28 Jul Wildlife Gardening: Success is in the Regional Details
I recently awoke to the sounds of screaming. Despite my quickened pulse, I suspected an animal. This was, after all, my Maryland hurricane season home, a wooded property left to the wildlife most of the year. The screams were piercing as I gently slid the door open and peered through the screen. It was barely light but there was no mistaking the prominent silhouette of a fox. It sat upright on a grassy plateau in the backyard as it threw its head back and shrieked its claim on my yard.
Perhaps it was this same fox that had reared kits beneath my deck one year. A wood chuck had lived there another. Deer regularly browse their way around the property and it isn’t uncommon to find box turtles crossing the lawn. This is all in stark contrast to my Florida yard where when I first moved into my new home in Coconut Grove, a northern cardinal was the sole wildlife representative. My Miami yard had clearly needed a wildlife intervention (read my Landscaping for South Florida Wildlife in Practice post for details), but it wasn’t until I thought about how quickly the hummingbirds emptied my feeders in Maryland that I realized there might be room for me to improve the wildlife habitat there too. Hadn’t I advised Florida gardeners in my wildlife gardening book to plant flowers rather than feeders? I had no wildflowers in my Maryland yard. I needed a pollinator patch!
I began planting wildflowers along the edge of the forest but while it looked nice and buzzed in bees for a season, my perennials never returned the following year. This wasn’t an issue I’d ever faced before. Having only ever gardened in South Florida, I was confounded both by the fact that wildflowers weren’t volunteering on their own accord and that they disappeared. I spend much of my gardening time in Miami hacking plants back to leave space for walkways, here I couldn’t even get them to grow for more than a season. It was clear that while the underlying ecological concepts were the same, the details of wildlife gardening were going to be very different in Maryland. Nonetheless, I set my sights on the sunniest part of the yard – the planting beds on either side of the front door entry.
Now under scrutiny, I realized that the hedge row in this front planting area included not a single native species. One plant was thorny and another had ambitious runners so they provided good cover for birds, but no food. They had to go. Removal proved more challenging than I had anticipated but one pick-up truck and several chained yanks later, the stubborn roots were finally gone. I headed to the local nursery to re-beautify my jumbled muddy mess of a planting bed.
My enthusiasm for the plant selection task dwindled ever so slightly when I realized the challenges facing a regional neophyte. I’ve always assumed the lack of adequate stock and labeling of native plants in the Miami area related to the fact that native plant landscaping was a relatively new and under-appreciated phenomenon in South Florida. And I was under the impression that buying native plants would be easier in the mid-Atlantic where many yard plants are native and where gardening for birds and other wildlife is more a part of the gardening culture. I was wrong. There was a comparatively larger number of tags advertising plants as native, but closer examination made it unclear as to whether they were in fact native to Maryland’s western shore, the Mid-Atlantic region more broadly, the eastern half of the country, or more generally still, the U.S. as a whole. Accustomed to being able to identify the native plants without consulting tags in South Florida, I found this lack of clarity frustrating. I tried Googling the plants of interest but that proved overly tedious so on that first trip to the store, I let the insects dictate my purchases – I stood and watched the bees and butterflies, letting them select the plants for me.
Now that the bushes were gone and I had what I hoped were mostly native wildflowers, I figured I was well on my way toward success. I arranged my potted plants aesthetically, rearranged for height, fussed with spacing, then grabbed a shovel – surely this would be cake compared to pick-axing through the limestone in my Miami yard. Wrong again. I hit clay that twanged like cement. My couple hour chore stretched into several grueling days. In the end though, I had my pollinator patch. I was proud of what I’d accomplished by the time I returned south at the end of that hurricane season.
The next year, I returned to a patch of flooded sludge. Clay, I learned, doesn’t drain and I had an irrigation leak. I repaired the pipe and replanted with a new round of pollinator-picked plants, but these didn’t seem particularly happy either and neither was I. Water still sat in the beds after a rain and visually it lacked structure. With this dilemma fresh in my mind, I headed to England on an unrelated but fortuitously timed trip to a bird conservation meeting.
As I wandered through villages and fields in the Cotswolds, I became intrigued by the ever-present stone walls. They undulated through rolling fields, emerald forests and quaint towns. Whether baked in the sun, covered in moss or bordering a tidy town planting, they seemed a natural and charismatic part of the landscape, and with good reason. This masterful construction style, known as dry stone, originated with agriculture thousands of years ago as farmers cleared rocks from their fields. Held together only by the careful arrangement of rocks without mortar, these walls were introduced to the Cotswolds in the 18th and 19th centuries to prevent sheep from entering the commons. They have indeed defined the Cotswolds landscape ever since. Why couldn’t it do the same for my challenging planting beds in Maryland? I had in fact used this same technique with limestone in Miami to terrace my vegetable gardens. Why hadn’t I thought of it sooner for my current project? I could use stone walls to elevate my beds above the clay. I returned home and ordered a pallet of Maryland fieldstones.
I carefully placed one rock at a time in my new wall, sometimes searching my stock pile for several minutes at a time for just the right interlocking match. I particularly needed stability as another non-Florida issue had been brought to my attention – winter movement from frost and thawing cycles, something I’d never faced in Miami. It was a slow process, but gratifying. I could tell long before it was done that this would make both the functional and aesthetic difference I hoped for. I completed my border and added a few interior walls in the larger bed for terracing. I filled the beds above the offending clay with a combination of soil and soil-amending mulch, planted a new round of flowering plants, and top-mulched the beds heavily to reduce weeds and insulate the beds over winter before I returned south.
That was last year. Funnily, I’d forgotten about my new wall until I pulled up at my Maryland house a few weeks ago. It was as if the whole house had gotten a facelift! Just like I saw in England, my wall had become a defining feature of the landscape. Flowers flourished in the now well-drained soil and butterflies, bees and a hummingbird flit from one blossom to another. Even after I put my hummingbird feeder out, just like in Miami, the hummingbird preferred the flowers. And it didn’t take long to realize that pollinators weren’t the only animals benefitting from my new patch. Other yard birds came and went – goldfinches slipped seeds from my cone flowers and the yard wren sat on the wall to trill an ownership tune. Several holes in the soil alongside the interior of the wall bore testimony to various tenants. It wasn’t long before I saw my first five-lined skink basking on the warm rocks, its brilliant blue tail contrasting against its chosen reddish stone. I found a shed snake skin on another rock in the wall. A box turtle napped below one of the hollies planted for winter greenery at the back of the bed. I even glimpsed the yard fox inspecting the new plantings. I hope he approves!
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