My Gardening Evolution: From Traditional Gardener to Native Plant Enthusiast

Canadian Lily

I cannot remember a moment when I was not fascinated by the plant kingdom. Even as a toddler I loved flowers and how they grew. The family home in England was my study center. The old house came with a large garden, complete with a defunct hot house, a rose garden, huge expanses of daffodils and a bluebell wood that we walked through to get to my great-

aunt’s home. By age 12 I had joined the Gardeners Book Club and received regular shipments of hard-bound books that are still on my bookshelves. They tended towards the arcane - minutely detailed instruction on obscure garden topics. Roy Genders’ ‘Pansies Violas and Violets’

prompted me to beg a patch of ground in which to grow enormous ‘Swiss Giant’ pansies, which I did to the great annoyance of my grandmother’s gardener. From Gran I learned how to steal cuttings from desirable plants in the lavish gardens she would visit in her role as the wife of the local Conservative Member of Parliament. After cutting a ribbon or declaring a village fête ‘open’ she would set off on a tour of the rockeries, armed with a razor blade and a plastic sponge bag in which to stash her loot. The resulting plants found homes in her favorite terrace beds and were always referred to by their gardens of origin -- the Knole Aubretia or the Chartwell Erigeron and so on. I later carried this skill to Kew Gardens, where the vicar’s son (a fellow aficionado) and I went to help ourselves to ‘pups’ from the cactus houses to start our own collections.

Through school years, I managed to turn any class assignment into a botanical project.

For English Literature I wrote on the plants in Shakespeare, for History I covered the evolution of gardens from mediaeval times through Capability Brown, and Biology gave me the excuse to collect, press and name every weed and wildflower I could find. When it came to moving on to college, fate, apparently, knew where I belonged. My requests to study philosophy at several big universities were politely declined, but the brand new Bath University of Technology offered me a place in their Horticulture program and my fate was sealed.

New England Aster

None of the jobs in the brave new world of mechanized, chemistry-driven commercial

horticulture that my fellow graduates moved on to held any appeal. I just wanted to learn about plants. Graduate school in the US offered the opportunity to postpone facing reality, and I found myself in Vermont where encounters with forests and mountains took my breath away.

Here was a whole new flora in more or less undisturbed ecosystems that went on for miles and miles, home to plants I had only ever read about or seen in botanical gardens. I discovered Ladies’ Slipper orchids, skunk cabbage and bloodroot, trailing arbutus and wild azaleas all in

their natural settings - real forests the likes of which no longer exist in the UK. It set me on a

course towards making native plants the focus of gardens I was asked to design.

The landscaping traditions I had been raised and trained in were all about the

subjugation and replacement of nature - the creation of tightly managed gardens where foreign species were prized over native plants. Even the cottage gardens that developed as a counter to the rigid formality of the Victorians had their preference for fancy hybrids and exotic imports. Requests for ‘English’ gardens along Maine’s coast were hard to meet. It felt like sacrilege to tear out the unique and highly specialized plant communities - evolved to survive its thin soils and harsh climate - to make room for plants that belong to a different continent and style. Even more jarring was the demand to install the popular ‘low maintenance’ plants of every landscapers’ catalog - great beds of Hostas and Hydrangeas, destined to become snacks for hungry deer. Why, I asked, would anyone blessed enough to live in one of the most beautiful places I had ever visited want gardens that belonged in anonymous suburbs? And how could we miss the absurdity that one gardener’s unwanted locals are another’s collected treasure? This irony hit home when I found family in England struggling to grow bunchberry in place of an old rose, while back in Maine I was hired to dig out bunchberry to make room for a bed of reluctant English roses. My determination to respect and promote indigenous plants grew along with the movement towards sustainable landscape practices. It made no sense then, and it makes no sense now, for gardens to be part of the degradation of our environment.

All of which is not to say that we should not treasure favorite plants, wherever they may

have come from. I swear that the purists will have to pry my peonies from my cold dead hands, along with my daffodils. They are a source of delight every spring - each year feeling like a whole new experience that never gets old. But I challenge anyone who fears that a garden based on native plants will be dull and colorless to get to know Canadian lilies, native azaleas, Veronicastrum and New England asters. Along with their adaptation to Maine’s growing conditions, they are sustenance for native pollinators, a fact that has greatly helped to open rewarding new doors for Maine gardeners.