No Substitute for Experience

Insights from three years as a backyard steward.

A programming note. Between holidays, post holidays, and back problems that have limited my time at the keyboard, Backyard Stewardship ended the year on hiatus. This winter, with Puddock Hill mostly dormant and other writing projects claiming more attention, I will be posting only occasionally until spring. I hope subscribers new and old will stick with me!

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My daughter encouraged me to reflect on what I’ve learned after three years pursuing backyard stewardship practices at Puddock Hill. That sounded like a good idea, so here it is.

You can’t plant a tree too soon, especially when rewilding.

Most of the areas we’re rewilding at Puddock Hill are ecologically impoverished but not completely denuded of trees. They’re missing understory, but some mature trees remain.

In a forest, there’s randomness to tree spacing, and because light reaching younger trees varies greatly, they grow at different rates. We’ve tried to replicate this by planting more naturally in the east woods and above the big pond, but as a consequence, after three years, some young trees have grown as big as 12 feet tall while those receiving less sunlight remain small saplings.

In sum, I wish I’d started reforesting sooner!

Plant tight in garden beds.

I have always advocated planting perennials closer together than labels suggest, and I had a reminder of this when we planted out the new patio garden two years ago.

Because of Covid supply disruptions and budgetary limits, we spaced the perennials too far apart in places. This allowed weeds to claim some territory and left us looking at too much bare ground (or, actually, leaf litter from mulching).

Last year I saw a talk by the great English gardener Fergus Garrett of Great Dixter House south of London. One couldn’t spot an inch of bare soil in his many vibrant pictures, which further solidified the idea in my mind that, given the opportunity, one should always plant tight in garden beds.

Fighting invasives is a grinding two-front war.

Regular readers of this newsletter know of my obsession with invasive species, an obsession that I believe is warranted. One simply cannot restore native habitat while allowing invasive plants to run rampant.

My main tool against invasive plants is the string trimmer, which is more selective than a mower, an especially important characteristic when one is working to limit lawns. I am absolutely convinced that when applied assiduously physical interdiction can win the battle against invasive plants. But the challenge is one of resources—time (mine) or money (mine, too, but applied to someone else’s time).

Therefore, the second front against invasives must be limiting them with native competition. As such, I allow aggressive natives such as goldenrod and dogbane to spread as vigorously as they like in meadows, and where they don’t do so for whatever reason, we plug in other natives. This fall we transplanted bunches of native grasses that we didn’t want in the patio garden to the native slope by the wet woods and the wet meadow by the small pond. We hope they’ll compete for resources and crowd out non-native competitors.

Another form of native competition can be provided with shade, which is one reason we led our rewilding efforts with trees. In particular, I’m hoping a dozen sycamores we planted will reduce the vigor of invasive porcelainberry along the stream behind the big pond. While it’s too early to say for sure, it does seem that the shade cast by these trees already set back the porcelainberry a bit. As the sycamores grow, their accumulating leaf litter may also help to suppress invasives.

It’s a critter’s full-time job to find gaps in fences.

I’ve learned the hard way that a deer fence must be designed to resist constant probing of any gaps both vertical (between gate and post, say) and horizontal. We think of deer as jumpers, but experience has taught me that they’re also very good at squeezing through gaps and under fences.

In recently reinforcing the fence along the ground, we intentionally left foot-wide gaps for smaller critters such as foxes, possums, and raccoons (although the latter are also very good climbers). While I haven’t witnessed any of these animals passing through these gaps, I have seen evidence of them coming and going, and we often spot foxes inside the fence, where they’re essential to keep rodent, rabbit, and groundhog populations under control.

No mow should go beyond May.

Three years ago, we started out leaving large swathes of lawn to nature during no-mow May. By last year, I’d extended the period into August and watched the seed bank provide a host of black-eyed Susans and other natives we hadn’t seen before in those places.

That said, eventually Japanese stiltgrass came on too strong to combat with selective string trimming, so I had to bring the mowers in. But until then, our no-mow summer provided food for native pollinators, cover for birds and small critters, and a soft backdrop to hardscape and lawn nearer the house.

The backyard steward plays the long game.

I wish I could report that three years of backyard stewardship have yielded an Eden replete with more songbirds and wildflowers than we ever saw before, but of course life is not that simple. Much of the good we do (or think we’re doing), is invisible. Other changes are subtle. Trees and shrubs can take a while to get established and produce significant fruit. Some things die and need to be replaced. Plus, the sins of neighbors are visited upon us in the form of invasive seeds that blow onto the property and heaven knows how many dead animals that never make it.

Gardners can at times obtain almost instant results: Plant some annual flowers and watch them bloom. Backyard stewardship requires more patience. I have to remind myself now and then that nature has its own rhythm. Besides, it has taken generations for humans to knock the ecology off balance. Even with collective effort, it may take equally long to set things right.

I decided not to drive my self crazy with the pursuit of purity (but it’s a close call).

How much slack should I give to my self-imposed rules of backyard stewardship?

Chemicals make our lives easier, for example, but in the long run they do not make them better. They disrupt ecosystems, lead sometimes to deadly diseases, and contribute to climate change with their manufacturing.

I won’t use chemicals at Puddock Hill except in limited ways as a very last resort. It’s harder to limit plastics, though doing so is a worthy cause. A recent study revealed “a startling truth about the hidden dangers of nanoplastics in our environment. They not only disrupt soil microbial communities but also facilitate the spread of antibiotic resistance, posing a silent yet significant threat to ecological and public health."

One thing we very much can control is whether to introduce non-native plants and what to do about those we already have growing on the property. My original intention was to eliminate everything non-native as quickly as possible, and perhaps their elimination can remain a far-off goal, but I’ve learned that being a purist has its own drawbacks.

For example, should I remove a mature non-native tree in favor of a native sapling that will take decades to store the same amount of carbon, provide other ecological services, and perhaps many years even to bear a significant amount of fruit and flowers to support native birds and insects? If I order a pure native and inadvertently receive a native cultivar, should I throw the latter away even as ecologists debate the relative benefits of one or the other on the environment?

I’ve concluded, to paraphrase Thoreau, that a foolish consistency may indeed be the hobgoblin of small minds. For instance, once one has removed plants or plantings that may have taken years to get established, they’re gone forever. So I’ve decided not to be too religious about these things in practice, while I continue to allow them to drive me a little crazy with each individual decision.

Whether my opinions of the above observations will change in future, I don’t know, but they represent my state of mind today. If I may tap a modern cliché, backyard stewardship, like so many things, is a journey, not a destination. We shall see what tomorrow brings.

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The big pond in winter: