Strawberry Moon Newsletter

Hi Plant People,

Happy Strawberry Moon! Yellowwood trees are blooming in Cambridge and the air smells unmistakably like candy. I hope the air is sweet where you are as well.

I finished my fellowship. It was easily one of the most magical years of my life. You can watch a 5 minute presentation I gave about what I learned and what I hope to do (I start at 7:30 but the entire event and the other lectures are just fantastic).

Fun news: my family and I are moving to CT this spring! I’ll be writing, consulting, and occasionally designing. I’m working on some new lectures (management strategies! designing ecological systems!) but I will be speaking less and to larger audiences. Not because I don’t love every garden club, but because I need to make time to write. And garden. And also not-garden, just watching plants grow. The next time you see me, I will have dirty fingernails.

GARDEN NOTES

The Chelsea Garden Show wrapped last week. Here is my run-down from 3000 miles away.

Alas, the ecological theme of last year was just that, a theme. The only wildlife reference I saw was from the Royal Entomological Society and their garden was cool but not high design. It seemed like people were groping for something important, but couldn’t figure it out.

Purpose-driven gardens won the biggest awards: Best Show Garden went to Charlotte Harris’s Horatio’s Garden for people with spinal injuries. The Most Sustainable Award went to a wildflower turf made without plastic or peat (this makes me wildly jealous and I don’t know why we can’t produce flower turf in North America). Chris Beardshaw won the People’s Choice Award for his Myeloma Garden. But it all felt like people trying to rationalize a fundamentally excessive event with a cause to make it meaningful. Cleve West made a garden about teen homelessness, and there was even a garden themed around the food children are served at school.

As for design, there were some total stunners. Ji-Hae Hwang’s garden, A Letter from A Million Years Past, was built with rare and medicinal plants from Korea, surrounding a replica of a hut used for drying herbs. Of the garden she says, “The garden’s large rocks represent over 2 billion years of time. These rocks have been keeping a certain form of love within them for millions of years. With little plants and flowers blossoming within the crevices and cracks between the rocks, this love has been illustrated. Therefore, these rocks and plants will look like special letters sent to us from millions of years ago.” Love.

Mark Gregory’s Savills Garden was “edimental” (edible + ornamental) and totally charming. The waterway was a bit overwrought but the space seemed familiar as well as a lovely path forward: the mixture of functionality, beauty, and ecology.

Danny Clark made a perfect little mini-garden: a cube of concrete with wildflowers bursting out of it. It was both beautiful and successful in communicating a message on inequality and access to green space. It was cool to see artists use a garden to say something important in such a tiny package, when so many more extravagant gardens had failed.

Lastly, I was happy to see Sarah Price knock it out of the park again. Her Nurture Landscapes Garden paid homage to the late painter and Iris breeder Cedric Morris and was truly unique and romantic. Even the pallet felt fresh. It seems that atmosphere is really created in gardens when each plant is given space to breathe. Here she is, like a flower herself, explaining the garden. More here.

So why didn’t my favorites win all the prizes? As it turns out, judging is not just based on emotion (or what one lady, in another country, looking at her computer happens to think). Apparently it’s far more about whether artists have manifested their design intent, if plants are healthy, and arranged in ways that would work in the real world. Chelsea’s most charismatic judge, James Alexander-Sinclair, breaks down the judging process on a recent podcast. Enjoy!

RESOURCE SPOTLIGHT

• The Xerces Society updated their regional plant lists for pollinators and beneficial insects, as well as Monarch nectaring flower preferences.

• The Perfect Earth Project published a free, online guidebook to the Basics of Nature-Based LandCare. It’s an easy-to-follow, 12-step actionable guide that’s packed with resources and inspiration. It’s the perfect thing to give to people new to the movement or crews working to evolve their practices.

• Dumbarton Oaks has an exhibit on gardens and nature in the medieval world that runs through this July. Fortunately for those of us far away, they put together an entire book on the subject available on their website for free.

• If you’re curious which plants the “world’s greatest plantspeople” grow, there is a new book for you! “What Gardeners Grow” contains >600 plants and these lovely odes to them written by the likes of Piet Oudolf, Dan Pearson, Fergus Garette, Jacqueline van der Kloet, and me! I was charmed to be able to extol the virtues of Tiarella in print.

IN THE NEWS

• Thought we were done trashing lawns? Never! Here is a lovely story and here is another about poet Camille Dungy and her new book, Soil: The Story of a Black Mother's Garden. In it, she rips out her lawn, plants native plants and watches the birds who arrive. She relates the diversity of her garden to the need for diversity in nature writing. There is far too much “(nearly always white) men and women who claim to be models for how to truly experience the natural world always seemed to do so in solitude…Just one guy – so often a guy – with no evidence of family or anyone to worry about but himself…the absence of family and community troubles me.” Both articles are funny and wonderful and I hope we see Camille keynoting hort symposia soon.

• Margaret Roach asks Piet Oudolf about the differences between art and gardens in the NYT. Piet says, “Nature impresses upon us “the greatest feelings, and I think that’s what you want to do in a garden as well…But the garden is smaller, and so you have to do something more than just this big idea of what nature is. You have to feel more than just what you see. It has to go a little bit deeper, and sometimes it’s called enhanced nature. And so you bring nature up a little bit, pump it up a little bit.”

• Dana Milbank of the Washington Post is just crushing it these days, writing about his shift from ecological bad-actor, over to someone trying to support the land he cares for. His latest details his brush with the “light police,” a local org who contacted him about his house lit up light a space ship. Of course he sees the light, and shares his learning that for the last decade, night skies have been getting 10% brighter per year. This harms insects, migrating birds, and the 80% of us who can’t see the Milky Way. Want to know more? Dark Sky, the org who contacted the reporter, has fantastic resources.

• The New Yorker published a roundup of recent tree books, and strung them together to tell a history of Europeans destroying forests, recognizing their error (sort of), planting trees, then recognizing their error again, and now searching for a path forward. Great quote on the well-deserved backlash against corporate tree planting, “Trees are the new polar bears, the trending face of the environmental movement. But it’s not clear that planting a trillion trees is a solution… a forest is an ecosystem, and a tree farm is a monoculture.”

• Recent research found that certain Bumblebees were able to use sunflower pollen medicinally, to clean out gut parasites, but researchers did not know how it works. The new answer is hilarious: it’s not the chemical composition of the pollen, the nutrients or the protein, that helps the bees but the SHAPE. Pollen has a waxy outer shell that protects the contents inside. In Sunflowers, and all of Asteraceae, that shell is spiny. After feeding bees empty shells and de-shelled pollen, they found that it was the spines that help the bees!

• A new film is out called "Master Gardener." It's by the same writer as Taxi Driver and portrays a lone, tortured man, who has to cleanse the world with violence, but this time, in a garden. I haven't seen it yet but thought you should know because next month, everyone is going to ask you your opinion on it.

• Good news on the horizon for fans of beleaguered Beech, Elm, and Chestnut: resistance breeding holds hope for literally all of them. Great reporting from Rewilding Mag on the surprisingly effective efforts to select for pathogen resistance rather than crossing with exotics.

• Worried about AI? Maybe you should be. Alpha Garden is an “AI-assisted plant ecosystem” who’s inventors claim it cared for a garden better than a person and thereby passed the Turing test. The robotic system was set against a gardening John Henry, and the two managed their plots for two months. At the end, both grew vegetables but the robot used 44% less water. I don’t think we need to worry about our jobs just yet, but maybe there is something to be said for better watering programs. Short video on the system here.

• Everyone knows how to garden for butterflies now but have you considered gardening for OWLS? Hard to imagine anything cooler. Most techniques are the usual: native plants, minimize light pollution. Some are novel: instal a nest box, maintain an open glade. And some are outright alarming: encourage rodents, install a bird bath to lure smaller birds to their death. Do you love owls that much? If so, more from Popular Science here.

• A must-read opinion piece in the NYT by Ben Wilson. It’s an ode to urban plants, thriving in sidewalk cracks unloved, and a call for us to create larger wild spaces in cities that support people as well as wildlife. Only one critique: where is Brooklyn Bridge Park in all this? Anyway, a solid quote, “Cities often contain perfected, simplified forms of nature, ones that look pretty but are biologically impoverished.”

• When working with wild plants, it can be necessary to perform some acrobatics to keep them looking garden-y. The Chelsea Chop is the most popular, but there are others detailed by Chelsea Ruiz for Izel Plants. Her lists of which native plants respond well to these techniques are truly helpful.

• A haunting essay in the New Yorker on the high costs of hidden labour: “But who shapes the trees? Who cuts the lawn? And why do you never see them?... What is it about our national culture, or our economic structures, that necessitates this invisibility? Why is it that America turns its laborers into spectres?” Every gardener, every worker, and every person deserves safety and dignity. We need to end exploitation in horticulture.

• This old-school commercial for Thuja ‘Green Giant’ is cracking me up to no end. We need to make more ads for plants! Can you imagine? “Why use boring old Tulips when you could have marvelous Sanguinaria canadensis blooming in springtime! No replanting! No fertilizing! And with toxic foliage, deer will be a problem of the past. Call today!” Please make this happen.

• Designer Austin Eischeid gave a talk on shade gardens from within a shade garden he designed at Northwind Perennial Farm. How fortunate are we that it was recorded?

• We all know of the hazardous effects of light pollution and chemical pollution on our regional wildlife. But did you know that noise pollution is also harmful for the world around us? How about scent pollution? Margaret Roach interviews Nancy Lawson in the New York Times about her new book, “Wildscape.” Sometimes, she writes, these habitat-sensitive garden practices are “not about doing something, but the opposite: Stop mowing so often; stop leaf blowing. ‘Stop these sensory disruptions.’”

• 100 million years ago, a “rogue lineage of moths” moved dayward to take advantage of bee-pollinated flowers. They would become the butterflies and the world is better for it. New research, the work of a global collaboration of >90 scientists over a decade, shows that this glorious evolution took place in North America, and that those newly evolved butterflies likely fed on the flowers of day-blooming Legumes, which lured them into the sunshine. Here is a moving story about the research from NPR, featuring lead author and rockstar Akito Kawahara’s origin story.

• OK, this newsletter is too long already. One sentence news roundup: Plants can sense when you touch them, and when you let go. Bob Villa has a shockingly sophisticated take on No Mow May. A Groundsel in England was brought back from extinction thanks to the Millennium Seed Bank. Somebody ranked all the apples and it’s funny. Certain flowers use humidity, more than scent, to attract pollinators.

• Finally we’re at the end! Phew. Ok, the reward: the study of electrostatic charges is easily the coolest fields (ha!) of ecology. We know pollen will jump to bumble bees, spider webs will reach out to passing flies, and filaments will brush against hummingbird throats all thanks to these charges. New research shows that even the tiny nematode will use electromagnetic fields to find their hosts. Apparently, and there’s video, these tiny parasites jump into the air when their fly victims pass by. The opposite charge of the fly and the worm will pull the nematode right to the fly! Amazing.

UPCOMING EVENTS

• Landscape Pleasures at the Parish Art Museum

  June 10. Water Mill, NY

  In person and open to the public

  I’m excited to speak alongside Charles Birnbaum and Raymond Jungles at this idyllic fundraiser for the Museum. I’ll be speaking about ecological horticulture and Brooklyn Bridge Park, of course. You can read about it here.

• Seeing the Forest and the Trees: Exploring the Social History of the Outdoors

  June 21.

  Virtual and open to the public

  The Native Pant Trust is hosting this symposium interrogating the the social history of natural spaces. Mardi Fuller will discuss racial equity in environmental access and movements and Dr. Xan Chacko will assess the history of plant collecting and the production of scientific knowledge as illustrated through Meyer’s lemons.

• Bergamo Landscape Festival

  September 7 - 24. Bergamo, Italy

  In person and open to the public

  The good news: What a thrill to speak at this iconic gathering and among such incredible people: Peter Korn, Teresa Moller and Martin Rein-Cano among others. The bad news: I’ll be virtual! Oh it’s so sad. Some day Bergamo, some day!

www.rebeccamcmackin.com