HELPING NATURE THROUGH NATIVE PLANT GARDENINGfrontyardrestoration.com/uploads/3/5/8/7/3587248/ontarioplantguide… · NATIVE PLANT GARDENING A PRACTICAL BEGINNER’S GUIDE ... Native

HELPING NATURE

THROUGH NATIVE PLANT GARDENING

A PRACTICAL BEGINNER’S GUIDE

No NonsenseJust what you need to know to make your yard

more bird, bee, and butterfly friendly(and minimize your yard work to nothing)

(c) John Boydell !1

!NATIVE PLANT GARDENING

A PRACTICAL BEGINNER’S GUIDE

!!!!!!!!!!!!

Dedicated to Suburbia,where I grew up, where change is most needed,

the effect would be the most profound,and minds most need to be opened;

...and to my parents who taught me to love nature too.

Copyright (c) John Boydell, 2015Wildlife photography courtesy fantastically of bill chan photography

For the Love of Nature Frontyard Restoration, 2015A non-registered charity

www.frontyardrestoration.com [email protected] ISBN 978-0-9940803-01

(c) John Boydell !2

http://www.frontyardrestoration.com

mailto:[email protected]

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Garden Big - Dream Big 5 You too can have a mission 10 The Domino Effect 11Your ornamental flowers are gorgeous 13Fear of success 14 Pour le Jardinage de Plantes Indigènes 77

What is a Native Plant? 4Examples of native plants 34Some basic definitions 4Why native plants? 7Non-Native Plants versus Native Plants 9Do you realize your lawn is a garden? 12Where can you garden with native plants? 15Where can you buy native plants? 15How to shop for native plants 18Mindless ground covers 33

Creating your Garden 19 Determine your garden type 20Choose all the native plants that suit your garden 25Maintain healthy, fertile soil 47Maintain a healthy Under Garden 51Practice a healthy gardening style 53Attract birds, bees, butterflies into your garden 69

If a Sparrow Falls will you Hear it? 74 Books and On-line Resources 75, 76Summary 79

(c) John Boydell !3

WHAT IS A NATIVE PLANT? Native plants are the grasses, sedges, rushes, flowers, ferns, mosses, shrubs, vines, and trees that were growing in your neighbourhood before the Europeans came and brought with them plants from other parts of the world. In other words, native plants are the ones that have been growing right where you live pretty much since or even before the last ice age. Native plants did not get here by boat, plane, car, or mail order. They evolved right here over a span of millions of years.

Examples of Native Plants See page 34 for examples of native plants.

Basic Definitions Alien: a non-native plant.Exotic: another word for a non-native plant.Ornamental: another word for a non-native plant.Forb: a flower; not a fern, shrub, vine, or tree.Herb: another word for forb or flower.Wildflower: often used to refer to a native plant, but sometimes used to refer to any-thing that can be found growing wild, native or not.A Woody: a shrub, vine, or tree.Grass: just what you think it is. Often used synonymously for sedge and rush.Sedge: looks just like grass but botanically different.Rush: very similar to grass but botanically different.Invasive: used to describe a plant that is so good at reproducing that it will overwhelm a garden and be almost impossible to eradicate once established.Plant and Animal Litter: dead plants and their parts, dead animals and their parts, poop; not pet or human poop, but wildlife, chicken, sheep, and zoo poop.Organic Matter: “organic matter in soil is composed of litter (dead leaves and branches on the soil’s surface); droppings (animal dung); and the remains of dead plants, ani-mals, and microorganisms in various stages of decomposition”. (Introductory Botany, Linda Berg, 2nd Edition, page 202.)Stabilizing, as in “this plant is good for stabilizing a slope”: refers to an aggressive plant whose many and entangled roots hold the soil in place.Naturalizing, as in “this plant is good for naturalizing an area”: used to describe the ef-fect of an aggressive native plant.

(c) John Boydell !4

Be bird, butterfly, and bee friendly

GARDEN BIG - DREAM BIG First, garden bigWalking down your street, any suburban street, could be just like walking down a coun-try road. Prairies, meadows, and forest glades on either side of you; grasses and ferns, tall flowers like sunflowers, asters, small ones like wild strawberry, nodding onion, phlox, and shrubs of all kinds. You could be surrounded with the sounds of nature: birds, bees, crickets, and wind in the trees. Field and forest wildlife: birds, bees, hawks, but-terflies, dragonflies, squirrels, chipmunks, even fox and rabbits. Going to bed every night could be like going to bed at the cottage. The Garden of Eden on your very street.

Then, dream big “Some biologists fear that we have entered the greatest period of mass extinction in Earth’s history, but the current mass extinction differs from previous ones in several re-spects. First, it is directly attributable to human activities. Second, it is occurring in a tremendously compressed period - just a few decades as opposed to millions of years”. (Introductory Botany, Linda Berg, 2008, Brooks/Cole Cengage Learning, page 344.) This mass extinction isn’t occurring just “around the world”, but in your very neighbour-hood, in your backyard. For example, a National Audubon Society paper called “Com-mon Birds in Decline” reports declines in some widespread bird species from 50% to 80% since 1967. This is just one of many statistics detailing the decline of our native wildlife species.

Believe it or not, you and I can make a difference to the survival of our native wildlife species right in our own yards. “Evidence suggests ... most species could live quite nicely with humans if their most basic ecological needs were met”. (Bringing Nature Home, Douglas W. Tallamy, 2009, Timber Press, page 37.) All we humans have to do is provide food and shelter for the birds, bees and butterflies in the form of native plants in our gardens. In other words we just need to change the way we garden. We just need to dream a little bit bigger. We need to know that gardening is an act of charity, an act of giving.

This is our reality Would you purposefully crush a groundhog family under the ground? Would you shake a bird’s nest out of a tree? Of course not. Except that you do, multiple times, every single day of the year. Me too. That’s how our houses and roads get built. That’s how our food gets grown. That’s how the minerals for everything we use are obtained. That’s how the paper for this pamphlet got made. And when you fail to recycle you double the shaken nests and crushed groundhogs. Think about that.

(c) John Boydell !5

However, we can give back to nature by choosing to grow native plants in our yards, putting back natural habitat into our neighbourhoods to feed and shelter our wildlife, and giving nature a place to live amongst us.

This guide will teach you how easy it is to incorporate native plants into your current garden plan and make the world a better place by making your neighbourhood more bird, bee, and butterfly friendly. Just like living on a country road.

(c) John Boydell !6

Be bird, bee, and butterfly friendly

WHY NATIVE PLANTS? They are varied and beautifulMaybe without realizing it you already know how beautiful native plants are. Cup plant, native sunflowers, coneflowers, black-eyed Susan, evening-primrose, wild columbine, asters, turtlehead, native ferns, wild geranium, wild blue-flag, spiked blazing star, cardi-nal flower, Solomon’s seal, wild bergamot, Virginia bluebells, foxglove beardtongue, and compass plant are all natives that are common in people’s front yard gardens.

Visit the NANP’s Webpage, http://www.nanps.org/index.php/resources/photo-album, or other Internet sites listed on page 75 for beautiful photographs.

They are very easy to grow requiring almost no work from youIf you plant the right plants for your yard and water them to get them going, native plants can do a pretty good job of defending themselves against the evils of the world, drought, flood, pestilence, and weeds, with a minimum of help from you. They were growing in your very yard long, long, long (millennia) before your house ever got built. They sur-vived and flourished without anybody watering, weeding, fertilizing, or spraying pesti-cides.

They are food and shelter for wildlife Every single day that you have a native plant in your yard, winter or summer, day or night you are providing food and homes to the birds, bees, butterflies, moths, forest and meadow animals and all the other little people commonly called nature.

You will be performing an act of charity while you go about your daily business Wildlife are the truly needy and downtrodden on this planet. We are wiping out whole species by destroying the natural habitat in which they build their homes and find their food. You can do your bit to help restore their habitat by planting a native plant in your garden. You don’t get a tax receipt but you do get the joy of seeing in your garden the beautiful blossoms and foliage, and the birds, bees and animals that you attract, and also by knowing that you are helping the needy. Furthermore, once your garden is es-tablished you will be continuing to perform an act of charity even while you ignore the garden and go about your daily business.

Our wildlife and native plants need each other in order to survive Native plants and native wildlife are star crossed lovers, boy and girl next door, best friends forever. They were made for each other. They each would die without the other. This isn’t literary license. It’s biological fact. Native plants and native wildlife have grown up together over millions of years and have modelled their bodies and behav-iours to each other to such an extent that they now need each other for survival.

(c) John Boydell !7

http://www.nanps.org/index.php/resources/photo-album

1) Our wildlife have evolved the body parts needed to reach the pollen or nectar of our flowers and to spread their pollen from one flower to another.

2) Many have evolved the cells in their sense organs needed to be able to find the plants that they need to eat out of all the other plants living in the forests and fields.

3) They have evolved the mouth and digestive systems needed in order to eat and di-gest the fruits and foliage of our plants.

4) They have evolved the life habits needed to spread the plant’s seeds.

5) Our native plants have evolved the necessary colours, scents, flower parts, and seed shapes that enable the birds, bees, butterflies, bugs, and animals to find, fertilize, and eat them and also to disperse their seeds.

6) They have evolved the self-defence mechanisms necessary to be eaten by wildlife and still survive.

Without each other these plant species would not be able to reproduce or survive and these bird, bee, butterfly, and animal species would be starved out of existence.

Your garden is Bed and Breakfast to the worldBenefiting the nature in your yard benefits wildlife up and down the Americas. How can this be? Birds migrate from the far north of Canada to the southern U.S., to Pan-Ameri-ca, and to South America. Our ducks can spend time in Russia. Monarch butterflies summer in Canada, winter in Mexico. Show me a butterfly, moth, bird, or bee that stays permanently in your backyard. There are none. Make the whole world a better place from your own backyard.

!!!!!!!!!(c) John Boydell !8


NON-NATIVE PLANTS vs NATIVE PLANTS Native Plants offer more food and shelter to wildlife than non-native plants be-cause they have specialized themselves to live in your neighbourhood, with your wildlife and with your weather, but non-native plants have not.

A non-native plant is a plant that evolved somewhere else other than your neighbour-hood. It may have evolved in Europe, Asia, Africa, South America, or some other prov-ince or state, but not in your backyard. We usually refer to these non-native plants as exotics, aliens, or ornamentals. Non-native plants have been living in your neighbour-hood for only several hundred years at the most, and usually under cultivation, but your native plants have been living here for millions of years growing wild in the fields and forests without anyone’s help. This is the big advantage that native plants have over non-natives.

Non-native plants have not specialized themselves to live in your neighbourhood. Non-native plants are often referred to as “alien”. This describes perfectly their relation-ship with your local sun, shade, rain, drought, soil, bugs and animals. Strangers in a strange land that so often could not survive without tender loving care from you, so dif-ferent from our native plants. It’s as simple as that.

Our native plants have been here for so long that they adapted, adapted, and adapted to your little corner of the world. They have adapted to its sun, shade, rain, drought, soil, bugs, grazing animals and to all the other wildlife that share your neigh-bourhood. As a result, native plants can endure onslaughts of trials and tribulations and still survive. They have learned to use our wildlife to fertilize their flowers and to spread their seeds. Nobody “gardens” the prairies or the forests but our native plants have been prospering none the less for millions of years.

Likewise, our native wildlife have been here for so long that they have adapted to eating our native plants. Our plants feed the deer, rabbit, moose, beaver, muskrat, groundhog, squirrel, chipmunk, field mouse, porcupine, bird, bee, butterfly, moth, cater-pillar, grub, aphid, and all the rest ... happily. All the wildlife and plants in your neigh-bourhood are like a big family that have truly been living with each other for ages. They know each other’s strengths and weaknesses They eat each other (that’s family for you), but they still manage to live side by side and everyone prospers. If this wasn’t true, one or the other would have gone extinct a long, long time ago.

(c) John Boydell !9

YOU TOO CAN HAVE A MISSION

The Nature Conservancy of Canada has a mission ( http://www.natureconservancy.ca/en/who-we-are/mission-values/ )$

“The Nature Conservancy of Canada (NCC): protects areas of natural diversity for their intrinsic value and for the benefit of our children and those after them.

“We will secure important natural areas through their purchase, donation or other mechanisms, and then manage these properties for the long term.

“The Earth's biological diversity is being lost at a rate that impoverishes our qual-ity of life and threatens our future.

“NCC's work is guided by the belief that our society will be judged by what it creates in the present and what it conserves for the future.”

You too can have a mission The Nature Conservancy of Canada “protects areas of natural diversity for their intrinsic value”. In other words, NCC protects areas that are currently natural so that they will remain natural. Their mission is not to convert our gardens into “areas of natural diver-sity” even though doing so would be of huge benefit to nature and our world. It just isn’t its mission. However, we can make this our mission.

You and I can convert our gardens and our front and back yards into areas of natural diversity. So, how do we do this? By choosing to provide food and shelter for wildlife by incorporating as many and as varied native plants into our gardens as we can in order to give nature a place to live amongst us.

(c) John Boydell !10

http://www.natureconservancy.ca/en/who-we-are/mission-values/


THE DOMINO EFFECT It isn’t silly. You can change your world one garden at a time. It works like com-pound interest in a bank account. With each additional native plant you add to your garden you receive even a greater return on your investment through compounding.

1. Nature attracts Nature like a neon sign advertising “Food and Shelter Here” along the side of nature’s highway. The more varieties of native plants you grow then the more varieties of birds, bees, and butterflies you attract, just like a more extensive restaurant menu satisfying more customers; and then that nature will attract more nature just like the cars in the restaurant’s parking lot attracting more customers from the highway.

2. Your native plant garden will motivate neighbours to follow your example. Just plant a native plant garden and let your neighbours know the reasons why. Lead by example and your neighbours will help you in your mission to make your house a house in the country.

When you plant even just one additional native plant in your garden you attract birds, bees and butterflies into your yard. If you turn a garden native then the more varieties of plants attract more varieties of nature. If you turn your yard native then the amount of nature attracted is compounded upwardly because the increased wildlife attracts more wildlife. (In addition, your yard work will be reduced to almost zero.) If your neighbour follows your example, the compounding will continue attracting greater varieties of wildlife. If, then, more of your street went native you’d be well on your way to accom-plishing your mission: walking down your street would be like a walk down a country road.


DO YOU REALIZE YOUR LAWN IS A GARDEN? Your lawn is a garden that consists of maybe three different species of grass, probably all of them non-native.

From the point of view of nature your lawn is an “Ecological Desert”. It provides almost nothing in the way of food or shelter for wildlife. If you go out and look at your front yard lawn right now you might see a robin, maybe some bees if you have some clover or dandelions, and maybe some sparrows if you have crabgrass gone to seed. If you have grubs you might have holes in your lawn, courtesy of skunks driving you to distraction. That is all you’ll see if luck is on nature’s side.

But worse than an ecological desert, your lawn is what ecologists call an “Ecological Sink”. It is a sink in that it sucks up more resources than it gives back. Your lawn takes human time, energy, and dollars, plus electricity, gasoline, water, fertilizer, weed killer, a lawnmower, and maybe a leaf blower. In return your lawn gives back only green that you can walk on.

In other words, if the birds, bees, and butterflies had to depend on your front lawn for life they would all starve to death. And if your lawn is green because of lawn-mowers, leaf blowers, fertilizers, weed killers, and copious watering then it isn’t green at all and you can take credit for personally destroying your little bit of the planet.

But enough of the guilt trip. I just want to ask you, “What do you use your front yard lawn for?” I believe most people use their front yard lawn just to impress their neigh-bours.

Wouldn’t you rather exchange your lawn for a garden: a Prairie, Meadow, Open Woods, or even an Ornamental Garden with grasses, flowers, shrubs, and trees that bloom all season long and that requires just about zero maintenance from you?

Your front yard could be a bed & breakfast for North America’s songbirds, honeybees, butterflies and other wildlife. All you have to do is replace your lawn with a variety of na-tive grasses, flowers, shrubs, and trees.

Exchanging your lawn for a native garden is one of the most powerful things you can do to make your world a better place while at the same time creating beauty and free time for yourself. You can kiss mowing, fertilizing, watering, raking, weed killers, and pesticides goodbye.



Your ornamental flowers are GORGEOUS I am not telling you to pull out all the gorgeous flowers you love, even if they are ornamental, alien plants that come from some other land across the ocean.

I suspect very few committed native plant gardeners have only native plants in their gardens. Ornamental flowers are just too beautiful to toss out and many of us have sentimental attachment to the flowers we grew up with.

This guide is about native plant gardens. However, in your garden you can include as many or as few natives as you want. Each additional native plant in your garden is a good thing. Of course, the more native plants the more good things.

Here are some options for incorporating native plants into you current garden plan.

Include just a few native plants into your current garden and continue gardening while practicing the Healthy Gardening Style taught later in this guide.

Convert only one of your gardens into a native plant garden. Choose a part of your property that perhaps isn’t that important to you: the other side of the fence, the far side of the house, the area no one sees, the part that’s almost all shade, the area under cedars and pines where nothing else will grow. Native plants, birds, bees, and butter-flies are not proud. There are native plants that will just thrive in these areas and the birds, bees, and butterflies will be happy to slum it if they can find the shelter and food they seek.

Add a native vine or shrub to a corner of your yard.

Leave your gardens untouched but replace your lawn with native grasses, sedges and flowers. You’ll have a nature park surrounded by your gorgeous ornamentals.

One of the easiest, simplest, and most powerful changes you can make to your neighbourhood is to plant a baby native tree. Because of its size, copious flowers, fruits, and roots and also because of its long lifespan a tree packs the most ecological punch into a single plant. Yet, by choosing a baby tree it means that it will make an al-most negligible change to your life and property, if that is what you want. Think of that. You can add one single plant to your yard and benefit the world for decades, maybe even centuries to come, with almost zero work from you. Also, remember that trees vary in their mature sizes, from a few metres tall like the Coronation Apple to the tower-ing Oaks. See pages 46 and 56 for some advice on trees.


FEAR OF SUCCESS Readers have expressed fears to me that if they follow the teachings of this guide that not only their backyards but even the insides of their houses are going to be overrun by wildlife.

I don’t think that this will happen. I think that what you will most likely see is an increase in the number and variety of birds, bees, and butterflies in your neighbourhood. I think you will hear in your streets the sounds of nature that are more commonly heard in your cottage country. You might see an increase in the numbers of squirrels, chipmunks, rabbits, and maybe even fox. Mosquitoes depend on standing water and raccoons on household garbage. Do not leave household garbage outside and change standing wa-ter every few days.

In other words, I think it will be like living in the country, and as far as I’m aware people living in the country seem to be doing just fine. Do you find it stressful to go out into the countryside and take a walk through the woods? Do you find yourself being overrun by wildlife? I don’t think your suburban street will become more stressful, but in fact, more soothing and fascinating. The evidence surrounds me in my tiny garden every single day of the year.

As I said earlier, it’s been estimated that the populations of some common birds in North America have been reduced by 50% to 80% since the 1960’s. Would it be so terrible to see an increase in the numbers of songbirds in your neighbourhood?

Wildlife is not a scary word. It just means “nature” and in the suburbs this means mostly birds, honeybees, bumblebees, and butterflies. Boo.

!!!!!!!!



WHERE CAN YOU GARDEN WITH NATIVE PLANTS? Anywhere.You can grow native plants anywhere you can grow any other plant. In the back gar-den, side garden, and in the front yard. You can grow native flowers, grasses, sedges, ferns, vines, trees, shrubs. You can grow them where it’s dry, where it’s wet, in the pond, where there’s clay, where there’s sand, up the fence and wall, in rock gardens, sand dunes, in the shade and in the sun. You can grow them miniature, short, medium, tall, giant, skinny, wide. In almost every colour of the spectrum, visible or not. No re-straints.

WHERE CAN YOU BUY NATIVE PLANTS? The first place you go is your local, larger nursery. All large nurseries carry the more common native plants, such as the ones listed at the top of page 7. Grab a clerk and drag him/her around the nursery with you showing you where the native plants are. They are most likely spread out all over the place. If this clerk isn’t helpful then find an-other. If necessary go to the manager. Don’t let them frustrate you. Remember your mission.

After that, go to the nurseries dedicated to native plants. The Internet site, http://findna-tiveplants.com/, is the best site to help you find the native plant nursery nearest you.

Talk to other gardeners and landscapers. Find your local gardening group for advice. Ask fellow gardeners if they have any seeds or surplus native plants that they are willing to share.

Do not go digging up plants in the wild.!Evergreen Brick Works, Toronto: a few native plants and shrubs among their orna-mentals but they are very centrally located in the city. htpp://www.evergreen.ca

Fuller Native and Rare Plants Nursery, Belleville: specialize in native perennials, wild-flowers, grasses, ferns, shrub seedlings and bulbs. http://www.fullerplants.com/

Grand Moraine Growers, Alma: develop and supply guild based plant products that encourage an ecosystem approach to planting and re-vegetation; provide and promote native alternatives to the plant products currently being offered by the horticultural in-dustry; offer a unique palette of native plants and seeds. http://grandmorainegrowers.com


http://findnativeplants.com

http://www.evergreen.ca

http://www.fullerplants.com

http://grandmorainegrowers.com

Green Side Up Environmental Services, Omemee: supply a range of native plants for residential landscaping, commercial landscaping, and ecological restoration. http://www.greenservices.ca/nativeplant

Grow Wild! Native Plant Nursery, Landscaping and Ecological Services, Omemee: Native Trees and Shrubs, Native Plants, Grasses and Wildflowers, Contract Growing, Environmental Assessment, Wetland Evaluation, Soil Classification, Ecological Restora-tion, Forestry Management and Native Landscaping. http://www.grow-wild.com/.

Hidden Habitat, the Barrie, Collingwood, Orillia areas: creates beautiful and ecological-ly healthy landscapes with a unique focus on design for the thoughtful integration of people and place, while protecting and promoting the biodiversity of your outdoor space. http://www.hiddenhabitat.ca/index.html

Humber Nurseries Ltd, Brampton: not a native plant nursery but has a fairly large na-tive plant section. http://www.gardencentre.com/

Inglis Falls Native Plant Nursery, Owen Sound: Woody plants of Grey & Bruce Coun-ties. http://www.greysauble.on.ca/ Click on Program and Services, then Forestry Ser-vices, and then Trees Sales and Planting.

Native Plant Nurseries, Zephyr and Tottenham: dedicated to producing local native plants from seed in an ethically sustainable fashion. http://www.nativeplantnurseries.ca/

Native Plant Source, Breslau: provides plant materials, information and services for the re-establishment and healing of Ontario’s native plant communities. http://www.nativeplantsource.com/

Native Plants in Claremont, Claremont: a nursery devoted to the increased awareness and restoration of Ontario’s native plants and their habitats. http://www.nativeplants.ca/

Natural Themes, Frankford: Native trees, shrubs and some of the ferns, perennial wild-flowers and grasses will be available as soon as the frost is out of the ground. http://www.naturalthemes.com/

Nith River Native Plants, New Hamburg: produces over 100 kinds of Ontario native wildflowers, grasses, sedges, shrubs, and vines as plants and seeds. http://www.nithriverplants.com/

N.A.N.P.S.: often has plant and seed sales at special events around Greater Toronto; visit their Website for details. http://www.nanps.org/


http://www.greenservices.ca/nativeplant

http://www.grow-wild.com

http://www.hiddenhabitat.ca/index.html

http://www.gardencentre.com

http://www.greysauble.on.ca

http://www.nativeplantnurseries.ca

http://www.nativeplantsource.com

http://www.nativeplants.ca

http://www.naturalthemes.com

http://www.nithriverplants.com

http://www.nanps.org


Not So Hollow Farm, Glencairn: saving the planet one Native Plant at a time; a nursery specializing in the growing of container grown trees and shrubs native to Ontario. http://www.notsohollowfarm.ca/

Ottawa Native Plants, Cobden: a unique series of bioregional demonstration gardens; ten habitats feature over three hundred plant species for water, bog, rock and woodland gardens; offers for sale a selection of these for the home landscape as well as environ-mental restoration use. http://www.connaughtnursery.com/

St. Williams Nursery & Ecology Centre, Norfolk County: produces over 300 source-identified wild type collected native species; Ontario’s largest native species nursery producing only pure Ontario Genotype species. http://stwilliamsnursery.com/

The Ark Farm Native Plant Nursery, Tiverton: propagates native plants in a sustain-able manner. www.thearknativeplants.com

Van Den Nest Nursery, Eden: specializes in native and Carolinian trees and shrubs. http://www.vandennest-nursery.com/

WILD Canada - Native Plant Nursery and Ecological Consulting, Wasaga Beach; indigenous native plants and seeds of central and southern Ontario; provides an array of ecological and interpretation consulting services. http://www.wildcanada.ca/

Wildflower Farm, Orillia; grows and sells hardy perennial wildflower and native grass seeds and wildflower meadow mixes; develops and distributes Eco-Lawn, the low main-tenance sustainable drought tolerant lawn. Eco-Lawn is available online and through numerous retailers throughout North America. http://www.wildflowerfarm.com/


http://www.notsohollowfarm.ca

http://www.connaughtnursery.com

http://stwilliamsnursery.com

http://www.thearknativeplants.com

http://www.vandennest-nursery.com

http://www.wildcanada.ca

http://www.wildflowerfarm.com

HOW TO SHOP FOR NATIVE PLANTS This is a beginner’s guide to native plant gardening. How can I expect you to go shop-ping for plants that you know almost nothing about other than the information I’ve pro-vided in this guide? The nursery, Grand Moraine Growers, focuses more on wholesale rather than retail sales, but their on-line catalogue is extensive and informative and you can print it for free as a nice PDF.

Their catalogue includes the most common and not-so-common perennials, shrubs, vines, trees, grasses, sedges, and rushes generally native to the regions south of Geor-gian Bay and around the eastern Great Lakes and the St. Lawrence River; in other words, southeast Canada and northeast USA.. For each plant there is a small descrip-tion, their sun and moisture requirements, and the habitats where they are commonly found in nature.

I recommend that you print their three lists (perennials, woodies, grasses) and study them for a bit to find the plants that suit your garden type. Research them online if you wish. Then, no matter where you go shopping, take the lists with you and you will be an educated shopper.

Of course there are very enjoyable books you can buy that also provide good informa-tion and beautiful photographs (I own a bunch), but Grand Moraine Growers will give you the information you need for free and the Internet has plenty of photographs with detailed information.

When choosing your nursery don’t scout too far afield. For instance, if you live in Ottawa you shouldn’t be travelling to southwestern Ontario to buy a plant even if it is a species native to Ottawa (unless you can’t find it in a nursery near Ottawa). The nurs-ery down in the south will be selling plants that are close blood-relations to the ones they have found growing around their nursery. You want the exact same species of plant, but the actual plants of that species that are the closest blood-relations of the plants that are growing around Ottawa. In other words, choose the plants that evolved and grew up right in your own backyard, not their kinfolk from far away lands.



CREATING YOUR GARDEN In six steps you can create a fantastic garden with maximum Integrity that will last forever with a minimum of work from you.

1. Determine the kind of garden you will have;2. Choose all the varieties of native plants that suit your garden;3. Create and keep healthy, fertile soil;4. Create and keep a healthy Under Garden;5. Practice a healthy gardening style;6. Attract birds, bees, and butterflies into your garden.

However, if this looks like too much work for you there is nothing wrong with just planti-ng more native plants in your garden. Just go to a nursery that sells native plants, choose ones whose sun and moisture needs are found in your garden, plant and treat them as you would any other newly planted plant. To pack a real punch, choose a baby tree. A tree packs the most benefit into one single plant.

IMPORTANT CONCEPT: What is Garden Integrity? The Integrity of a garden is a measurement of the garden’s ability to fend for itself against weeds, pests, drought, flood, and foraging animals. The greater the In-tegrity then the greater the strength of your garden and the less it depends on your labour for survival.

Lets consider a person with high Integrity. This person is up-to-date on his vaccines, exercises regularly, eats healthy, has a good education, a decent job, friends, money in the bank, unemployment insurance, a drug plan, a medical plan, a dental plan, a trust-worthy friend or partner, and a sound and insured home. A person missing any of these things has a chink in their armour, a weakness in their Integrity.

Now, lets consider a wheat field in the middle of the prairies. Unless this wheat field has a caring farmer who prepares the land, fertilizes, spreads pesticides, weed killer, and fungicides, maintains good fencing to keep cattle and neighbours out, and a watering system for between rains then this wheat field would be at the mercy of the world. This garden wouldn’t have any armour at all except luck. It would not have any Integrity.

You don’t want that. Your goal is to build into your garden maximum Integrity, i.e. the ability to fend for itself against the wild world, a good strong garden that can survive without a lot of work from you. All you have to do is follow the 6 Steps listed above.

!(c) John Boydell !19

1. DETERMINE YOUR GARDEN TYPE You can’t have a garden with any Integrity if you are trying to grow the wrong garden.

This is the first step in creating a garden with Integrity. It is an easy step that ensures you don’t, for example, plant a wheat field inside a forest.

Simplifying things, the kind of garden you will have depends upon the amount of sun and moisture your garden receives.

!YOUR GARDEN SITE YOUR GARDEN TYPEStanding water for part of the year: Wetland All sun; dry soil: Prairie All sun; moist soil: MeadowPart sun/shade but more sun than shade: Open Woods Part shade/sun but more shade than sun: Forest Glade Mostly or full shade: Forest Floor

!Special Note: I am not using the correct botanic names for Garden Types, but the names that I think make the most sense for back and front yard gardeners. Also, there exists other kinds of gardens, e.g. rock, alvar, and shoreline gardens, but I’m concen-trating on the most common suburban garden types.

So, six descriptive names for the possible kinds of gardens you can have. What differ-ence does this make as you wander your nursery aisles choosing plants? Not much. You will still be choosing plants by matching the amount of sun and moisture the plants require and the amount of sun and moisture your garden plot offers.

Yet, by describing your garden by its inherent characteristics you can immediately visu-alize in your mind’s eye exactly what kind of garden you will have. Your neighbour has a “garden” but this gives you no information about the kind of garden it is or its charac-teristics. But as soon as you say, “I have a Prairie in the front yard while my neighbour has a Forest Floor in the backyard”, you can immediately visualize these two gardens and the differences between them.

Even more importantly, as I explain next, you can do a much better job of building In-tegrity into your garden if you change the way you think of your garden and where your garden fits into the world’s ecosystems.



You will be much more successful with your gardening if you know right at the very be-ginning what kind of garden you are aiming for. Looking out over your watery property and saying to yourself, “This shall be a fantastic garden!” is like starting with a blank slate when you don’t have a blank slate at all. You start off with a massive advantage when you look out over your watery property and state, “This shall be a fantastic Wet-land Garden full of moisture loving plants and all the nature a wetland will attract!”. Now that’s starting off on the right foot!

By visualizing your future garden by its inherent characteristics, for example as a Forest Glade, you, the designer of your garden, immediately have a template in your mind for a forest glade as the goal for your garden-to-be. It gives you an idea about what your garden will look like. It tells you about the nature you and your Forest Glade will be at-tracting. It immediately begins to tell you what kind of plants will thrive.

It helps you to be realistic about choosing plants. In your heart you may want a full sun Meadow Garden with big, tall, bright flowers. But if you have shade-casting trees creat-ing a forest floor, unless you plan on chopping down these trees a full sun Meadow Garden cannot be. You can save money and frustration by not choosing meadow plants that will die on your Forest Floor. (Been there. Done that.)

Also, many native plant books and nursery catalogs will state where the plants are found in nature. Some plants are found mostly on sand dunes, some in wetlands, some in fields, some in the half sun/shade found in open woodlands, and others on forest floors. When you know which one of these habitats you have on your property then you can choose the plants that will thrive in your garden.

Wetland GardenLucky you. In a Wetland garden you can grow plants that won’t grow anywhere else and will attract the nature that no other garden can. Understand that a Wetland Garden includes all the ground that surrounds the area that sometimes has standing water. So this includes the ground that is sometimes covered with water, or is only very wet, all the way to the ground that is just moist. All these different areas will support different kinds of plants giving a very wide variety of plants available to you that all grow best in wet to moist soil.

Prairie GardenLucky you. A Prairie Garden can be one of the more understated gardens or it can be one of the brightest gardens with the boldest blossoms, but it is also the garden that re-quires the very least amount of work from you because it survives the driest conditions. In nature a prairie consists mostly of grasses intermingled with flowers. But in your


Prairie Garden feel free to increase the number of flowers. Front yard Prairie Gardens are often called Pocket Prairies.

Meadow GardenLucky you. In a Meadow Garden, with all that sun and moisture, you can grow the tallest plants with the brightest and most prolific blossoms and that will provide homes for many little meadow animals. Most front yards in Ontario, Quebec, and New England are wanna-be Meadow Gardens.

Open Woods Garden Lucky you. An Open Woods garden has all the benefits of a meadow but with a sprin-kling of shrubs and trees added to the palette.

Forest Glade GardenLucky you. A Forest Glade provides a peaceful privacy with sun shining through the trees highlighting the plant and wildlife that find shelter there. For the sake of simplicity, I’m including the edge of a woods within the term Forest Glade, i.e. Part sun/Part shade.

Forest Floor GardenLucky you. Peace, quiet, and serenity is yours. Sit on a bench; watch the wildlife that comes to your feet; listen to the birds that flit through the shrubs and trees.

!!!!!!!!!!!!(c) John Boydell !22


Not all dirt is the same The books Healthy Soils for Sustainable Gardens, Introductory Botany and Soil Biology Primer recommended on pages 76 and 77 go into much more detail about soil.

There are three types of dirtThere is sand, which has large particles. There is silt which has medium sized particles. And there is clay which has tiny sized particles. Most soil is composed of all three types of dirt in various amounts. It isn’t usually important unless your soil is composed of a very high proportion of sand or a very high proportion of clay.

Just so you know, the ideal sand, silt, and clay combination is called loam and is com-posed of 40% each of sand and silt, and 20% clay. You do not need this ideal ratio to garden successfully.

Some plants prefer to grow in lots of sand. These are the kinds of plants that require good drainage, perhaps growing on beaches and prairies. Some plants don’t like so much to grow in sand because they need more water in the soil. The thing about sand is that because the particles are so large water flows right through and out of the soil creating very dry soil conditions. The more sand, the dryer your soil. See page 45 for a list of plants that can tolerate dry, sandy soil. By the way, there are even native plants that prefer to grow in gravelly soil.

There are many plants that won’t grow in lots of clay. However, clay soil tends to hold on to water and therefore its presence in your soil is an asset in times of drought. See page 43 for a list of plants that can tolerate clay soil.

Most plants do well somewhere in between lots of sand and lots of clay. So what kind of soil you have really only matters to you as a gardener if you have lots of one or the other or if you choose plants that require lots of sand for good drainage. Still it’s a good idea to find out what kind of soil you have before going out and buying plants.

If you have either lots of sand or lots of clay there is a good chance you already know it. If you’re not sure, ask a neighbour. If no one knows then you probably have average soil. If you’re worried, there is a very simple test you can do yourself called the Sedi-mentation Test of Soil that you can find on the Internet that will determine your soil type.


Soil can be Acidic or Alkaline or NeutralThe pH Scale: scientists use the pH scale to measure acidity and alkalinity. It goes from 0 to 14. If you’re interested on more information on the pH scale the Internet has it for you.

Acidic: just what you think it is. Vinegar is a weak acid and Hydrochloric Acid is a very strong acid. On the pH scale acidity is from 0 (a very strong acid) to 6.9 (a weak acid). Acidic soil tends to be found under cedars, pines and oaks and in fens and bogs.

Neutral: 7 on the pH scale. Neutral is neither acidic nor alkaline. It’s right in the middle.

Alkaline: On the pH scale alkaline is from 7.1 (weak) to 14 (strong). “Basic” is another word for alkaline. Very alkaline soils are rare in Ontario and Quebec.

Most Plants prefer slightly acidic soil (pH 6.2 to 6.8), can tolerate slightly alkaline soil (up to pH 7.5), but cannot tolerate very acidic soil (pH less than 5.5).

Some Plants prefer or can tolerate more acidic soils. These plants are perfect for un-der cedars, evergreens, and pines. See page 43 for a list of plants that can tolerate acidic soil.

Determining the Acidity of your Soil: If you’re worried about the acidity of your soil there are simple test kits you can buy in nurseries.

Soil can be Calcareous Calcareous soil tends to be found around limestone rocks. There are a few plants that prefer calcareous soil.

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2. CHOOSE ALL THE NATIVE PLANTS THAT SUIT YOUR GARDEN TYPE The more varieties of native plants that you include in your garden then the greater your garden’s Integrity and the more varieties of birds, bees and butter-flies it will attract.

IMPORTANT CONCEPT: What is Community? People live in communities. Communities differ. Here are some examples: metropolis, suburban, inner city, downtown, trendy, rich, poor, apartment complex, small town, vil-lage, farming, ethnic, university, factory town, etc. Each Community has unique attrib-utes that attract specific kinds of people that are different than the people attracted to the other types of Communities. Ask yourself why you chose to live in the community you do, if you share similar characteristics with your neighbours, and if you feel you “fit in” to your community and then you should see the point being made about Community.

Plants and animals also live in Communities. In Step 1 you gave a descriptive name to your kind of garden: Wetland, Prairie, Meadow, Open Woods, Forest Glade, or Forest Floor. Each one of these gardens forms a Community populated with plants and wildlife that are attracted to what that specific garden type has to offer. You will not find prairie plants and animals living in a forest and vice versa. Prairie plants and animals would die in a forest. Wetlands attract their own unique set of plants and animals that would die if someone tried to grow them where it’s dry. This is Community. Native plants search out and locate themselves in the Community that provides the environment they require in order to survive.

When plants and animals live in their own Community they find themselves living with the very neighbours, the other native plants, insects and animals, that they’ve been liv-ing beside for millions of years. During these millions of years they have just gone hog wild evolving and adapting to each other and to their Community’s attributes like no-body’s business. The native plants, insects, bees, mammals, birds, etc that live in a Community are star crossed lovers, boy and girl next door. They were made for each other. Best friends forever. They each would die without the other. This isn’t literary license. This is biological fact.

All you have to do to prove this point is walk out into a field, look around you, and note the nature. Now walk out into a forest. Is anything the same? There is no way it could ever be the same because all the prairie plants that found themselves in a forest then


died from lack of sun and too much moisture and all the wildlife that depended on prairie plants for food and shelter died as soon as the prairie plants bit the dust.

What does this mean to you? To maximize the Integrity of your garden, choose to grow all the varieties of native plants that are found naturally living in your gar-den’s Community, whether it be Wetland, Prairie, or whatever. All the varieties. The stronger your garden’s Community than the greater your garden’s Integrity.

I stressed all. Each plant variety in your Community has survived for millions of years because it best fits a unique ecological niche in its Community that no other native plant can fill as well. You can think of a niche as a house that either can be filled with a pro-ductive member of the Community, or that can be left empty without giving any benefit, or, worse, filled with riff-raff. If you leave a niche empty then you are leaving that niche open for a non-native weed to fill, there will be insects and other wildlife that will lack the benefit of the missing plant and go home to their young hungry. Plus, you yourself will miss the opportunity to enjoy the unique beauty of the missing native plant. A non-na-tive plant does not provide as many benefits to the Community as a native plant. It’s a lazy, good-for-nothing bum.

The plants that live in a Community behave exactly like good neighbours. They help each other out. For instance, a plant that is being eaten by bugs will release a hormone that can signal the neighbouring plants to ramp up their self-defence mechanisms by making their tissues less appetizing to the pests. The roots of different species of trees, but of the same Community, have been found to join together underground to form “grafts” through which the different trees exchange dissolved sugars and other materials such as hormones. Just like neighbours lending a cup of sugar. This has been seen in 160 different tree species. (Introductory Botany, Linda Berg, 2008, page 123.)

Plants in a Community fight each other for survival, but at the same time they have all found a way to survive together as neighbours for millions of years. Otherwise the species would have gone extinct a long, long time ago.

Native plants provide the necessary food for the foraging wildlife of their Community, be they deer, rabbits, or insects, yet at the same time they have all found a way to survive together. Otherwise either the plants or the animals that eat them would have gone ex-tinct a long, long time ago.

It is sometimes recommended to plant a whole bunch of one plant all together to make an impact on the eye and also to make it easier for the bees and butterflies to find them. Fine. But also remember that the more varieties you grow the more variety of nature you will attract. This is because bugs, bees, birds, and other wildlife tend to be special-



ists. If your garden doesn’t have the plant they have evolved to eat then they just won’t show up in your garden. So the more varieties of plants in your garden the more vari-eties of birds, bees, and butterflies you will attract and keep.

Also, if you’ve amassed one kind of plant in your garden because it looks just spectacu-lar when blooming, remember that until it is blooming and after it is finished blooming your garden will have next to nothing in bloom, no colour, and the bees and butterflies will fly away. When you plant all the varieties of plants that suit your garden, you will have something blooming from the first warm days of spring until the first frosts of winter and there will always be blossoms to attract the bees, butterflies, and you.

If you choose only a few varieties for your garden and some evil pestilence strikes one of your varieties then your garden will be devastated. Choose as many varieties as you can and your garden will survive. The more varieties the higher the Integrity and the stronger your garden. There is strength in numbers. Note that the larger the garden you have and the more neighbours you have with native gardens then the more space you will have to allow you to amass one kind of plant for effect and still have room for all the other varieties.

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The importance of Vines, Trees, and Shrubs Incorporating vines, trees, and shrubs into your garden will increase its biodiver-sity and thereby increase the garden’s Integrity; furthermore, your garden will at-tract more varieties of nature by increasing the varieties of food and shelter avail-able. They will make your garden much more lush and leafy.

Vines: if you have a fence on your property then native vines are a must. These vines will hide the fence, look attractive, provide leaves, berries, and shelter for wildlife, yet not take up any ground space. Many vines also create wonderful ground covers.

Shrubs: besides being attractive and providing privacy for you and leaves, berries and shelter for wildlife, more bird’s nests are built in shrubs than in trees. Also, they often become especially attractive in the fall when their leaves change colour.

Trees: Immense amounts of flowers, fruits, leaves, bark, cavities, and roots that provide food and shelter for tons of crawly things, flying things, climbing things, and other plants 365 days of the year. Then there is carbon capture, oxygen production, water conser-vation, and shade. A tree provides the most benefit in one plant.

You want lots of Grass and Sedge in your garden Incorporating grass and sedge into your garden will increase its biodiversity and thereby increase the garden’s Integrity; furthermore, your garden will attract more varieties of nature by increasing the varieties of food and shelter available to them. And, they will make your garden much more lush and verdant.

In this guide the term grass is used to include grasses, sedges and rushes.

If you go to a good native plant nursery you’ll find that they sell grass. Why would you want to grow plain grass with your lovely flowers? Grass is found growing everywhere: in wetlands, prairies, meadows, open woods, and forest floors. In fact, you cannot have a Wetland, Prairie, Meadow, or Open Woods Garden without lots and lots of grass. It is the most common member in garden Communities and one of the biggest attractions to wildlife.

By filling in the spaces between your flowers with grass you are filling available biologi-cal niches in your garden’s Community. Remember that these niches are like houses. If you leave these houses empty they are liable to be filled by alien weeds that are non-productive members in your Community. Fill the houses with native grass and these good Community members will provide food and shelter to wildlife. Allowing them to be filled with alien weeds, well, not so much.



Grasses are lifesavers to wildlifeYou might not have paid attention to it but all grasses bloom. They all produce flowers and are pollinated, not by bees, but by the wind. These flowers produce copious amounts of seeds held high above the snows throughout winter. Little birds need to find these seeds, as tiny as they are, to enable the birds to survive winter. They cannot eat seeds that they cannot find under the snow.

Grass provides protection and shelter for little ground animals from predators like hawks and cats and they also hide the little entrances to their little homes.

Do you ever wonder how on the first warm day of spring there are bugs already flying and crawling about? Some of these little guys spent all winter hunkered down inside the stems and thatch of your grass. So let the dead grass stems stand in the fall to last all winter right through into late, late spring at the least before you cut them down.

Have you ever bought cut flowers from the florist without something green being added to the bouquet? Florists know that this green helps show off the blossoms to make them look their best. Your blossoms will look better with grass. Use grass to fill in the spaces between your flowers with beautiful, natural green.

Grass provides beautiful rich shades of green with tall, graceful leaf blades that sway in the breeze and catch the sun, moonlight, dew, and frost. They have a calm, cooling af-fect on the mind. Their seed heads held high are varied and interesting and in winter they stand up dramatically above the snows.

All of this is assuming you don’t mow the grass keeping it from reaching its natural height. Long grass is not ugly. It’s natural, the way grass is meant to grow. No one mows the prairies, meadows, marshes or forests and no one complains. If you want to cut your grass then do it no more than once a year in late, late spring when the weather is warmer, the snows are gone and wildlife has woken up and come out of their hidey-holes. Let your grasses live the lives they were meant to live - tall and seedy - and your wildlife will benefit.


Big, Bold, and Beautiful Flowers Yes, we love our blossoms to be big and bold. However, there is more to nature’s palette than blossoms that are so big and bold you can see them from down the street.

When younger I easily learned to love The Beatles: big, bold, bright, and easy to appre-ciate. I still enjoy their music but when older I also learned to love Puccini’s The Hum-ming Chorus. Many native plants have blossoms along the lines of The Beatles, but more are like The Humming Chorus. They are exquisite and powerful in their delicate-ness. Their colours are pure. Their varied shapes really are amazing. I ask you to learn to appreciate the subtle beauty of the flowers that nature gave us. I used music as a metaphor, but perhaps better it would be to imagine your garden spangled with di-amonds, pearls, rubies, emeralds, stars, moons, and suns. That is how it will be.

Drab and Ugly and Hurtful Plants Incorporating drab, ugly, and hurtful plants into your garden will increase its bio-diversity and thereby increase the garden’s Integrity; furthermore, your garden will attract more varieties of nature by providing more varieties of their food and shelter.

Not all native plants are drop dead gorgeous. Do they have to be? Perhaps the Amer-ican Hazelnut in my backyard isn’t what you would call pretty, yet it still creates a nice hedge and produces the very same hazelnuts that we humans can eat and enjoy. The Bluejays eat them too. Drab plants are still loved by nature. Canada Wood Nettle is growing in my front yard. It’s a beautiful lush green with airy blossoms and it can turn a lovely yellow in late fall. My nursery sells it. Whenever I take off my clothes and roll around in the front garden the nettles sting me all over yet it still produces the preferred food of the Red Admiral Butterfly caterpillar. Hurtful plants are still loved by nature.

So, don’t turn your back on plants that are not the most beautiful you’ve ever seen. Na-ture needs these plants just as much as the more popular ones because these plants increase the varieties of food and shelter available to wildlife.



The advantages of planting baby plants Baby plants have baby needs. Baby plants may be small but they also have smaller needs than newly planted big plants. They require less water, they’re cheaper and they’re easier to transport and plant. Enjoy the pleasure of watching them grow.

This is especially true with trees. When you buy an already decent-sized sapling from a nursery, everything is big except the roots. The nursery has chopped most of the roots off in order to get the tree to and into your garden. Then, since the tree is missing most of its roots, you will have to make sure the tree gets lots and lots of water consistently for the next several years until the tree can replace the lost roots that are needed to support a too big canopy. Over the next few years your tree will be putting all its re-sources into growing roots and you will not see any growth in the tree’s top. Your tree will just sit there. If you plant a baby tree, it will have all its roots intact, won’t require as much obsessive care, and you’ll enjoy watching the tree grow from day one.

What might even be more important to you is that if you already have a big, old tree on your property then you can plant a baby tree under it so that the baby will grow up to replace the old tree many years later when the old tree comes to the end of its life. You can be prepared.

You can buy plants or you can buy seeds Most nurseries will sell you plants that they’ve been growing either in their greenhouses or gardens until they are of reasonable size to sell. But plants are not your only option. There are many places where you can buy your grasses, sedges, and flowers in seed form. Also, you yourself easily can grow trees from nuts that you find on the ground.

The advantages of buying seeds over plants are that the seeds are much cheaper, there is often increased varieties available in seed form, and starting Prairie, Meadow, and Open Woods gardens from seed can be much more practical and cheaper than planting individual pots of grass and sedge by hand. You can seed a Prairie, Meadow, or Open Woods with grasses much the same way you would seed a lawn.

The disadvantages of buying flowers in seed form is that you have to have the know-how to get your seed germinated, you have to care for your seed inside your house until it’s big enough to plant outside, and you run the risk of “crop failure”. Grass and sedge seeds are sown directly into your yard like lawn so they’re easier to grow.

There are many gardeners who really prefer and enjoy starting their plants from seed. To these gardeners it is an enjoyable hobby that allows them to garden straight through


winter and gives them huge amounts of satisfaction to plant their babies outdoors come spring.

Ask the seller of the seeds for information on the care that your seeds require to get them big enough to plant outside. Seeds are their hobby and they will love to tell you everything you need to know.

Because seeds are so inexpensive it doesn’t cost you a lot to give seeds a shot.

These common plants are not native Some plants are so common that you may be tempted to think they are native when ac-tually they are not.

Norway maple, weeping willow, Forsythia, periwinkle, lily-of-the-valley, forget-me-nots, pachysandra, day lilies, and English and Boston ivies are not native to North America and provide little benefit to nature.

Almost all chestnut trees that you see around town or in nurseries are not native to North America. The American Chestnut tree has been almost completely wiped out by a blight and there are almost none remaining. You most likely will only find the native American Chestnut in a native plant nursery.

!!!!!!!!!!!!(c) John Boydell !32


Plants we could really do better without These are common non-native plants that provide little in the way of benefit to nature. There are native plants available that can do the same job but provide more benefits to your local bit of the planet. Photographs of these plants can be found on the Internet.

Boston Ivy: -boring and invasive; use a native vine;Creeping Bellflower: -a pretty weed that will takeover your garden and lawn;Dog Strangling Vine: -horrendous and overwhelms native plants in the wild;English Ivy: -boring and invasive; use a native vine;English Box Hedges: -boring and never bloom; use short, flowering shrubs;Forget-me-nots: -invasive; use a native ground cover;Garlic Mustard: -simply horrendous;Goutweed: -simply horrendous;Hostas: -demonstrate lack of imagination and low I.Q.;Japanese Knotweed: -simply horrendous; Godzilla of the plant world;Japanese Honeysuckle: -boring; replace with a native vine or short shrubs;Lily-of-the-valley: -invasive and will even break through your driveway;Norway Maple: -The Death Star; almost nothing can grow beneath it;Periwinkle: -invasive; replace with a native ground cover;Porcelain Berry Vine: -an invasive monster.

Mindless ground covers Not everyone has the desire or time to be a gardener but they have some area of their property that needs covering, so they choose a mindless ground cover to do the job. There is nothing wrong with this, but some mindless ground covers are better than oth-ers. Needless to say, the native mindless ground covers are way, way better than the non-native ground covers because they make your world a better place by feeding and sheltering nature. Suggested native mindless ground covers are listed on page 42.

The following are typical non-native mindless ground covers:day lilies, periwinkle, lily-of-the-valley, forget-me-nots, English ivy, Japanese honeysuck-le, pachysandra.

Post Script: What am I thinking?$All native plant gardens are “mindless ground covers” because you create your garden with the Integrity to fend for itself against weeds, pests, drought, flood, and foraging animals without time, work, and worry from you.


EXAMPLES OF NATIVE PLANTS Always defer to the information your nursery provides before buying a plant. These lists are intended as examples and to spur your imagination - not guarantees. I have not taken into account the preferred soil type of these plants. The lists are not comprehensive. Not every plant listed may be native to your locale. The Garden Type categories used below do not correspond exactly with botanical “Habitats” but are ade-quate for suburban gardens.

Many plants are versatile in their Garden Type especially if babied when young until they have an extensive root system and you’ve created healthy soil (important). A plant that requires sun may survive with less sun but just won’t bloom. A non-blooming plant is still beneficial to nature because their foliage still provides food and shelter, and you never know when your tree just might disappear and now your plants are in full sun.

The official people responsible for naming plants use the spelling “Pensylvania”. Don’t phone me. Goldenrod does not cause hay fever. Ragweed, which blooms at the same time as goldenrod, is the guilty party.

All plants have at least two names. They have their common names and their scientific name. Common names are used in this guide because they are in everyday usage, but since almost all plants have more than one common name this can lead to confu-sion. You may have to resort to the scientific name of a plant, there is always only one. However and unfortunately, botanists may change a plant’s scientific name.

The Website of Grand Moraine Growers was used to compile these lists. This Website includes growing information and specifies the correct botanical Habitats for each plant. A valuable resource no matter where you shop.( http://grandmorainegrowers.ca/ )

!!!!!!!(c) John Boydell !34

http://grandmorainegrowers.ca


Wetland GardenThese plants can tolerate standing water for part of the year. They are not aquatic plants in that they won’t survive growing in permanent water. Depending upon the plant you may be able to grow it in soil that is simply moist and so be included in other garden types. Also, you can still include in your Wetland Garden the moisture loving plants from the other garden types if you plant them in the soil surrounding the standing water. Most of these plants like sun.

Canada Anemone Swamp Milkweed Swamp AsterFlat-tapped White Aster Marsh Marigold White TurtleheadSpinulose Wood Fern Crested Wood Fern Goldie’s Wood FernVariegated Horsetail Joe-pye Weed BonesetPurple Avens Tall Wild Sunflower Wild Blue-flagWild Yellow Canada Lily Michigan Lily Cardinal FlowerMonkey Flower Sensitive Fern Silvery CinquefoilCanadian Burnet Rough-leaved Goldenrod Ohio GoldenrodMarsh Goldenrod Tall Meadow-rue Blue VervainNew York Iron Weed Golden Sedge Gray’s SedgePorcupine Sedge Muskingum Sedge Fox SedgeGreen Bulrush Cottongrass Bulrush Slough/Cord GrassMountain Maple Black Chokeberry Eastern ButtonbushSilky Dogwood Red-osier Dogwood Black & Green AshesWinterberry American Larch Mtn Fly-HoneysuckleChoke Cherry Alder-leaved Buckthorn Wild Black CurrantSwamp Red Currant American Elm NannyberrySwamp Rose Dwarf Raspberry Hoary WillowHeart-leaved Willow Highbush Cranberry Eastern White CedarNarrow-leaved Meadowsweet

!!!!!!!(c) John Boydell !35

Prairie GardenThese plants can tolerate full sun in dry conditions. They should never need watering after having survived several seasons and your soil is healthy (important). Perfect for full sun, front yard gardens you never want to touch. Just remember to water them well for the first three years at least and practice a good gardening style. Many Meadow plants can be grown in Prairie gardens if you’re willing to water during dry spells. Re-member that real prairies consist mostly of grasses and sedges and so should yours.

Long-headed Anemone Common Milkweed Butterfly MilkweedHeath Aster Smooth Blue Aster Sky-blue AsterAmerican Harebell Lance-leaved Coreopsis Showy Tick-trefoilRattlesnake Master Prairie Smoke Alum RootSlender Blazing Star Wild Lupine Round-headed Bush CloverWild Bergamot Slender Blazing Star Wild LupineWild Quinine Hoary Vervain Common Evening-primroseHairy Beardtongue Tall Cinquefoil Common CinquefoilGray-headed Coneflower Black-eyed Susan Compass PlantPrairie Dock Silverrod (a goldenrod) Gray-stemmed GoldenrodUpland White Goldenrod Big Bluestem Sand DropseedSide-oats Grama Prairie Brome Copper-shouldered SedgeCanada Wild Rye June Grass Little BluestemIndian Grass Lead Plant SnowberryNew Jersey Tea Shrubby St. John’s-wort Ground JuniperPrickly Wild Rose Pasture Rose Northern Dewberry

!!!!!!!!!!(c) John Boydell !36


Meadow GardenThese plants can tolerate full sun with moist conditions. This section may look small but many Wetland, Prairie and Open Woods plants can be planted in a Meadow Garden. Meadow plants are excellent for front yard gardens; may need watering in times of drought. Many of these plants can be planted in Open Woods. Many can be planted in a Prairie if you’re willing to water. Many can be planted in a Wetland if planted in the moist soil surrounding the standing water. Real meadows consist mostly of grasses and sedges and so should yours.

Blue Giant-hyssop Nodding Onion Pearly EverlastingCommon Milkweed Wild Columbine Hairy Calico AsterNew England Aster Wild Hyacinth Tall CoreopsisRobin’s Plantain Wild Strawberry Bottle GentianWoodland Sunflower Great St. John’s-wort Prairie Blazing StarSpiked Blazing Star Wild Yellow Canada Lily Michigan LilySmall Sundrops Wild Quinine Foxglove BeardtongueObedient Plant Virginia Mountain Mint Cut-leaved ConeflowerThin-leaved Cone Flower Compass Plant Cup PlantPrairie Dock Blue-eyed Grass Stiff/Hard-leaved GoldenrodHoary Vervain Culver’s Root Rough-stemmed GoldenrodGolden Alexanders Prairie Brome Pensylvania SedgeSweetgrass Switch Grass Indian Grass

!!!!!!!!!!!(c) John Boydell !37

Open Woods Garden These plants can tolerate sun to part shade. Some of these plants are found on the borders of woods. Water in times of drought. Remember to include lots of grasses and sedges just like in wild Open Woods. I have not included trees in this list unless they can tolerate some shade because almost all trees like the sun of this garden type.

Canada Wild Onion Nodding Onion ThimbleweedWild Columbine Hairy Calico Aster Large-leaved AsterNew England Aster Sky-blue Aster Short’s AsterCanada Milkvetch Wild Hyacinth Tall CoreopsisShowy Tick-trefoil Robin’s Plantain Wild StrawberryBottle Gentian Woodland Sunflower Oxeye/False SunflowerAlum Root Giant Lobelia Wild LupineFoxglove Beardtongue Thin-leaved Coneflower Cup PlantTall Meadow-rue Ohio Spiderwort Culver’s RootGolden Alexanders Pensylvania Sedge Switch GrassDowny Serviceberry White Birch American Bittersweet VineVirgin’s Bower Vine Rough-leaved Dogwood Gray DogwoodAmerican Hazelnut Coronation Apple Northern Bush-honeysuckleNinebark Thicket Creeper Fragrant SumacStaghorn Sumac Prickly Gooseberry Prickly RoseSmooth Rose Pasture Rose Northern DewberryRed-berried Elderberry Canada Elderberry BladdernutEastern White Cedar American Basswood Maple-leaf ViburnumDowny Arrowwood Riverbank/Frost Grape Purple Flowering Raspberry

!!!!!!!!!(c) John Boydell !38


Forest Glade GardenThese plants can tolerate part shade/sun but more shade than sun; may need watering in times of drought. Quite a few Wetland and Open Woods plants can be planted in a wide Forest Glade. Include grasses and sedges in your garden.

Wild Leek Wild Columbine White TurtleheadFourleaf Wild-Yam White Snakeroot Wild GeraniumLarge-leaved Avens Virginia Waterleaf Starflower False Solomon’s SealSensitive Fern Wild Blue Phlox White LettuceYellow Pimpernel Ohio Spiderwort Barren StrawberryGolden Alexanders Loose-flowered Sedge Pensylvania SedgeLong-beaked Sedge Bottle-brush Grass Alternate-leaved DogwoodRough-leaved Dogwood Roundleaf Dogwood Northern Bush-HoneysuckleWitch-hazel Canada Moonseed Vine IronwoodThicket Creeper American Basswood BladdernutNannyberry Purple Flowering Raspberry

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!(c) John Boydell !39

Forest Floor GardenThese plants tolerate mostly or full shade; may need watering in times of drought. Note: it is almost impossible to grow a good garden under a Norway Maple. Include grasses and sedges in your garden.

White Baneberry Red Baneberry Maidenhair FernWild Leek Wild Columbine SpikenardJack-in-the-pulpit Wild Ginger Heart-leaved AsterWhite Wood Aster Lowrie’s Aster Blue CohoshBlack Snakeroot/Cohosh Bulblet Bladder Fern ToothwortSpinulose Wood Fern Crested Wood Fern Goldie’s Wood FernMarginal Wood Fern White Snakeroot Wild GeraniumSharp-lobed Hepatica Broad-leaved Waterleaf Virginia WaterleafTwin Leaf Canada Wood Nettle Canada MayflowerFalse Solomon’s Seal Virginia Blue Bells Bishop’s Cap/MiterwortSweet Cicely Wild Blue Phlox MayappleHairy Solomon’s Seal Christmas Fern White LettuceBloodroot Blue-stemmed Goldenrod Zig-zag GoldenrodEarly Meadow-rue Broad-beech Fern FoamflowerWhite Trillium Virginia Knotweed/JumpseedWild Coffee Large-flowered Bellwort Smooth/Hairy Yellow VioletsBarren Strawberry Bladder Sedge Loose-flowered SedgePensylvania Sedge Long-beaked Sedge Striped MapleMountain Maple Bunchberry Running Strawberry BushCanada Moonseed Vine Thicket Creeper Vine Eastern White CedarNannyberry American Basswood (shade tolerant, but needs some sun.)

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Short Plants for tidy Front Yard Prairries, Meadows and Open Woods Three feet tall at their very tallest. May need watering in times of drought. Remember to include lots of grasses and sedges.

Canada Wild Onion Pearly Everlasting Long-fruited AnemoneWild Columbine Common Milkweed Butterfly MilkweedHeath Aster Wild Hyacinth American HarebellLance-leaved Coreopsis Robin’s Plantain Rattlesnake MasterWild Strawberry Bottle Gentian Purple AvensPrairie Smoke Alum Root Lakeside DaisyDwarf Lake Iris Slender Blazing Star Wild LupineMonkey Flower Lead Plant Starflower False Solomon’s SealSmall Sundrops Wild Quinine Hairy BeardtongueTall Cinquefoil Common Cinquefoil Virginia Mountain MintGray-headed Coneflower Black-eyed Susan Blue-eyed GrassSilverrod (a goldenrod) Gray Goldenrod Ohio GoldenrodUpland White Goldenrod Ohio Spiderwort Hoary VervainGolden Alexanders New Jersey Tea Kalm’s St. John’s-wortSandcherry Prickly Gooseberry Northern Bush-honeysucklePrickly Wild Rose Pasture Rose Northern DewberrySnowberry Side-oats Grama Prairie BromeEbony Sedge Canada Wild Rye Copper-shouldered SedgeRocky Mountain Fescue June Grass Little BluestemSand Dropseed.

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Mindless Ground Covers All native plant gardens are “mindless ground covers” because you create them with the Integrity to fend for themselves without time, work, and worry from you. How-ever, here are some suggested plants. These plants vary in their aggressiveness and from short to tall. If you have a really large area many shrubs will spread to form thick-ets. There is no need to be “mindless” when actually choosing your ground covers. Ground covers offer a wonderful opportunity for easy creativity. If you leave it up to your landscaper to choose your ground cover they will plant the very same ground covers they always plant and you will have the very same ground covers that your whole city has. Truly mindless.

Wild Leek: part/full shade Canada Anemone: sun/part shade, wetlandsNew England Aster: part sun, tall Short’s Aster: sun;Marsh Marigold: part sun, wetlands Bulblet Bladder Fern: shady, moist, calcareousShowy Tick-trefoil: full sun, tall Spinulous Wood Fern: shady, acidic, moistRobin’s Plantain: sun White Snakeroot: shady, tall Wild Strawberry: sun Prairie Smoke: sun Woodland Sunflower: full/part sun, tall Oxeye/False Sunflower: full/part sun, tall Sharp-lobed Hepatica: shade Common Evening Primrose: full/part sun Broad-leaved Waterleaf: shady Virginia Waterleaf: shadyCanada Mayflower: shade, acidic soil Starflower False Solomon’s Seal: full/part sun Sensitive Fern: part sun, moist/wetlandsWild Blue Phlox: shady Hairy Solomon’s Seal: shady Silvery Cinquefoil: sunny, wet/moist Common Cinquefoil: full/part sun Canadian Burnet: full/part sun, wetland, tallZig-zag Goldenrod: part/full shade Gray Goldenrod: full/part sun Rough-stemmed Goldenrod: sun Tall Meadow-rue: sun to shade wetlandsFoamflower: shady Virginia Knotweed/Jumpseed: shadySmooth/Hairy Yellow Violets: shade Barren Strawberry: part shade Bunchberry: shade, moist/wet, acidic Northern Bush Honeysuckle: part sun Pasture Rose: full to part sun Riverbank/Frost Grape: full/part sun Purple Flowering Raspberry: full/part sun, tall Canada Moonseed Vine: part sun Thicket Creeper Vine: sun to shade Sandcherry: full sun, sandy/rocky areas Creeping Juniper: sun, sandy/rocky areasNorthern Dewberry: full/part sun, dry Alder-leaved Buckthorn: full/part sun, wetlandsVirginia Creeper: versatile Pensylvania Sedge: versatile Canada Wild Rye: full to part sun.



Plants for under CEDARS, PINES, & OAKS, and for bogs & fens In other words, plants that can tolerate or prefer acidic soil. In my travels around Toron-to I see many yards with pines and cedars and nothing growing underneath. There is no need for this.

Nodding Onion Wild Columbine Jack-in-the-pulpitSwamp Milkweed New England Aster Black SnakerootCrested Wood Fern Spinulose Wood Fern Purple ConeflowerVariegated Horsetail Cardinal Flower Canada MayflowerFalse Solomon’s Seal Black-eyed Susan FoamflowerTall Ironweed New York Ironweed Culver’s RootGolden Alexanders Mountain Fly Honeysuckle SteeplebushAmerican Larch Dwarf Raspberry BunchberryBlack Chokeberry Stripped Maple

!Plants for Clay SoilIf you have clay soil remember that clay soil holds on to moisture tightly and doesn’t need to be watered as often as other soils.

Long-fruited Anemone Thimble weed Wild ColumbineSarsaparilla Jack-in-the-pulpit Swamp MilkweedLarge-leave Aster New England Aster Swamp AsterFlat-topped Aster Big Bluestem Side Oats GramaFringed Brome Black Chokeberry Downy ServiceberryWhite Birch Prairie Brome Marsh MarigoldYellow Sedge Muskingum Sedge Fox SedgeHackberry Turtlehead American Bittersweet Vine Virgin’s Bower Alder-leaved Dogwood Silky DogwoodRough-leaved Dogwood Gray Dogwood Red-Osier DogwoodHawthorns Showy Tick-trefoil Northern Bush-honeysuckleCanada Wild Rye Bottle-brush Grass Riverbank Wild RyeWild Rye Rattlesnake Master Running Strawberry BushJoe-pye Weed Boneset Wild StrawberryWhite/American Ash Black Ash Green AshPurple Avens Honey Locust SneezeweedThinleaf Sunflower Woodland Sunflower Tall Wild SunflowerSaw-toothed Sunflower Oxeye/False Sunflower Great St. John’s WortWinterberry Eastern Red Cedar Prairie Blazing Star


Spike Blazing Star Michigan Lilly Glaucous HoneysuckleMountain Fly-honeysuckle Winged Loosestrife Coronation AppleWild Bergamot Sweet Cicely IronwoodSwitch Grass Wild Quinine Thicket CreeperAmerican Pokeweed Ninebark Wild Black CherryChoke Cherry Virginia Mountain Mint Gray-headed ConeflowerAlder-leaved Buckthorn Prickly Wild Rose Smooth RoseSwamp Rose Dwarf Raspberry Purple Flowering RaspberryBlack-eyed Susan Cut-leaved Coneflower Thin-leaved ConeflowerHoary Willow Heart-leave Willow Canada ElderberryRed-berried Elderberry Canadian Burnet Little BluestemGreen Bulrush Wool Grass Compass PlantCup Plant Prairie Dock SilverrodZig-zag Goldenrod Grass-leaved Goldenrod Gray GoldenrodOhio Goldenrod Swamp Goldenrod Riddell’s Goldenrod.Stiff/Hard-leaved Goldenrod Rough-stemmed GoldenrodStout Goldenrod Smooth Yellow Violet Riverbank/Frost GrapeBog Goldenrod Indian Grass Slough/Cord GrassSteeplebush Golden Alexanders Narrow-leaved MeadowsweetBladdernut Yellow Pimpernel Broad Beech FernAmerican Basswood Ohio Spiderwort American ElmBlue Vervain Tall Ironweed New York IronweedMaple-leave Viburnum Nannyberry Highbush Cranberry.



Plants for Dry, Sandy SoilBecause sand particles are large rain and water flow right through creating dry soil. However some plants prefer to grow in soil with the good drainage sand provides.

Hair Grass Nodding Onion Downy Serviceberry Lead Plant Pearly Everlasting Common Evening Primrose Big Bluestem Long-fruited Anemone Red Anemone Thimbleweed Wild Columbine Tower Mustard White Sagebrush Butterfly Milkweed Heath Aster Smooth Blue Aster Calico Aster Sky-blue Aster Side Oats Grama Arctic Brome American Harebell New Jersey Tea Hackberry Copper-shouldered Sedge Dwarf Hackberry Gray Dogwood Round-leaf Dogwood Lance-leaved Coreopsis Showy Tick-trefoil Northern Bush-honeysuckle Pale Purple Coneflower Canada Wild Rye Bottle-brush Grass Robin’s Plantain Rattlesnake Master Rocky Mountain Fescue Blanketflower Prairie Smoke Witch Hazel Woodland Sunflower Oxeye/False Sunflower Stemless Four-Nerve Daisy Alum Root Kalm’s St. John’s-wort Shrubby St. John’s-wort Dwarf Lake Iris Ground Juniper Creeping Juniper Eastern Red Cedar June Grass Round-headed Bush Clover Slender Blazing Star Prairie Blazing star Wild Lupine Wild Bergamot Switch Grass Wild Quinine Hairy Beardtongue Ninebark Tall Cinquefoil Common Cinquefoil Pin Cherry Sandcherry Choke Cherry Slender Mountain Mint Hairy Mountain Mint Virginia Mountain Mint Dwarf Chinquapin Oak Fragrant Sumac Staghorn Sumac Gray-headed Coneflower Downy Arrow-wood Northern Dewberry Black-eyed Susan Hoary Vervain Little Bluestem Soap/Buffalo Berry Prairie Dock Blue-eyed Grass Silverrod (a goldenrod) Zig-zag Goldenrod Gray Goldenrod Upland White Goldenrod Rough-stemmed Goldenrod Indian Grass Sand Dropseed Snowberry.


There are more trees in Heaven and Earth than are dreamt of ...So many native trees yet gardeners seem to have so little imagination. This list is com-posed of trees from just two native plant nurseries. There are assuredly more trees na-tive to your locale than listed here. In Canada, some of these trees are native only to the Ontario Carolinian Zone but this includes the Golden Horseshoe up to Toronto. Remember that a tree packs the most benefit into one single plant.

Black Walnut Butternut American HazelnutShagbark Hickory Bitternut Hickory Prickly AshAmerican Basswood Blue Beech White BeechPaper Birch Swamp Birch Black CherryChoke Cherry Bladdernut Cucumber TreeAmerican Elm Hackberry Alternate-leaved DogwoodDwarf Hackberry Ironwood Kentucky Coffee TreeHop Tree Honey Locust Manitoba Maple/Box ElderStriped Maple Rubrum Red Maple Silver MapleSugar Maple Red Mulberry NannyberryBlack Oak Burr Oak Pin OakChinquapin Oak Red Oak White OakRed Bud Sassafras Staghorn SumacSycamore Tulip Wild PlumPawpaw Showy Mountain Ash Pussy WillowSandbar Willow Hoary Willow Heart-leaved WillowWhite Cedar Red Cedar White SpruceBalsam Fir Jack Pine White PineRed Pine Hemlock Mountain MapleHawthorn Black Ash Green AshAmerican Larch Coronation Apple Dwarf Chinquapin OakEastern White Cedar Serviceberry Witch Hazel

“He who plants a tree plants a hope”. Lucy Larcom.

“Someone’s sitting in the shade today because someone planted a tree a long time ago”. Warren Buffett.

“The true meaning of life, is to plant trees under whose shade you do not expect to sit”. Nelson Henderson.

“Let us cross over the river, and rest under the shade of the trees.” Stonewall Jackson.



3. MAINTAIN HEALTHY, FERTILE SOIL The more organic matter in your soil then the healthier and more fertile it is and the greater your garden’s Integrity. Many plants have more of themselves under-ground than they do above ground and unless the plant is an annual it is the under-ground parts, the roots, that enable the plant to arise again in the spring or after you have crushed it under foot. And, of course, your plant obtains most of its nutrition from under the ground. The lesson here is that your soil and Under Garden are critical for the health and survival of your plants.

What makes good, fertile soil? Good, fertile soil is made up of lots of organic matter: the decomposing and decom-posed bodies of leaves, grasses, plants, fruits, nuts, pine cones, animals, bugs, logs, branches, twigs, poo (not from cats or dogs or you) and microorganisms, particularly bacteria and fungi.

Organic matter is created by leaving plant and animal litter in your garden. To supple-ment your garden’s plant and animal litter you can spread around farm/zoo poop, com-post, and leaf mould. Just let all that good stuff decompose year after year after year. Don’t go cleaning up the garden. You will get fertile soil. If the debris is too big to look attractive then cut it smaller or move the larger branches to the sides of your yard to de-compose slowly and provide lots of food and shelter for nature.

Adding mature compost is wonderful because compost is the already decomposed or-ganic stuff and it speeds up the process of creating fertile soil.

Leaf mould, an excellent organic soil conditioner, is created by letting leaves lie un-touched in a pile for about 3 years until the leaves have completely lost the look of leaves. Don’t use Norway maple leaves.

Organic matter is an organic fertilizer. Organic fertilizer is the “recycling” of nutrients and so, unlike chemical fertilizers, does not require any manufacturing process. It is a slow acting, long lasting and complex fertilizer. It increases your soil’s water-holding capacity. It changes the make up of the Under Garden Community so that the microor-ganisms that cause plant diseases can be suppressed and pollution can be degraded. Water conservation, water purification, healthier plants. Win, win, win.

If you can, even before you begin your garden, dig into the soil lots of organic matter so you don’t have to wait for all that surface litter to decompose and your garden will begin its life with healthy, fertile soil.


Mulching and Leaves: Nature’s way When your garden is brand new and you’ve planted all your plants, place a thick layer of organic matter around the new plants to keep the weeds out. But the season after the first planting don’t mulch so heavily again. Instead, don’t rake out the leaves and other plant and animal litter from your garden in the fall. Leave it all lying there year after year. Spreading an additional thin sprinkling of organic matter or com-post is good, but not a thick layer.

Let nature do the mulching. It is common practice to keep the soil in between plants covered with 1 to 2 inches of shredded bark, wood chips, or stones. However, nature’s way of mulching is to lay a carpet of leaves or pine needles over your garden every fall and a sprinkling of dead fallen branches every winter. Leaves, stems, and branches are the natural mulch for our gardens. As they decompose over the winter and the next year they return all their nutrients back into the soil from whence they came. In the process they feed and shelter all kinds of insects, pupae, bacteria and fungi that keep your garden healthy and Integrity high. They also increase the ability of your soil to re-tain water thereby reducing the need for supplemental watering.

While dead branches also do their bit we humans tend to find them unsightly, so break them up into tolerable sizes and throw them back on the ground. If you think they’re still too big then see if you can drag them to the side of your yard and leave them there. They will decompose ever so slowing returning their nutrients to the soil and be food and shelter for all kinds of wildlife in the meantime.

If you find that after a few seasons there is still a lot of bare space around your plants then you should consider adding more plants or a ground cover that will fill in the gaps. This is especially true under shrubs, hedges, and trees.

Bottom Line: mulch heavily the first year of your garden, but after that mulching takes the form of not raking up the leaves and other plant and animal litter from your garden in the fall, leaving it all there, and scattering organic matter such as compost during the rest of the year. If the leaves are forming a thick wet smothering mat in the spring then rake them out sparingly. Retain the raked off litter in your compost pile to be returned to the garden later as compost.

Norway Maple leaves contain phytotoxins that inhibit the growth and development of other plants in your garden. Their leaves should be raked up, packaged and sent off with your city’s collection. Use purchased organic matter instead or non-Norway Maple leaves borrowed from your neighbour. If at all possible replace your Norway Maple with a native tree and your garden and nature will thank you.



Chemical Fertilizers will not improve the health of your soil Even though plants require many different nutrients to be healthy, chemical fertilizers are only guaranteed to contain nitrogen, potassium, and phosphate and that’s it. So you may be fertilizing your garden but if your soil is deficient in some nutrient other than nitrogen, potassium or phosphate your plants will be under fed.

Chemical fertilizers act on plants similarly to the way sugar acts on humans. Sugar is very fast acting giving us instant energy and then it disappears. Chemical fertilizers zip into the plant and the plant quickly benefits, but then the rains come and wash away all the chemical fertilizer leaving the soil no better. Organic fertilizers, i.e. plant and animal litter, compost, and leaf mould, actually become part of the soil making it healthier. They are slow acting on the plants, are long lasting, contain many more nutrients than just nitrogen, potassium, and phosphate, and are not washed away by the rain. In fact, organic fertilizers actually act to increase the water holding capacity of the soil.

Chemical fertilizers are bad for the environment. Unlike organic fertilizers, chemical fertilizers do not improve the water-holding capacity of the soil and lead to increased watering needs in order to compensate. They are so water soluble they dissolve in the rain very quickly, leach out and then pollute the nearby water systems. Unlike organic fertilizers, chemical fertilizers are created through a manufacturing process that con-sumes lots of fossil fuels. Wasted water, water pollution, fossils fuels. Lose, lose, lose.

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Compost Pile Myths Everybody should have a compost pile because it gives you free organic fertilizer and it’s so easy to do. Composting methods are not detailed here because there are so many books and Internet sites explaining how to go about it. Also, composting at its simplest is dedicating a corner of your yard to a pile where you throw plant litter and vegetable kitchen scraps to slowly decompose on their own.

MYTH #1: Composting is rocket science Composting can be as complicated or as sim-ple as you want it to be. You can buy books or search the Internet for how-to instruc-tions. Hardware stores have selections of compost bins that all come with how-to in-structions. Or it can be as simple as dedicating a corner of your yard to a pile where you throw plant litter and vegetable kitchen scraps. Composting will occur. It won’t happen quickly but it will be worry free.

MYTH #2: Composting smells Do not add meat, meat byproducts, fish, dairy, dairy byproducts, whole eggs, oils or poop to your compost pile and it will not smell. This means that you can situate your compost pile anywhere in your yard, even right beside your patio. My Bench of Infinite Caffeine is situated right beside my compost bin and there is no smell. Composting is for vegetable kitchen waste, used paper serviettes, pieces of paper too small to recycle, garden clippings and leaves. They won’t smell. Egg shells are okay.

MYTH #3: Composting attracts bothersome bugs Composting attracts bugs but they are beneficial, desirable bugs interested in the decomposing materials in your compost pile, but not you or your meal. Unless you or your food smell like decomposing vegeta-bles you have nothing to worry about. My Bench of Infinite Caffeine is situated right be-side my compost bin and I can enjoy my coffee while watching the little flying things keeping themselves busy with the compost bin. And whenever I have the pleasure of having a little sweetie join me on the bench, I always point to the little flying things and say, “See, sweetie, there are such things as faeries!” And whenever there is no sweetie beside me, I can look across my garden, see a myriad of little flying things shining in the sun, and I know that my garden is a success.

MYTH #4: Composting attracts rodents Remember to add only vegetable and plant lit-ter to your compost pile. If there are rodents in your neighbourhood use a compost bin that’s off the ground and that has good lids and keep them closed.



4. MAINTAIN A HEALTHY UNDER GARDEN You cannot have a healthy garden without a healthy Under Garden.

Go ahead. Admire your garden and feel proud that you created such life-giving beauty. Well, you can feel double the pride because while you were busy creating your above ground garden without realizing it you also created another garden underground. This garden is packed with way more wildlife than even the above ground garden.

This Under Garden is just as important to you as the above ground garden earthworms, grubs, eggs, nematodes, beetles, cicada nymphs, sow bugs, centipedes, millipedes, spiders, springtails, cutworm, weevil larvae, roots, bacteria, protozoa, fun-gus, moles, ants, mites, and microscopic worms. There may also be bees, snakes, groundhogs, chipmunks, rabbits, and gophers living under your garden.

There are millions and millions and millions of these Under Garden Community mem-bers in your garden. Most of them are bacteria (a good thing). Ian Davidson, founder of Biologic Systems, says, “The soil is a super organism; meaning it is alive, teeming with life, teeming with diversity much similar to our own bodies, your own body. 70% of the cells in your own body are bacteria”. (The Soil Solution, a Green Bridge Me-dia Film)

What are they all doing down there? Most of them are eating plant and animal litter converting it into nutrients that your plants can use. An awful lot of them are eating each other and converting them into nutrients your plants can use. Some of them serve as food for birds and other above ground wildlife. Others live in tight relationships with the roots of your plants exchanging nutrients with them for the benefit of both. Some of them live on and coat the surfaces of the roots of plants acting as the root’s first line of defence. Some of them eat your roots. Some degrade a wide range of pollutants and some compete with disease-causing organisms and soil pathogens. Worms and ants, in addition to other functions, work to aerate and till your soil mixing in organic matter from the surface. A surprising fact is that ants can take seeds and plant them at the level in the soil exactly where they need to be in order to germinate. No matter how small, every organism has a role to play in your garden, so love your garden’s bugs.

The roots of most plants form mutually beneficial relationships, “mycorrhizae”, with cer-tain fungi in the Under Garden. These relationships allow the passing of materials (such as nutrients) from the roots of the plant to the fungus (to the benefit of the fungus). At the same time, essential minerals (such as phosphorus) move from the fun-gus to the roots (to the benefit of the plant). The threadlike roots of the fungus, myceli-um, extend throughout the soil, gathering minerals for the benefit of the plant well be-


yond the reach of the plant’s roots. Some evidence suggests that this fungal network interconnects different plants species in the garden and that carbon compounds (an es-sential building-block for plants) may pass from one plant to another through their fungal partners. (Introductory Botany, Linda Berg, 2008, pages 123-124.) In other words, a single plant in your garden is able to gather nutrients from over a very large area but only with the help of other members of its Under Garden Community.

The healthier your Under Garden:$-the healthier and more fertile your garden’s soil;-the safer your plants from disease;-the cleaner the water leaving your garden;-the better able your garden’s soil to retain water and so require less watering;-the greater the ability of your garden to attract more varieties of nature;-the greater the Integrity of your Above Ground garden.

How do you make a healthy Under Garden? 1. Leave plant and animal litter on the ground, leave fallen twigs and branches

where they lie, and spread compost and leaf mould to feed the Under Garden.

2. Never dig into your garden except to plant new plants. Your above ground plants use their Under Garden as an underground transport network to pass nutri-ents amongst themselves through their roots and fungal mycelium. This transport system extends throughout your garden from one end to the other. When you dig in the ground with a shovel or trowel you cut right into this network, severing it and damaging it. Don’t do it. An Under Garden works best when left intact from one end of your garden to the other.

3. Don’t use chemical fertilizers. They change the environment of the Under Garden for the worse.

4. Limit the use of pesticides. They are poisons which may kill members of the Un-der Garden.

5. Minimize the use of salt on the sidewalks bordering your garden. The salt will wash into the Under Garden and poison it and your plants.

6. Tolerate all the insects you see on the ground and within. They are all members of your garden’s Community and they all have their roles to play in Nature’s Garden. A sign that your garden is a success is when you see a veritable zoo of little crawly things.



5. PRACTICE A HEALTHY GARDENING STYLE Practicing a healthy gardening style will keep the Integrity of you garden at its maximum.

Plant your Garden and then leave it alone Once you’ve got your plants in the ground and you’ve placed a few inches of mulch around the baby plants then the garden needs to be left alone. Water it like crazy for the first three years but don’t go digging around in the ground with trowel and shovel. Leave the ground alone as best you can to let the Under Garden grow. In order to survive your new garden needs to send out a network of roots and mycelium that you can’t see and cutting them with a trowel, well, cuts them. Some of your new plants will be spreading by runners and rhizomes. Don’t dig in the ground if you want a carpet of flowers. Bottom Line: Don’t dig into your garden ever again.

New plants germinating from seed may need a couple of years to develop into anything recognizable as a desirable plant. When you see a weed that you are really, really posi-tively sure is a weed, then pull it out. But unless you seriously know your native plants I’d give that questionable plant time to prove it isn’t something nice that you haven’t yet recognized.

Resist the urge to constantly fiddle around with your garden. Let go. Let Nature. It takes about three years before your garden of disparate plants begins to act like a true unified garden, a true native plant Community, a garden with Integrity, a green organic symphony. Don’t go chopping it up willy-nilly. Patience will reward you.

Weeding Weeding a native plant garden should be minimal if you keep the garden’s Integrity at its maximum, keep a healthy Under Garden, and practice a healthy gardening style. This is especially true after about three years when your garden begins behaving like a Community protecting itself from invading weeds.

When your garden is first new the soil will be freshly disturbed and there will be bare earth. This is the perfect environment for weeds to take hold. This is why you mulch all around your new plants in order to cover the bare earth. Any plant that you can identify as a weed you should pull out by hand. Don’t use a trowel to disturb the soil or the Un-der Garden any further.

With time your plants will fill in the spaces removing exposed soil available for weeds to find a footing and the Under Garden will knit together into a unified force acting as one


complete body to protect itself from invaders. You will find the need for weeding greatly reduced.

Once a year you should do a thorough job of sorting through your garden, pulling out the weeds, and adding them to your compost pile.

Watering Watering a native plant garden should be rare if you keep the garden’s Integrity at its maximum by maintaining fertile soil, keeping a healthy Under Garden, and practicing a healthy gardening style.

This is because:

1. Before you planted even one single plant in your garden you identified the kind of garden you will have according to the amount of sun and moisture your garden plot receives. You then selected all the varieties of plants that suit your garden type. The plants that suit are the plants that evolved over millions of years the ability to survive with the amount of sun and moisture your garden receives without supple-ment. Therefore, there will be little need for you to supplement your garden’s mois-ture by watering it with a hose (unlike for the non-native plants and lawns).

2. You allow all the plant and animal litter to collect in your garden to decompose into your soil to create a healthy Under Garden. This increases the water retaining ability of your soil and reduces the need for supplemental watering.

3. You do not dig into your soil with shovel or trowel that will destroy a healthy Under Garden and reduce its water retaining ability.

4. You watered your garden like a mad person for the first three years of your garden’s life to get your roots established, but then you had faith in your garden to fend for itself against drought.

5. You do not over water. If you water your garden when it doesn’t need watering, what you are actually doing is watering the weeds ensuring that they live long and pros-per. Don’t go around making it easy for the weeds. Make them fight for their lives.

Prairie Gardens that have survived several seasons should never need to be watered again, even it they look all wilted. These plants have specialized to survive droughts with amazingly deep roots. Have faith that they will perk up with the next rainfall.

Gardens with clay soil need less watering because clay holds onto to water tighter than other soils.



In the era of Global Warming what is moist, what is dry? Everyone knows that neither Ontario nor Quebec nor New England are deserts. As-suming your garden isn’t sheltered by an overhang or a Norway Maple, isn’t in sandy soil, or isn’t on a slope, then for millions of years it’s been getting enough rain for the soil in your garden to be “moist” and not “dry”. But is this still true today? It seems to me our weather is a little bit crazy: it’s either too little or too much.

I have emphasized that if you plant the right plant for your garden’s natural moisture conditions and your garden’s Integrity is high, then you should never, or almost never, have to water your garden. But I’m going to hedge my bets by recommending that you do water your garden if you really, really think it’s been too long without rain.

Another reason that your garden may need supplemental watering is that traditional or-namental garden practices tend to create soil that is low in organic matter. Until you’ve created good, fertile soil it will not be retaining moisture the way it should and so your garden may require supplemental watering until you’ve healed it.

But definitely remember this: just because your neighbours are watering their lawns is not a sign that you should be watering your native plant garden because your garden has Integrity and a lawn does not.

If you need to water your garden then your tree especially needs to be watered because trees need much more water than plants. The bigger the tree the more water it needs. Baby trees need less water but more frequent watering. If your tree is a new, nursery-bought sapling then it will need even more watering because it will be lacking roots.

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A couple of words about shrub and tree care!You should rarely need to prune shrubs and trees Reason one. Before you buy a shrub or tree you are going to know exactly where you intend to plant it. Then you will ask yourself the question, “When this plant is mature will it still fit into its intended space?”. If the answer is “No”, you will then hunt around for a different plant, shrub, or tree that when mature will fit into your space. Then there should rarely be a need to prune this shrub or tree.

Reason two. Let’s take the beautiful Alternate-leaved Dogwood as an example of a na-tive shrub you might be thinking of pruning. The Alternate-leaved Dogwood has been around for millions of years. During this time it wasn’t just sitting around looking pretty, but changing and adapting itself to its environment to be not only the most perfect Alter-nate-leaved Dogwood you have ever seen, but also the Alternate-leaved Dogwood most likely to survive. Do you really think that today you could prune this shrub into a new and improved Alternate-leaved Dogwood? Your Alternate-leaved Dogwood knows ex-actly how to become an Alternate-leaved Dogwood without any outside advice. Please don’t go around pruning perfection, whether it be an Alternate-leaved Dogwood, a Nan-nyberry, or a Wild Black Cherry tree. Leave your trees and shrubs alone.

Don’t plant your tree too deep It is better to plant the tree a little too shallow than a little too deep. A tree should be planted at the depth where you can still see the tops of the very first roots. You will see that the trunk swells out a bit just before the roots start. This swelling should be above ground level.

Do not wrap around your tree wire or a garden hose It can damage your tree for the rest of its life and may even shorten the life of your tree even after the wire has been removed. You can buy elastic bands for staking purposes and even then you should remove the band when no longer needed.

You should mulch around your newly planted tree but the mulch should not come right up to touch the bark of the tree. This would create a perfectly bad place for bad bugs and tree rot to grow. The mulch around the tree should look like a donut with the tree in the middle. Also, too many people think that once their shrub/hedge/tree is planted everything is right with the world. If you do not plant a garden or a ground cover under your shrub/hedge/tree, then once the mulch has worn out you’ll have weeds for a long, long time. Plant a garden around the shrub/hedge/tree to keep the weeds out.



All newly planted trees need frequent watering for the first three years at leastWhenever your garden plants need to be watered in a drought then your tree especially needs to be watered because trees need way, way more water than plants. The bigger the tree the more water it needs. Baby trees need less water but more frequent water-ing. If your tree is a new nursery-bought sapling then it will need even more watering because it will be lacking roots.

Lawns are bad for trees Lawns form a very thick carpet over the ground doing their best to suck up all rain be-fore it reaches the soil. Hence, your tree will suffer. All trees should have a garden be-neath their canopy with any lawn stopping outside the tree’s drip line.

Putting your garden to bed for the winter Your garden is a big boy and doesn’t need any help to go to bed. Native plants have been surviving winters by themselves for millennia. Let them do it their way. The best thing you can do is to sit back and enjoy the changing of the season. When the leaves fall, let them lie. Sweep them up from the patio, driveway, and sidewalk and throw them onto your compost pile. Don’t “neaten up” the garden. Leave the dead stems and fallen fruits. Let the grasses flop over. All this plant litter form the blankets that will protect your plants, insects, and pupae during the long night of winter just the way they’ve been doing it for ages. Nature will thank you for it and the dead stems and seed heads will look dramatic sticking up above the snows.

Waking your garden up in the spring If there is ever a time to stay out of the garden it is now. Your garden is at its most delicate and fragile state. Under the leaves and just beneath the soil little itsy-bitsy deli-cate green shoots and seedlings are just beginning to grow. They are never more vul-nerable. You can’t see them. They survived all winter long. Please don’t step on them now. On your shrubs and baby trees the buds that survived outdoors all winter are starting to produce little bits of green that are going to become your leaves and flowers, i.e. you plant’s future. Don’t brush them off the stem now as you walk past.

The soil of your garden is thawing and full of moisture which makes the ground very, very soft. If you walk on it you will crush that soil down and squeeze out all the moisture and air that your roots need and it could be a long time before that compacted soil gets loosened up again by worms and such. Please stay off of the moist garden soil.

You may be considering raking out last year’s leaves to help the plant shoots reach the sun. If your garden has tree leaves on it then your garden is either a Forest Floor, For-


est Glade or an Open Woods. If you’ve planted the plants that are Community Mem-bers of these garden types then they will know how to cope with these leaves, so you can leave them right there.

Also, these leaves will do all the fantastic things that leaves on the ground do: provide homes for insects (food for wildlife), provide shelter for wildlife, and decompose right into your soil to provide fertilizer and improve your Under Garden. Many moths and but-terflies spend the winter hibernating as pupae in this leaf litter.

If you’ve mulched your garden with additional leaves from your neighbour’s yard then rake out these extra leaves and add them to your compost pile.

If the leaves are Norway maple leaves, then, yes, without walking into the garden use a long handled rake to rake out the Norway leaves and package them up for the city’s col-lection. These leaves will smother your plants because they take forever to decompose and will poison the soil with phytotoxins. Replace Norway maple leaves with organic compost.

Keeping your Prairie, Meadow, or Open Woods fresh Prairie, Meadow, and Open Woods grasses and sedges are not meant to be cut. Some of them will actually die if mown just a few times a year. However, nature has a natural way of stopping prairies and meadows from becoming over grown.

In nature fire sweeps through prairies and meadows every few years keeping them fresh. This is a necessary and beneficial occurrence that returns the nutrients that have been locked in the dead stems of grasses for years back into and enriching the soil. It also reduces the thatch covering the ground to allow new plant shoots to find sunlight.

If your yard is a Prairie, or Meadow, or Open Woods garden you can try to mimic this process by mowing it, but no more often than once every three years. You may want to run the lawn mower over the garden a few times to chew up the stems because you are trying to reduce the dead stems to a size where they will easily compost into the ground.

Some people with Prairie or Meadow gardens actually have a controlled grass fire right on their yard. Sally Wasowslki’s book, Gardening with Prairie Plants, gives instructions for this technique. I believe this is too risky in suburbia.

It’s debatable in which season it is best to do this mowing to minimize disturbance to the nature in your garden. You could try doing it in a different season each third year. Or you could do one section of your garden in one year and a different section the next year, so that every three years your garden gets completely done.



Are bugs eating your plants? Plants are for eating. That’s their biological purpose on this planet. A plant that only feeds itself is a very selfish plant indeed. Every time I see that the leaves of my plants have holes in them, I rejoice. It means that my plants are being eaten and they are attracting wildlife into my garden, even if the wildlife are bugs. You do not get but-terflies or moths without bugs because butterflies and moths begin their lives as bugs. You don’t get birds without bugs because birds eat bugs. If you want to see a Monarch Butterfly, a Hummingbird Clearwing Moth or a Yellow Warbler then you grow native plants because the leaves, roots, seeds and flowers of these plants feed bugs.

At times you will get way too many bugs or you will get super destructive non-native bugs like the Japanese Rose Beetle and the life of you plant will be in jeopardy. You may decide that action needs to be taken. Refer to your nursery, fellow gardeners, and gardening books for advice. Try to minimize the use of chemical insecticides because, simply put, they are poisons.

For things like aphids, say “kumbaya” and try tolerating them. They most likely won’t kill your plant and ladybird bugs and ants love them. But if you really think the life of your plant is in danger, squish them with your fingers or hose the plant down with strong jets of water just to keep their numbers in check. If your bugs are Japanese Rose Beetles then they definitely need to die because they will kill your plant. They will show up day after day and eat and eat and multiply and multiply. Pick them off by hand every day.

!!!!!!!!!!!(c) John Boydell !59

Removing lawn (and saving your bit of the planet) Replacing your lawn with a native plant garden is one of the very best things you can do to benefit nature and to turn your neighbourhood into cottage country.

You may decide to replace a little bit, quite a bit, a lot, or all of your lawn with native plants. How do you get rid of lawn? You can find detailed instructions on-line or in books. The book, “Gardening with Prairie Plants”, by Sally Wasowski, is excellent for this, but the following will give you the gist of your options.

The Least Effort: Don’t do anything. Just plant your new native plants right into your lawn. Then totally baby your new plants with water and totally ignore the lawn. Contin-ue adding new plants and removing lawn each year. If you only water your plants and ignore the lawn then the lawn will eventually take the hint, die out, and the natives will inherit the earth. If you can, do not mow the lawn during this time. Your lawn at its nat-ural height will provide food and shelter for nature. When digging the hole for your plant make it a whole lot wider than you normally would and mulch heavily to give your plant some much needed grass-free space. Never let garbage collect and pull the heads off dandelions once they’ve gone to seed to keep your garden looking nice while it’s slowly being converted into a garden. Caveat: this one is a bit risky because if your plants aren’t robust enough the lawn may encroach and overwhelm.

A Bit More Effort: Before planting your garden lower the blade on your lawnmower and give your lawn the shortest brush-cut you can, preferably right to the ground. Then plant your garden as above.

The No Rush: Cover every square inch of your lawn with cardboard and weigh the cardboard with lots of pots or other weights to stop the wind from removing everything. Let the cardboard sit for at least one complete growing season. Then remove the card-board and plant your plants. If you do this just before winter, you can remove the card-board at the end of spring and the summer is yours.

The Quick but not Easiest: Cover every square inch of your lawn with several layers of newspaper and then hose the newspaper down to keep it in place. Cover the newspa-per with two inches of compost and plant your plants right into the ground through the compost and newspapers. Proceed to garden.

I’m in a Hurry: Till your lawn into oblivion either with a roto-tiller thing or by hand with a shovel. Squish the peaks down a bit and then proceed to garden.



What to tell your neighbours? If you’ve been convinced that adding food and shelter for wildlife in the form of native plants makes your world a better place, then maybe you’ve also decided to replace some or all of your “lawn garden” with a “native plant garden”. Then it is possible that a few of your neighbours may not know what to think about it. I want you to be prepared.

People often love and are very attached to their lawns. They are also often in love and very attached to their neighbours’ lawns. If they see a neighbour doing something “dif-ferent” with their lawn, they might immediately start worrying about property values and messiness. What your neighbours want above all is neatness. What they fear above all is messiness. You may need to defend yourself. Here are some strategies in prevent-ing frayed nerves.

1. Replace short lawns with short plants You may be tempted to plant a forest of stunningly beautiful eight foot tall Compass Plants out there. Gorgeous. However, if your neighbours’ lawns are currently pris-tine, you may want to restrain yourself and use the tall plants only for accents. See page 41 for a list of short, tidy plants.

2. Keep your new front yard cleanPick up any garbage right away. Pull the tops off any dandelions once they’ve gone to see. Don’t attract the critical eye. Once late spring arrives cut down tall dead stems into little pieces and spread them around the garden. Pull out obvious weeds. Don’t let your sidewalk and driveway be messy. Bring in your garbage cans. Be a Good Neighbour.

3. Be strict about the very front of the yard that runs along the sidewalk You may want to have a stretch of real lawn that you keep mown. Border the side-walk with a row of low, flowering native shrubs or ornamental plants that everyone can appreciate. In my yard a row of beautiful hydrangeas bordering the sidewalk calms frayed nerves. Or you could put in a short, high quality, edging fence.

4. Confuse them Grow some non-native, ornamental flowers in the middle of your native plant garden.

5. Best of all, educate them Point out all the different plants and what makes them special. Point out how there are flowers blooming all year long. Explain how you are making their street a better place. Give them a copy of this guide.


!!!!!!!!!!!!!Choosing a neat and tidy front yard garden If you’ve elected to replace your lawn with a Prairie, Meadow or Open Woods, well, ku-dos to you. However, you may be hesitating because you’ve seen examples of these yards and, in your eyes, they look like a shabby mess. There are alternatives to this. We are accustomed to really short lawns, so plants six feet tall in the front yard can be a real affront to our eyes.

There are plenty of plants that grow to very neat heights of no more than three feet at their tallest. See page 41 for examples of short, tidy plants.



Zen in the Garden To create peace and calm for yourself in your garden you might want to think about Zen. Zen, I’m told, is the careful harmonization of natural elements and nature in order to as-sist with meditation and the contemplation of the true meaning of life.

Zen in the garden will not just create peace and calm for yourself. It will create peace and calm for the wildlife you’ve attracted, allowing them to go about their daily and nightly business undisturbed.

Zen is the sound of wind in the trees and the rustle and whisper of little animals. It is not the sound of Vivaldi’s “The Seasons” through backyard speakers. Turn the speak-ers off when you’re not there. Let baby birds hear their mothers, animals hear their mat-ing calls, and prey hear the stalking of predators. Let yourself hear the beauty of the world.

Zen is moonlight, starlight, and fireflies. It is not floodlighting. Mood lighting, maybe, but not floodlights. Turn off your outdoor lights when you go to bed. Leave night to the night creatures, let the owls roost in your trees, and have your before bed cocktail in peace.

Zen is the sound of gently flowing, dripping water. It is not a swimming pool nor the mo-torized hum of your swimming pool’s water filter. Swimming pools are here to stay but try to place the motor away from you garden, swaddle its sound and turn it off at night. Let animals hear their mating calls and the stalking of predators. Let yourself hear the beauty of nature.

Zen is the beauty of natural, weathered rock and stone. It is not slabs of power washed concrete. It makes sense to have your patio made of durable concrete but paths through your garden made of stepping stones, broken pottery, or wood chips will allow water to flow through and leave room for nature to poke out. Minimize the concrete and maximize the green. It will assist with “meditation and the contemplation of the true meaning of life”.

Zen is the sound of crickets and katydids. This will not be possible if you use a leaf blower to blow every cricket and katydid from here to eternity. I live in a very lush, leafy neighbourhood where leaf blowers are rampant and as a consequence the sound of crickets is not what it should be. A healthy neighbourhood at night is a symphony with the music of a panoply of nature.

Zen is watching time change a baby tree into a giant. It is not cheating time by buying a medium sized tree with almost no roots and praying it survives several years until it has


grown some. Nelson Henderson, a second generation farmer in the Swan River Valley of Manitoba, said, “The true meaning of life, is to plant trees under whose shade you do not expect to sit”. Planting a baby tree epitomizes faith and hope for the future. How can it be possible to plant a tree without thinking of future generations? It takes courage to plant a little tree. Go ahead, be courageous and feel proud of yourself.

In a Zen garden, nothing is left to chance; every element is chosen, positioned, and pruned with deliberation to achieve harmony. The pruning of the plant is critical in mak-ing nature fit into man’s idea of a pleasing shape in order to allow peace to enter the viewer’s mind. But in a native plant Zen garden this harmony is achieved naturally. The designer of the garden, that’s you, chooses native plants that fit naturally into your over-all plan. Choose plants whose natural height, width, shape, colour, and behaviour fit with all the other elements of your garden without the need for pruning.

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Master of the World That’s you. Powerful natural cycles making all life possible are continuously working their way around this planet. Because of the native plant garden you’ve created they are happening in your very yard.

Carbon is an essential element for life because it is a component of proteins, carbohy-drates and other necessary organic molecules. Carbon is constantly cycling from the atmosphere into plants through photosynthesis and then into animals and us when we eat the plants and animals, and also into water, seashells, rock, coal, natural gas, oil, back into water, rock, plants, and then us again, and eventually maybe thousands of years later back into the air and then back into plants, the oceans and around and around. It is plants through photosynthesis that are first able to capture carbon and in-corporate it into life forms and make life possible. This Carbon Cycle is happening in your very yard because of the garden you created.

Nitrogen is crucial for life because it is a necessary component of proteins. 80% of the earth’s air is composed of nitrogen. However, nitrogen is perfectly happy staying in the air and so plants must depend on the kindness of strangers living in your Under Garden, i.e. bacteria, to capture for the plants the nitrogen they require to grow and reproduce. This nitrogen fixation is performed by nitrogen-fixing bacteria that convert nitrogen from the air into compounds in the soil and water that plants can absorb through their roots and then use as a nutrient. In some cases the nitrogen-fixing bacteria do their job right inside the roots. Then animals, pests, and us eat the plants to obtain their nitrogen in order to grow and reproduce. Then more animals, and pests, and us eat those animals and pests to obtain their nitrogen and around and around. Then these animals excrete, die and decompose and the nitrogen returns to the soil and water again. At some un-knowable time the nitrogen will return to the air. This Nitrogen Cycle is happening in your very yard because of the healthy soil and Under Garden you created.

Water is crucial for life. Forever circling around the planet water moves from clouds, fogs, humidity, rain, snow, and dew into runoff, groundwater, oceans, ice, lakes, ponds, rivers, streams, reservoirs, glaciers, aquifers, swamps, and marshes into plants, bugs, animals, and us and then out again via transpiration, perspiration, urination or decom-position. It can take many thousands of years for water to move back into the air. This is the Hydrologic Cycle. When water leaves your garden it can be clean, or pollut-ed, or acidic, or salty depending upon your Gardening Style. Watering your gar-den you can drain aquifers depending upon your Gardening Style. Hint: grow all the various native plants that suit your garden type; don’t use chemical fertilizers, use


plant and animal litter and compost; limit the use of pesticides; limit the use of concrete; limit the use of salt on your sidewalks; create a healthy Under Garden.

Energy is captured and flowing through your garden. The very first step in this process is that the energy of the sun is captured and held in your plants through the process of photosynthesis. Almost all life on this planet depends on this, including yours. Your plants use this energy to grow and reproduce. Then all kinds of animals, all kinds of pests, and us come along and eat these plants stealing some of the energy they cap-tured from the sun. These animals, pests, and us use this energy to grow and repro-duce. Then other animals, pests, and us come along to eat those animals to steal their energy to grow and reproduce. And then they are eaten in their turn. When these plants, animals, pests, and us die they are then consumed by members of the Under Garden Community to grow and reproduce and in the process produce nutrients avail-able to your plants for new growth. These are Food Chains and Food Webs: everything eating each other in order to grow and reproduce by obtaining the energy originally cap-tured by your plants. In my backyard there is birth, life, pillage, murder and death. This flow of energy makes life possible. This Energy is flowing through your very yard because of the native plant garden you created and the nature you’ve attracted.

All this worldly power is in your hands when you create a native plant garden.

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An opossum, Canada’s only marsupial. Here’s this little guy on snow. I have seen them in my backyard in both Toronto & Houston.



A word about Leaf Blowers, IF YOU CAN HEAR ME!Would you really be unable to sleep at night if a blade of grass or some stray leaf was running amok somewhere on your property? Do you really think that the dirt in your garden is supposed to be clean? Are you neurotic?

When I was a boy my father taught me to never leave grass trimmings on either our dri-veway, the neigbour’s driveway or the public sidewalk. The 2 minute solution was to run the lawnmower around on this concrete and asphalt with the lawnmower grass exhaust pointing in towards our lawn. That was it. This leaf leaf blower nonsense your land-scaper is inflicting on the neighbourhood is nothing but nutso-cuckoo craziness to con-vince you with a lot of noise that they are earning their money. Good employees come, do their job, and go without anyone knowing they were there. Please tell whoever cuts your grass to minimize leaf blowing. Nobody needs all that noise and fumes. It’s just plain rude.

Or, replace the lawn with a garden and then no grass or leaves ever will need to be blown again. Let the grass and leaves lie. Besides avoiding the noise and fumes, let-ting leaf litter lie is good for your garden. It’s free mulch, free fertilizer and provides refuge for bugs and the pupae of butterflies, especially in winter. Providing refuge for bugs provides food for the songbirds you want to attract to your yard. Let the beautiful birds debug your yard for you. And what’s more, some of these birds will search your yard in the spring for last year’s dead blades of grass with which to build their nests. Don’t disappoint them.


In which season is it best to plant? When you have the plants in your hot little hands!

I’ve read that spring is the best time to plant. Well, by the time the ground is dry enough to walk on, I’ve chosen the plants I want, I’ve made it to the nursery to buy the plants, and I have a free weekend to garden it is now summer. Am I going to wait until next year? I’d never get my plants in the ground.

Plant’em when you’ve got’em. You can plant your plants in any season except in the dead of winter.

Just remember that in the summer you have to be especially diligent to water consis-tently. Newly planted plants will die if they have to endure any dry spell.

Having said that, my preferred time to plant is in the late fall after the drying sun of summer, during the cool rains of fall so that they are already in the ground and ready to grow the following year at the very first warm, wet days of spring and they have a big head start before the drying sun of summer returns. The drawback of planting in the fall is that the plants you want may no longer be available in the nursery that late in the season.

So, plant them when you have them in your hot little hands, and then let the watering begin.

!!!!!!!!!!!(c) John Boydell !68


6. ATTRACT BIRDS, BEES, AND BUTTERFLIES The more varieties of plants you grow then the more varieties of birds, bees, and butterflies you will attract into your garden. This is because the multitude of vari-eties of plants will provide a multitude of varieties of food and shelter to attract more va-rieties of nature.

The more varieties of birds, bees, and butterflies you attract the higher your gar-den’s Integrity. This is because the different varieties of nature will keep the popula-tions of wildlife (like plant-eating bugs) in your garden under control. Since all this wildlife is eating each other, no one wildlife population will grow too big for very long.

The secret to attracting all this nature is to grow native plants. Lots of them. And lots of varieties. Grow all the different kinds of native plants that suit your garden type. Grow grasses, flowers, shrubs, vines, and trees. Lots. In other words, the greater the In-tegrity of your garden the greater the varieties of birds, bees, and butterflies. Oh, and you should learn to love your garden’s bugs.

Nature can be divided into two broad categories. There is the half of nature that EATS the other half, and then there is the half that is EATEN by the first half. To attract nature into your garden start with a part of nature that the other half eat: native plants. The more varieties of plants you grow then the more varieties of nature you will attract to eat the different plants. Then having attracted one variety of nature you will attract another variety to eat the first and then another to eat that variety and so on. A garden with high Integrity is like a table groaning with food: there is something to eat for everybody.

They say that for every man there is a woman, but I know for sure that for every native plant there is a bug that was made to eat it, and another bug to eat that bug, and a bird to eat that bug, and a bigger bird to eat that bird, and a chipmunk to eat that bird’s eggs, and an owl to eat that chipmunk, and when that owl dies there are worms to eat it, and birds to eat those worms, and on and on. Now you know the real secret of life: plants and bugs.

Butterfly Garden Everyone wants a Butterfly Garden. A Butterfly Garden is really a “Butterfly Bar” where on an afternoon the butterflies can get together and sip a cool one. However, butterflies also need to lay their eggs on a plant that has the leaves their lar-vae can eat. Unfortunately, the butterfly bar and the larvae restaurant are often on two different plants. So what you really want to grow is a “Butterfly Licensed Restaurant”. In other words, you should grow all the varieties of plants that suit your garden type so that it contains the plants that provide nectar for the adults and the plants that provide


edible leaves for their larvae. Then you can satisfy all the needs of your butterflies and actually attract more and even produce more butterflies.

Every good garden deserves a Birdbath Don’t choose one with a deep pool. Birds like the water to be no more than 2 inches deep. Change the water about once a week to keep the water clean and the mosquitos out. Special Note: leave the birdbath outside in the winter. Winter is a drought for birds and they need sources of water.

Every good garden deserves a Bird Feeder Actually, every single backyard should have a bird feeder to replace the bird food lost when we plant lawns. Go to a reputable nature store (probably not a pet shop) and ask for feed that won’t attract pigeons. Usu-ally the more sunflower seeds the better the quality of feed. Find a place for it safe from squirrels. Best of luck.

Every good garden deserves a Hummingbird Feeder Yes, those cheap plastic hummingbird feeders work. You should see hummingbirds feeding every summer day. Use 1 part sugar to 4 parts water heated on the stove until the sugar is dissolved. Don’t use honey or syrup or anything calorie reduced. Replace the sugar water at least week-ly in hot weather before it ferments and don’t place the feeder directly in the sun. Or you can buy nectar with preservatives from nature stores. I prefer 1 cup water, 1/4 cup icing sugar, shaken like mad, not stirred.

Cats I hate to say it but cats belong indoors. I let my cat out into the backyard only un-der escort. Giving your cat free reign of the garden is like giving a fox free reign of the hen house. Really. A fledging bird plopping down in your garden should not be like a treat under the table for your cat. Look at this mother Robin. Would you hand her child to your cat?

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Bees$Everybody knows and loves honey and bumble bees. But, yes, wasps and hornets also have their place in Nature’s Garden and you want to tolerate them just like the lovable bees. They all make the world go around.

According to newspapers, maintaing bee hives in cities is becoming popular in order to help the declining bee population. What will all these bees eat if they are unable find in the city their source of food - native plant flowers? Feed the needy bees from your gar-den.

You might not realize this, but besides the well known bees there are lots and lots of other bees that don’t look like the bees you know. They tend to look just like little flying bugs hovering over your flowers. Some of them actually are bugs and not bees but they behave just like bees on your flowers; they’re the wanna-bees. These smaller unknown bees and bugs are actually just as lovable, if not more lovable, than honey and bumble bees because they are just tiny little, unloved guys going about their business fertilizing your flowers without any praise. Botanists are now thinking that these guys might actu-ally do more fertilizing of flowers than honeybees. So give them the love they deserve.

Many of these bees make their homes in little holes in bare earth. Another reason not to mulch heavily and not dig into your garden with shovel or trowel. Leave their homes alone.

What does nature look like? Sure, you love the birds and the bees and the butterflies, but don’t forget about all the seeds, nuts, fruits, grasses, sedges, rushes, flowers, trees, vines, shrubs, bugs, worms, fruit flies, yellow jackets, hornets, slugs, ants, daddy longlegs, crickets, tent caterpillars, mosses, mushrooms, toadstools, centipedes, millipedes, slimes, moulds, aphids, spi-ders, vultures, mice, rabbits, porcupines, fox, raccoons, skunks, opossums, moles, voles, mink, toads, frogs, squirrels, snakes, salamanders, groundhogs, gophers, micro-scopic worms, protozoa, bacteria, nematodes, bats, owls, and even the hawk attacking the birds at your feeder.

All this nature have their rightful places in Nature’s Garden. They are all part of the Food Web. They all make the world a better place. They all make the world go around. They all together have their roles to play in keeping Nature’s Garden a smoothly func-tioning machine. All are good and you should try tolerating all of them if you are lucky enough to find them in your garden.


What does food for nature look like? Food for nature looks exactly like the nature listed above because that’s exactly what nature eats.

Nature eats nature. Nature doesn’t go to the neighbourhood grocery store. Your gar-den is its grocery store and all the different elements of your garden (plants, shrubs, trees, soil, and plant and animal litter) are the shelves of their store. So set up their store with all the varieties of plants that suit your garden type, plenty of plant and animal litter, and also a healthy Under Garden with a full Under Garden Community in order to attract all the possible nature which will then fill the shelves of their own grocery store with themselves.

Where does nature live? In the usual places such as nests in trees and shrubs and in holes in the ground. But also under and within garden debris: the bodies of leaves, grasses, plants, dead ani-mals, bugs, logs, branches, twigs, animal poop, in log and brush piles, in trees and shrubs; in dirt and mud and water; under bark and rocks and in holes in trees; in the hol-low stems of grasses and plants; under pots and in cracks in the pavement. Just let all that stuff lie undisturbed. If the debris is too big to look attractive to you then cut it smaller or move the larger branches to the sides of your yard where they’ll blend in.

Where does nature find its food? Nature finds its food exactly where nature lives because nature eats nature. These are the Food Chains and Food Webs necessary for life to continue. So just leave all that stuff listed above alone to provide homes and refuges for nature.



Leave dead plants, shrubs & trees standing to decompose naturally To attract more birds, bees, and butterflies into your garden and to fertilize the soil of your garden, leave dead plants, grass, sedge, shrubs, and trees standing. Dead plants attract the nature that use them for food and shelter. Then this nature will attract other nature that will use them for food which will attract even more. If you chop down a dead tree you will be chopping down the future homes of woodpeckers, sap-suckers, chickadees, nuthatches, owls, squirrels, and raccoons. You will be chopping down the perches of birds, hawks and owls. You will be chopping down the homes of the multitude of bugs that attract the multitudes of nature that use them for food.

Perhaps you think I’m crazy telling you to leave dead or damaged trees to stand. But without these trees and their holes, where would owls, woodpeckers, wrens, and chick-adees raise their young and keep their species alive?

Decomposing brush piles and log piles on your property are critical food and shelter for little over wintering animals, bugs, bees, and spiders plus their larvae and eggs.

Letting dead plants, grasses, sedges, shrubs, and trees slowly decompose into your garden will provide your soil with the nutrients required by your living plants. Dead plants are composed of the nutrients that came originally from your soil. If you ship off these dead plants into the garbage then you are robbing your living plants of the nutrition they need to grow big and strong. Ashes to ashes. Dust to dust. Gar-den to garden. The lives of the living are built with the bones of the dead. Another se-cret of life, that which comes from the earth should return to the earth otherwise the earth’s resources will be lost.

Dead plants are not always the most attractive things to see in your garden, but they don’t last forever and you can grow new plants around them and over them. Plant a vine at their base to climb up the dead shrub or tree. Trim it down a bit to make it more manageable for the eye. Be sure to especially leave the trunks of trees standing to pro-vide food and shelter for bees, woodpeckers, chickadees, nuthatches, and owls. Dead trees can be dangerous. Chop off the overhanging parts but leave the rest standing. Leave the dead branches somewhere in your yard to continue to feed and shelter na-ture and to decompose into the nutrients that will fertilize your soil.


IF A SPARROW FALLS WILL YOU HEAR IT? Actually, it will most likely be a songbird and, no, you will never hear it sing again. It has been estimated that in North America one billion birds a year are killed by flying into windows. The vast majority of these birds are songbirds and the vast majority of them crash into houses, not office towers. Every year fewer collisions are occurring be-cause every year there are fewer songbirds. Think about that.

The deadliest floors are the first four floors where birds can see the reflections of trees in the windows. The deadliest time is during the spring and fall migrations. The birds think they’re flying from tree to tree but instead they fly full speed, head first into the re-flection of a tree on a window pane. Then they die.

I learned all this listening to Anna Maria Tremonti interview Michael Mesure of FLAP and Christie Sheppard of The American Bird Conservancy on the radio show The Current, CBC One, on October 7, 2014. I could hardly bear to listen to it.

Currently the best solution to window collisions that I’m aware of are decals that stick to the outside of the window. There are those black silhouettes of hawks that you may have seen. Not the most attractive. But they have these new smaller and much less obvious decals that use ultraviolet colours that birds can see but we can’t. To us they just look like little fuzzy areas on the window. They are very appropriate to use at home. These decals are placed on the outside of the window in order to distort the reflection of the tree that the bird sees. They do not use a glue and peel off easily without leaving a mark.

Use these decals on houses with trees in the yard and on those houses with beautiful expansive windows. It won’t ruin your view by applying a few of these little decals. Please go to your local nature store and pick some up.

During the writing of this guide I was sitting on my patio reading the newspaper. Above me I heard a thump, a small squeak, and a plop behind me. I had never seen a Yellow Sapsucker before, but now I had the chance to hold a yearling in my hands. That day I wrote a cheque to The Nature Conservancy of Canada but I’d much rather have had that Yellow Sapsucker still alive.



ON-LINE RESOURCES http://findnativeplants.com/ The site to help you find your nearest native plant nursery & organization.

http://www.nanps.org/Markhams’s local native plant society. If you have a question about a plant, e.g. if a plant is native to your locale, email these people.

Native Plant Lists - Toronto - City of TorontoExplains how to select and buy native plants, controlling invasive plants, and guidelines for planting and maintenance.

http://grandmorainegrowers.ca/Grand Moraine Growers native plant nursery. Their extensive product lists contain nec-essary information for each plant. Print out a copy for when you go shopping, no matter where you shop.

http://www.stwilliamsnursery.com/St. Williams Nursery & Ecology Centre. Ontario’s largest native plant nursery.

http://www.illinoiswildflowers.info/Detailed information and wonderful photographs. Good for Ontario and Quebec.

https://www.wildflower.org/explore.phpLady Bird Johnson and Helen Hayes founded an organization to protect and preserve North America's native plants and natural landscapes. This is their Website. To call it extensive is an understatement.

http://plants.usda.gov/java/The United States Department of Agriculture’s Natural Resources Conservation Service. Very extensive. Includes plants native to Canada.

http://www.grandriver.ca/index/document.cfm?Sec=48&Sub1=5&Sub2=0The Grand River Conservation Authority. Good information on planting and growing trees.

http://environment.uwaterloo.ca/research/watgreen/pdfs/NativeSpecies.pdf The University of Waterloo. Useful, concise information on native trees.

http://www.ontariotrees.com/

http://www.ontariowildflower.com/This is “Andy’s Northern Ontario Wildflowers”. Andy must be a wonderful person.


http://findnativeplants.com

http://www.nanps.org

http://www.google.ca/url?q=http://www1.toronto.ca/city_of_toronto/parks_forestry__recreation/urban_forestry/files/pdf/guide_to_native_plant_lists_intro.pdf&sa=u&ei=kiohvjpun5d_yqst6ai&ved=0cbkqfjab&usg=afqjcnffpsxe6fclmvvkufxzoekoi2lvqg

http://grandmorainegrowers.ca

http://www.stwilliamsnursery.com

http://www.illinoiswildflowers.info

https://www.wildflower.org/explore.php

http://plants.usda.gov/java/

http://www.grandriver.ca/index/document.cfm?sec=48&sub1=5&sub2=0

http://environment.uwaterloo.ca/research/watgreen/pdfs/NativeSpecies.pdf

http://www.ontariotrees.com

http://www.ontariowildflower.com

BOOKS TO TEACH AND INSPIRE All these books are useful to anyone living in southernish Ontario.Refer to: http://www.fs.fed.us/wildflowers/features/books/northeastbooks.shtml for books used by the botanists of the United States Department of Agriculture Forest Service.

Watchers at the Pond; Franklin RussellWhen I die if I were to be buried with just one book it would be this one. An account of the natural life around a pond over the course of one year. Depicts the Garden of Eden that we are creating by gardening with native plants.

Bringing Nature Home; Douglas W. TallamyThis is the book that inspired me to become a native plant bible thumper. It spells out the evidence that growing native plants around your home can restore dwindling wildlife species by providing the food and shelter that they require to survive and that without these native plants the nature that we have taken for granted will disappear from our lives, much to our harm.

Brooklyn Botanic Garden All-Region Guides: Great Natives for Tough Places;Going Native Biodiversity in our Own Backyards;Healthy Soils for Sustainable Gardens.

100 Easy-to-Grow Native Plants for Canadian Gardens; Lorraine JohnsonThis is an excellent book to begin learning all about the plants you’re liable to find at your nursery. It is the first native plant book I ever bought and I still refer to it because learning about 100 common plants teaches you a bit about almost every other plant. One plant per page so it’s very easy to read. For each of the 100, it lists Good Com-panion Plants and Related Species to further increase your plant knowledge.

Gardening with Prairie Plants: How to Create Beautiful Native Landscapes; Sally WasowskiHugely inspiring and educational. Unless your garden is a forest floor it will have plants and advice in it for you. Perfect for those who want to replace their yard with a prairie, meadow, or open woods garden.

Native Plants for Prairie Gardens; June FlanaganA compact, Canadian version of the previous book.

Wetland Plants of Ontario; Newmaster, Harris, KershawIncludes all the plants that will grow in anything from damp soil to standing water. This book, as well as the next two, as an added bonus spells out the benefits each plant pro-


http://www.fs.fed.us/wildflowers/features/books/northeastbooks.shtml


vides to specific animal species. So for instance, if you grow purple flowering raspberry you can expect a hungry moose to show up in your yard. Something to look forward to.

Forest Plants of Northeastern Ontario; Karen Legasy

Forest Plants of Central Ontario; Chambers, Legasy, and Bentley

Shrubs of Ontario; James H. Soper and Margaret L. Heimburger

Trees in Canada; John Laird Farrar

The ROM Field Guide to Wildflowers of Ontario; Dickinson, Metsger, Bull, DickinsonThe ROM is the Royal Ontario Museum.

Landscaping with Native Plants of Michigan; Lynn M. SteinerVery detailed, informative, and educational.

Grasses, An Identification Guide; Lauren BrownNot a very big book and probably won’t be of use to a lot of people, however, it gives clear and concise information and drawings on the many grasses, sedges and rushes. It dispels the notion that grass is grass and that it’s all pretty boring. You can flip through this book and develop a real hunger to grow as many of these almost 200 grasses as possible.

Soil Biology Primer Soil and Water Conservation Society in cooperation with the USDA Natural Resources Conservation Service. Available over the Internet. Just in case you thought I made up all that stuff about the Under Garden, this inexpensive and concise Primer gives you the total low-down. You cannot have a healthy garden without a healthy Under Garden.

Introductory Botany: Plants, People, and The Environment; Linda BergA college textbook and a bit technical in places. A bit pricey but there should be used copies available.

Botany for Gardeners; Brian CaponA nice, informative, compact botany book.

Pour le Jardinage de Plantes Indigènes Pour les jardiniers du Québec, je m'excuse que je n'ai pas un guide spécialement pour le Québec ou un guide en langue française. Cependant, Flora Quebeca, que vous pouvez retrouver ici, http://www.floraquebeca.qc.ca/, est la société de plantes indigènes au Québec et ils sont là pour vous aider. Aussi, un trés bon nombre des plantes in-digènes de l'Ontario sont également originaires du Québec.


http://www.floraquebeca.qc.ca/

!!!!!!!!!!!!!John BoydellAbsolutely needs nature in his life and in his own yard. He lives in Toronto.Bachelor of Arts (Latin), Bachelor of Mathematics; University of Waterloo.Nursing Diploma; George Brown College.Introductory Botany I, Introduction to Native Plants; Humber College.Introductory Organic Gardening I; Gaia College.

For the Love of Nature Frontyard RestorationA non-registered charity dedicated to the promotion of Native Plant gardens on our sub-urban properties to create natural habitat that allow wildlife to live amongst us.

When I die don’t bury me at all just strip me naked and leave me raw.Throw me in the woods, let Nature do the rest and I’ll feed the plants and animals that I love best.

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IN SUMMARY 1. Benefiting nature in your backyard benefits wildlife from North to South America.2. Native Plants evolved right in your own neighbourhood, not somewhere else.3. Native Plants offer more food and shelter to wildlife than non-native plants.4. Create fertile soil with Organic Matter, not chemical fertilizers.5. Determine your garden type by the amount of Sun and Moisture it gets.6. Choose all the native plants that suit your garden type.7. Be sure to include lots and lots of grasses and sedges in your garden.8. The native plants in a garden form a strong, unified, tight-knit, protective Community.9. Once your garden is planted, don’t dig into the garden ever again.10. Keep garden soil fertile by letting all plant, leaf & animal litter remain on the ground.11. Attract wildlife into your garden with plants, bird bath & feeder, and letting litter lie.12. Tolerate your garden’s insects; they become wildlife & they are food for wildlife.13) Home windows kill millions of songbirds each year; use bird deterrent decals.14. Front yard lawns starve wildlife to death; replace with a native plant garden.

What you do to the least of our people you do also unto me For many, many years an approximation to this statement hung in the old Bond St. en-trance to St. Michael’s Hospital in downtown Toronto. Every time I read it I could not help but think that the least of our people, the very most needy, are the little animals, plants, and bugs that we tread under foot and bulldozer every single day. Can we not, at the least, return a little bit of their food and shelter to our properties by choosing to grow native plants?


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MAGIC IN THE GARDEN

!!Over my compost bin and beside my Bench of Infinite Caffeine I have a sign that I bought in a magic shop in Charleston, South Carolina. It reads, “Those who don’t believe in magic will never see it.” If you could sit for a bit in my small backyard in downtown Toronto on my bench beneath the Chestnut Tree looking across my tiny Forest Glade with its Purple Flower-ing Raspberry, various shrubs, bird feeder, hummingbird feeder and bird bath, whether in winter or summer, and not see magic, then you never will.


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