A Distinction That Makes All the Difference
Puddock Hill Journal #58: Gardening becomes backyard stewardship when one changes perspective.
The temperature drops. A damp chill drives us inside except for exercise or chores.
It’s a good time to reflect on winter landscapes, which lack the flashiness of spring, the lushness of summer, the profundity of fall. But they have their own virtues.
Stillness lays over the land. Hollies and conifers, often overlooked in other seasons, command our attention. The bald shape of a mature cut-leaf maple reminds me of an old person’s arthritic hands.
Deprived of thick vegetative cover, mammals that evolved as prey show the logic of their disguises. Squirrels on high branches blend into slate-gray skies. Brownish sparrows, field mice, and cottontails duck into the camouflage of dead meadow grasses. In the woods outside the fence, deer in their winter coats practically disappear among tree trunks and leaf litter.
Urban and suburban residents on smaller plots may miss these subtleties. Squirrels stand out against painted decks. Those mice making a nuisance of themselves in the house may be more gray than tan—street clothes. People in those communities may look out their windows at the remnants of their gardens, not nature. Beyond their own gardens: more gardens, not wild places.
The results of recent rewilding efforts around the edges of Puddock Hill appear less impressive this time of year. Young trees without leaves look no more substantial than sticks. One would never know how much promise they held as leaf counts tripled or quadrupled during the growing season. From the house, in fact, one can’t see most of them at all. Stewardship can be more subtle than gardening.
I had been meaning to write this essay on the difference between gardening and stewardship for some time because the social media narrative on native gardening often disappointed me this year. Tension between purists and the native-plant-curious often spilled out into open hostility. Why were these people so often talking past one another? It seemed to me—whether anyone would listen or not—that one should attempt to draw a finer distinction between the pursuit of pretty gardens and the necessity of ecosystem preservation (or restoration) close to home.
The other day, after a conversation with a friend about killing mice in the house, a thought clarified in my mind. During the conversation, my friend startled when I explained the cruelty of glue traps and poisons. Both inflict immeasurable suffering, and the latter risks poisoning animals higher up the food chain, such as birds of prey. One may try to stop the mice from getting inside in the first place by plugging holes, steel wool being a great tool for this. But when that fails—as it inevitably does, especially in old houses—a spring-loaded trap kills fastest and therefore most humanely. No-kill traps are not effective. The mice come back inside unless released more than two miles away, and unless one checks the traps daily, they die painfully of thirst or starvation. So I explained.
My friend paused and swallowed hard. “Until this moment,” he admitted, “I never thought about it from the perspective of the mouse.”
That response sat with me. When I returned home, it resonated further. We run roughshod over nature exactly because we too often fail to look at the world from the perspective of anything other than ourselves. And, as a corollary, we sow the seeds for our own ruin because we fail to acknowledge our own place in nature.
The old-fashioned gardener’s primary desire is to make things beautiful to the gardener. The steward’s primary desire is to maintain or restore the balance of nature.
These two desires do not necessarily conflict, but when they do, priorities come clear. Here are a few examples:
When selecting plants, the gardener may choose those that put on the best show. The backyard steward prefers to select keystone species—those that support the most wildlife.
The gardener may select plants that are resistant to insects, often non-native species. The backyard steward wants to feed the insects, which form the basis of a healthy natural food web.
The gardener may tidy planting beds when fall rolls around. The backyard steward leaves dead plant material standing to support solitary bees and other native arthropods and uses leaf mulch to help other small creatures survive winter.
The gardener blithely uses chemical fertilizer, herbicide, fungicide, and pesticide while dismissing (or failing to consider) potential effects on non-target species. The backyard steward considers the fabric of nature before turning to solutions outside nature.
Before any of my gardening readers get their Wellies twisted into a knot over these assertions, please allow me to emphasize that I’m not issuing a moral condemnation here against gardeners qua gardeners. What I am doing is asking gardeners who don’t currently follow the precepts of backyard stewardship to consider changing their emphasis.
I have been a gardener and have at times done all those things I attributed to gardeners above. In committing myself to backyard stewardship a few years ago, I had to stop thinking about the nature of beauty in the garden and start thinking about the beauty of nature out there.
Consider the dogwood. It has been fashionable among gardeners over the past couple decades to plant Korean dogwoods (Cornus kousa) when one wanted a small flowering tree. They generally carry more foliage than native dogwoods, flower more prolifically, and have more interesting fruit. Many people find them beautiful, but they are of little use to our native arthropods and birds.
To select instead a native flowering dogwood (Cornus florida) is to compromise on the above-mentioned elements of beauty if exotic beauty is the ideal. But consider—as the backyard steward should—that the native American flowering dogwood is “a larval host plant for several moth varieties, including Eudeilinia herminiata, the dogwood thyatirid moth, Antispila cornifoliella, the stinging rose moth, the grand arches moth, the pecan bark borer, the dogwood borer, the rosaceous leaf roller, the diamondback epinotia moth, spring azures, cecropia moths, and the Io moth.” That’s beautiful.
And further consider that the native American flowering dogwood attracts jays, thrushes, nuthatches, sparrows, cardinals & grosbeaks, wood warblers, woodpeckers, orioles, chickadees & titmice, vireos, waxwings, mockingbirds & thrashers, and wrens. More beautiful still.
To see one’s yard through a backyard steward’s lens rather than a simple gardener’s requires looking at the landscape not from a narrow human perspective but from the perspective of the wild things that enrich and sustain our lives.
The plain old gardener looks out on the bare winter landscape and mostly anticipates the flashy flowers of spring and summer. The backyard steward looks out and anticipates all the richness of nature, all the year through.
An ephemeral invasive lesser celandine (Ficaria verna) flowers early near the east woods:
A volunteer maple grows under an old non-native vitex trifolia shrub by the barn:
Once hidden by the leaves of this sweet gum tree near the walnut woods, a pair of squirrel nests stand out in winter:
Near the barn, this leatherleaf viburnum, native to China, seems confused about the season:
Crab apples north of the barn await the birds:
Red twig dogwood (Cornus sericea) and American holly (Ilex opaca) frame the barn view from the patio:
As usual, the planter ladies did a fine job with our winter-themed planters in the driveway beside the patio garden:
