening…and only a few have fallen asleep.
Following my talk came five workshops. Care to take a guess what they covered? I admit I was surprised by the topics: bio-rational pesticides; open-pollinated vegetables; cover crops; planning a sustainable veggie garden; and creating healthy garden ecosystems. All elements of sustainable landscaping, with a big focus on gardening for food. Not a single talk on aesthetics, perennials or flowers of any kind. A major shift of emphasis? It seems so to me. But this is not the new development I mentioned earlier.
That revelation came at my third garden show, the Ecological Landscaping Association’s 18th Annual Conference and Eco-Marketplace. No fancy floral displays here. Just 40 exhibitors and 23 speakers in two educational days, co-sponsored by the Conway School of Landscape Design and the Association of Professional Landscape Designers, oriented toward an audience of 400 professionals with an interest in sustainable landscaping.
I have attended this conference many times in the past because it has always provided tons of useful, cutting-edge information, plus it’s held in Springfield, MA, not too far from my home. Many attendees travel here from quite far away because no other conference in New England offers this particular set of knowledge.
I must now disclose that, thanks to the generosity of the organizers, I was given a press pass to cover this year’s event. Even without that privilege, though, I would honestly report all good things about the ELA conference…with one slight exception, as you’ll see.
The exhibitors were specific to sustainable landscaping: Biochar Northeast, Compostwerks, EcoDepot, New England Wetland Plants, Ocean Organics, the George Washington University Sustainable Landscapes Program, NOFA, etc. Three that stood out for me were:
- Project Native; a small nursery that collects its own seed, raises and sells native plants, helps in local restoration projects, and has grown steadily in size since it began 10 years ago, despite the tough economy.
- Herbanatur (pronounced Er-ba-nay-tchure, not, as I thought, like it rhymes with terminator); a new organic weed-control that is actually a salt, a form of sodium chloride. Used as a foliar spray or root injection, it can kill every major invasive weed I could name, including Japanese knotweed, goutweed, giant hogweed and even buckthorn, supposedly without causing harm. If this is true, it’s impressive. (But could it be true?)
- Groundscapes Express, a company that has devised a product combining compost and partially decomposed shredded wood (NOT wood chips), to bring myccorhyzae filaments and humic acid quickly into play in stopping erosion and enhancing growth of both herbaceous and woody plants.
One of the frustrations of attending an excellent conference like this one is that there’s no way to hear all the interesting talks, many of which run concurrently to satisfy to a wide variety of appetites. Here are just a few significant things I learned in my hopping around:
- Big storms associated with climate change are going to transport a lot of species to new ecosystems. For example, Hurricane Irene brought to New England the black-spotted fruitfly, never seen here before and sighted in five states immediately after the storm. The females of this species have a saw-tooth ovipositor that can easily penetrate soft-skinned fruit such as blueberries, peaches and raspberries while they’re still growing. No need for fruit to ripen or start rotting first. A big problem.
- If you have grubs in a lawn, you should stop irrigating. Why? Because flying beetles go to moist places first. Who knew?
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Hardy kiwi: newly popular, wildly aggressive
In seven years, one deer couple can have 35 offspring. Deer overpopulation is a major cause of non-native plant invasion. The only cost-effective solution is to have hunters remove a doe first, before being allowed to take a buck. (This is going to go over great with the rack-hunters.)
- The Trustees of Reservations, the second-largest private land conservation organization in Massachusetts, faces an ongoing struggle with invasive plants. One big problem species? Hardy kiwi (Actinidia arguta), a plant only recently escaped into the wild. More on this just ahead.
One of the event’s two keynote speakers was Michael Clough, a specialist in Japanese knotweed. This plant has been causing trouble in the UK for decades and at this point the invasion is so widespread and scary that some banks refuse to grant a mortgage on property that contains even one sprig of the stuff.
Japanese knotweed loves the living conditions in Britain.
The story of knotweed’s origins in the UK is sadly identical to many invasion stories: it was enthusiastically marketed based on one or two appealing qualities (in this case those qualities were dune-stabilization and pretty flowers), then was introduced in ecosystems that lacked inherent biological controls, and now, more than a hundred years later, it has become disastrously rampant. Getting rid of knotweed requires either long-term herbicide application, or if that’s not possible in sensitive areas or where other valuable plants are growing, UK law requires digging nine feet down and 20 feet out in all directions, then sifting out the roots, and drying and burning them, or burying the excavated material 15 feet deep. What a frustrating, energy-sucking, royal pain.
How ironic, then, that the ELA event’s other keynote speaker was Ben Falk, of Whole Systems Design. Now, I confess that I couldn’t stay for Ben’s dinnertime address, so my comments are based on chats with others who did hear him, his website, and what I know of those who follow similar practices. Ben is one of a growing group of landscape professionals who advocate a renaissance of old-fashioned homesteading and 1970’s back-to-the-land values. They have revised and extended original permaculture ideas, creating their own modern set of solutions, relabeled with names like edible forest gardening, regenerative design, conscious system design or other inspiring terms.
This group of hard-working, hands-on garden folk perceive that the earth is in trouble, and they want to make things better: a worthy goal. Their approach is admirably multi-layered but focuses mainly on maximizing productivity of land and reducing the need for outside inputs. More worthy goals.
According to this school of thought, the highest and best use for land is to produce food and fuel for people. And there’s the problem. Like all the worst systems of agriculture and horticulture in our past, this new approach still places human wishes and desires (often called “needs”) in the center of the equation.
This is not Borneo. Still think hardy kiwi is no problem? We should know better by now. (Photo credit: Julie Richburg, TTOR)
Which brings us back to hardy kiwi. This plant is widely used in edible landscaping plans, because it produces large, good-tasting fruit. It also grows fast and can thrive in a wide range of conditions, two qualities of invasive plants everywhere. And as we learned earlier, hardy kiwi has already become, in a very short time, a serious problem. It did not blow in on a storm or get carried here in the gut of a passing bird, which would be unfortunate but unavoidable. Hardy kiwi was introduced to our forests by well-meaning idealists, many of whom (coincidentally?) also adhere to the point of view that invasive plants are being unfairly maligned these days, and are really not so bad.
These gardeners also promote using several other invasive plants, including autumn olive (a good nitrogen-fixer that helps other fruit trees grow!) and oriental bittersweet (when it kills trees, this opens up more space for growing food!). What about native plants and insects? What about harm to native ecosystems? Well, these things matter, but not as much as food and other things that people need.
So, progress or not?
My first thought, in light of the environmental damage resulting from this new school of thought, was to question ELA’s wisdom in choosing this particular closing speaker. From another perspective, though, it seems that ELA is carrying out its 20-year-long educational mission in the ideal way: by presenting several sides of an issue and leaving it to us to figure out what makes the most sense.
Both the Rhode Island Flower Show and the Garden Wise Symposium revealed great positive changes in our gardening values. The ELA conference, in contrast, presented complexity, reminding us that we must pay attention to the full meaning of our choices. New food-growing methods may aim to help the planet. But if they still place human interests before the health of the environment, and if they create new problems while trying to solve old ones, they may not be quite as beneficial in the long run as their enthusiastic practitioners proclaim. We need only look at two examples from the ELA conference – forests of knotweed in the UK, and natural areas in the US fatally carpeted in hardy kiwi – to remember that humans are no good at predicting anything about the natural world.
© 2012, Sue Reed. All rights reserved. This article is the property of Native Plants and Wildlife Gardens. If you are reading this at another site, please report that to us
About Sue Reed
Sue – very informative. Several points here worth following up on. I mention only a few.
1. first, I am glad you went, rather than me, and are telling us about this. I’m grateful for the positive information but short-sighted views like “placing human interests before the health of the environment” give me a headache. what planet do they think humans live on? You are right, I am sure, that suppression of un-PC views doesn’t help but I don’t enjoy being exposed to them.
2. Herbanur sounds too good to be true. There was a sesame seed oil version of horticultural oil on the market a while ago that was exempt from labeling as it claimed to be harmless; however, they didn’t mention that it (of course) killed ALL insects it touched including ALL the beneficial predator insects. May be I could have used it as salad dressing but it still would have done more harm than good in the garden. Who knows how many innocent well-meaning gardeners were mislead tho?
I quickly checked the Herbanur web-site and it seems to be claiming it’s exempt from Fed pesticide labeling because it’s not toxic. But how does stuff kill stuff if it’s not toxic? How could a salt,e.g., not alter the soil PH, not be harmful to water animals? Would it be possible to get the NPWG brain trust to look at this? I could certainly use something to control lesser celandine and bindweed in wetlands.
3. Japanese knotweed: at Scalzi Riverwalk, we have demonstrated that bi-weekly ground cutting during active growth (in CT, May thru October) will kill JKW in 2 to 3 years. The UK law is would be good to stop a rare but potentially very serous invasive before it got started – but where I live JKW is already so widespread the that the massive digging to get every root fragment is unnecessarily harmful to the environment; an area dug up like this will require 10 to 20 years to recover (if then) as the best replanting only adds back in a few species of the hundreds that should be present – including all the healthful soil critters, fungi etc.
4. I am familiar with hardy kiwi and the thing grows like kudzu with trunks as thick as Asian bittersweet; the reason I am an all-native purist is because we don’t know what will get loose and cause massive destruction but by the time it does it’s usually too late to say “oops”; we can’t “put the genie back in the bottle”. The already stressed, fragile uncultivated areas near me, for example, just can’t absorb a whole lot more “oops”s.
Hi Sue, and thanks for your thoughtful comments. I did ask the Herbanatur salesguy about soil pH being affected by his product, and he assured me that this would not happen. I’m suspicious, though, or rather I should say, doubtful. His answer was too glib. I didn’t even think about pH of water, though. That’s so important to keep in mind. Also, I agree, the UK law on knotweed eradication does seem absurdly destructive…. it’s just an indication of how freaked out they are by their problem. And probably there were no gardeners consulted when the law was passed!
thank you for a fascinating & thought-provoking article! i will not plant the hardy kiwi i was going to now – we are battling 2 large stands of bamboo, courtesy of the former owner of this house, and i have no intention of adding anything else to the invasive mix.. i thought your comments about the well-meaning idealists and invasive plants interesting as well. wish i could have gone to this conference, it sounds like it was wonderful & i am putting in as many native plants as i can in our yard.
and finally, we love project native too!
cheers,
julianna
Hi Julianna. I’m so sorry about your bamboo problem! That’s another one of those plants that is being promoted without concern for its invasiveness. While driving around the Pennsylvania countryside after the York County Symposium, we saw absolute FORESTS of bamboo along the Susquehanna river… solid dense stands of this green monster, with no other plants anywhere in sight. I really wish we could avoid causing a similar problem with hardy kiwi, but too many people refuse to think past the immediate moment. You’re doing good by avoiding it!
That the focus of those being presented to speak before the public has changed is good news. Change is slow. It takes a process of moving through the professionals and the next generation into the general public. Education is slow but inevitable.
Gloria recently posted..Pollinators In The Garden In March
Yeh, I totally agree. Change is slow slow slow. The tricky part is that it almost seems like even though good change is usually slow, bad change can happen like lightning. All we can do is be on the lookout, and this hardy kiwi movement is still in its early stages, so I’m hoping to slow (or halt?) the damage. Hoping.
Sue I stopped going to garden shows…but glad to see they are trying to get a different message out…I still have to say with respect to ELA…REALLY???!!!
Herbanatur is too good to be true and advocating our needs again over the planets is still selfish…I have enough invasives to get rid of due to my stupidity and lack of knowledge…I don’t need more…Like Sue Sweeney and you, I wonder how safe Herbanatur really is…
Donna@ Gardens Eye View recently posted..Seasonal Celebrations Revealed-March 2012
I do want to reiterate that the ELA conference itself was loaded with great information, and I recommend it highly. My goal in the article was just to point out some of the contradictions and potential dangers in some of the choices that some ELA members/supporters are making.
Hi Sue, you’ve done an incredible job piecing this all together and drawing conclusions.
I studied permaculture in Vermont (as an aside, I actually had an afternoon with Ben Falk). It’s true that providing for people is a central tenet of permaculture, but it’s not supposed to be at the expense of the environment. Indeed, restoring areas humans have damaged and leaving as much wild land as possible are supposed to be central, as well.
Overall, I think the original permaculture design process is very good, but yes, there are some problems with how it’s been implemented now by some adherents.
Phil (Smiling Gardener) recently posted..How Vegetable Gardening Is Like Songwriting
Thanks for the feedback, Phil. I didn’t do as good a job of describing permaculture as perhaps I should have, but in such a short article I couldn’t go into a full discussion about the whole discipline of permaculture and its new interpretations (which wouldn’t fit in one article anyway!). I hope it was clear that I’m not pointing a finger at any one person, but rather my criticism is about this new way of thinking that I’m observing lately, a casual-ness about using non-native plants, regardless of their invasive potential, simply because they’re a good source of food.
Oh ya, I understand. I used to teach a class on permaculture and I had several criticisms, too. Your article is spot on.
Phil (Smiling Gardener) recently posted..Pesticide Side Effects – An Insecticide Is Not Just An Insecticide
If you kill the invasives with salt, are you not leaving dead earth? On which nothing will grow in the future? I’m thinking of agricultural land which has been over-fertilised, over-irrigated. And left for dead!
Elephant’s Eye recently posted..March wildflowers for birds
You might be right, but I expect that the inventors of Herbanatur must have been aware of these concerns. I don’t know for sure, though. In any case, it’s good to be wary. Thanks for your thoughts.
Sue – good job of analyzing the spirit of these shows. Enlightening indeed. Enouraging, yet concerning at the same time.
And you’ve given me the missing link in my response to people asking me “isn’t there room for compromise and some balance between native and non native”. Depends on whether you’re more interested in your own desires or the health of the planet. THANKS!
Hal
Hal Mann recently posted..The First Signs
Hi Hal, and thanks for your feedback. This whole issue of native, non-native, invasive plants… it’s so complex…. I’m always looking for ideas that distill the complexity down to a few essential truths.
Sue, thank you for this excellent analysis of the various shows – I am glad you were there to report on them for us because I was unable to attend any of the big shows this year due to other commitments. Very encouraging about the RI show, as I lost interest in the “hardscaping and lawn ornament” focus of the traditional garden shows I’ve attended over the years…
I also heard a talk on Permaculture a few weeks ago in NH and found it fascinating to hear about “modern” homesteaders who are making the most of their land to live in as sustainably as possible using local resources – these people are really walking the talk and they are relearning the lessons of the early settlers to New England in the 1700-1800s – but the idea of introducing new food crops (who knew there were rice paddies in northern New England?) could definitely be a worrying trend in a region of forest ecosystems that are already under great upheaval from acid rain, fragmentation, climate change, and incursion of non-native invasive species. Unlike the early colonial settlers who still had vast untapped resources at their disposal, we now understand that we cannot simply continue to extract and destroy all our available natural resources, and that at this point of our species’ existence on earth, we rely on the stability of our ecosystems for our own survival. Thanks for raising this issue in a very thought-provoking way. Thanks again for raising this very thought-provoking issue.
Ellen Sousa recently posted..NWF and ScottsMiracle-Gro? No!
Hey there Ellen, and thanks for taking the time to comment. I know how busy you are these days! From my perspective, the permaculture movement seems to be an odd marriage of old-fashioned values that inspire and reassure, and new-fangled justifications for doing just whatever we want, consequences be damned. Same old, same old.
Sorry for the typos in my msg – always doing too many things at once!
Ellen Sousa recently posted..NWF and ScottsMiracle-Gro? No!
An excellent discussion on what can be conflicting topics. Thank you for doing this. I value the permaculture movement and appreciate the dedication to feeding people in an environmentally safe manner, as well as creating closed systems. I’ve been pleased to see a gradual change in gardening perspectives to one that, at least, considers the value of ecological stewardship. I wish that what is promoted at trade shows and publications would translate to general practice among gardeners and nurseries.
My thoughts echo those of other comments. The explosion of invasive organisms is of paramount concern and one to which many subscribing to permaculture practices don’t subscribe, including prominent advocate and author Dave Jackie (unless he has altered his views in recent years). The hardy kiwi vine is but one example. I worry about anthropogenic views of the concept of earth stewardship.
In the interests of survival, it behooves us to consider not only the production of food, but the continued health of native ecosystems, not only because of their inherent right to existence, but because of the considerable, oft unrecognized, services that they provide. It is possible to farm and garden in a manner that includes maintaining contiguity of habitat and fosters ecological health.
I was also interested in your observations on booths and exhibits. I’ve found that simply presenting oneself at an ecological exhibit, or claiming that a product is ecologically beneficial does not make it true. The rapacious, mendacious or simply well meaning, but uninformed, are present everywhere.
As an example, at one conference, an author touting the value of soil microorganisms denied that earthworms were a problem for local forest soils, despite a significant body of research that indicates their deleterious effects on forest ecosystems.
Also, Project Native, does not, apparently, produce half of its plants or use most of its own seeds, as is implied, nor are these necessarily organic (I found osmocote in the pots). Unfortunately, they promote some misinformation about native plants, as well.
I’m interested in the Herbenatur; however, it only makes sense that any product that could have such an effect, unless it is a specific biological control, could be likely to have a negative impact on the site. Whether or not that impact counteracts the effects of the invasive plant is something that requires careful consideration. There are rare times that I support the use of glyphosate, simply because I can see no other viable and/or affordable solution and the eradication of the goutweed or bamboo is more important.
Thank you for taking the time to write this article and to continue to question and spark discussion.
oops. reread this. Typo – anthropogenic was meant to be anthropocentric….a bit of a difference!