Impending Spring Newsletter

Hi Plant People,

I’m BACK! Forgive me. I am busy. There have been many wonderful things, many flowers blooming, while the empire falls. I know how hard it can be to focus on gardening right now. But it’s a practice that can ground you, connect you, and help your community even amidst *gestures wildly.* Of course there’s a Blood Worm Moon eclipse as Mercury goes retrograde. Everyone needs flowers!

My TED talk reached a million views!!! Which is WILD and brings me so much hope for the future of this movement. More and more people are recognizing the importance of ecological gardening. Evidence:

I received the Francis Peters award from the City Gardens Club of New York City! And was recognized as an “eco-warrior” by the North Brooklyn Park Alliance.

I wrote an article for Gardens Illustrated!

I had an online conversation with Basil Camu about the beauty and significance of old trees for the Harvard Divinity School’s Thinking with Plants and Fungi Initiative.

I had the world’s friendliest debate with Mark Weathington on problematic introduced plants in the nursery trade for the Morris Arboretum.  

And I presented, alongside Brook Klausing, on the Brooklyn Museum Garden for the Perennial Plant Association.

I judged the Philly Flower Show, testified to get Neonics banned in CT, became a Board Advisor for Homegrown National Park and took on a new role as Lead Horticulturist for the American Horticulture Society.

PHEW! OK, what follows is a newsletter of things you can do to change the world with gardens. Go team!

GARDEN NOTES

A new, massive study in Science has shown that butterfly populations in the US are down 22% in the last 20 years. And while this is truly horrific, you, dear reader, are the perfect person to take action and help others to.  Insects are incredibly environmentally responsive: they tend to reproduce like gangbusters when conditions are right, and can disappear when they aren’t. We can change conditions. Here is what to do:

• Visit this New York Times article that lets you plug in your town to see which butterflies around you are in decline. It might surprise you.

• Go to www.butterfliesandmoths.org to look up the host plants of those declining species.

• Visit BONAP to search up the host plants by scientific name and see which ones are native to your region.        

• PLANT THOSE PLANTS, in large drifts. Buy plugs, Give them to your neighbors. Divide them, propagate them, and cover the land with flowers as it was meant to be.

Of course you must make sure the plants are not treated with systemic insecticides like neonics, which are responsible for a full 33% of the Monarch butterfly’s decline and a HUGE part of the problem. We need to get them out of our plants, trees, and lawns.

CT is on the edge of passing a bill to do just that. I went to the state capital to testify last month and it was incredibly fun and empowering. Is your state working on something similar? I highly recommend getting involved.

RESOURCE SPOTLIGHT

• Mt Cuba released their Vernonia trials!!! Top performers are V. angustifolia ‘Plum Peachy,’ V. giganita, and a very cool North Carolina species, V. acaulis, which isn’t in the trade. BUT, many Vernonia like wetter conditions than the trial gardens provided and did poorly as a result. The specialist Vernonia Longhorn Bee would only visit flowers that were blooming during the few weeks they were active from plants that were healthy. So it’s important, if you’re thinking about specialist pollinators, to select plants from your region and then of course make them happy.

• AND the Chicago Botanic Garden published their Echinacea trials. They selected 9 top performers out of 52, about half of whom bear passing resemblance to the straight species. The rest are… you know… I am excited to try ‘Sensation Pink.’ More of their trials can be found here.

• SCAPE released a free online book on designing with plants during dormancy, essentially winter design. Thrilled to see the Brooklyn Museum Garden featured!

• Kelly Norris released his latest tome, Your Natural Garden, and it is a doozy and a beauty, both philosophical and instructional. He has so much to share on design and editing, but this book also ventures into garden management, exploring succession, carbon sequestration, pruning and propagation, all of it poetically written and romantically illustrated. Thank you Kelly!

• Native plant rocker Jared Rosenbaum has a wonderful YouTube series, with 5 minute videos on all your faves. The best is Prickly Pear. More on Opuntia and the series from A Way to Garden here.

• Jared Barns shared his Bloom Calendar process with newsletter subscribers and it’s nearly the same as mine!

IN THE NEWS

• Times are bleak, it’s true. But people are still out here doing incredible work now, when it matters most. Activists in Kentucky bought land slated for a new federal prison and will now restore native plants, reintroduce bison, and organize an intertribal gathering location.

• A study out of Warsaw found that small, urban meadows filled with sewn wildflowers were just as helpful to many pollinators as natural meadows outside of cities. Bees and hoverflies were just as happy in the city as the country. Many butterflies did prefer the countryside, but certain rare and protected species were still found in the city. Time for more urban meadows! Article here.

• Some of you may be starting seeds already but for the rest of us, consider growing plants from the Seed Savers Exchange, the country’s largest non-governmental seed bank that holds over 20,000 heirloom fruits, veggies, flowers, and trees. It’s a cooperative preservation effort, with thousands of people growing and sharing plants, often available for the cost of postage. Margaret Roach delves into this wonderful organization that models what happens when community care and plant conservation work together.

• Most of us hear “pollinator” and think of bees and butterflies. But WOLVES can now be added to the list of animals who help flowers reproduce. Endangered Ethiopian wolves have been documented licking nectar from Kniphofia flowers, with a muzzle covered in pollen - the first carnivores to do so. There even an adorable video.

• OMG, there’s an article on Landback in Time Magazine! Caddo Nation tribal member and U.S. Forest Service Ranger, Joe Whittle argues that the only way to protect public lands from privatization, extraction, and development is to give them back to the people who know best how to care for them. There are legal reasons (the US continues to break treaties), ethical reasons (it’s literally their land) and ecological reasons (land managed by indigenous people is far more biodiverse than the rest). But increasingly, it’s also a matter of planetary survival. I don’t know about you, but I’m not feeling super confident that IF the Democrats ever get power again, that they’ll suddenly throw off their corporate masters and stop fossil fuel dependency. Public lands are the site of 20% US carbon emissions due to oil and gas drilling. Whittle shares that “returning a billion hectares of land to Indigenous tenureship by 2050 would sequester over 12 gigatons of carbon dioxide.” I’m honestly not sure why anyone not directly profiting would prefer federal land leased to ranchers and oil barons rather than cared for by the people who know best. I’m hopeful that we are all ready to support this movement.

• The avocados we all know and love did not just happen to evolve into one of the healthiest and most delicious foods ever known. They were actively selected for >7,500 years ago by ancient people in what is now Honduras. Yes, they originally evolved alongside of Pleistocene megafauna large enough to eat them in one gulp. But a new study theorizes that, when those same megafauna went extinct, people needed a nutritional replacement. Enter the avocado. Researchers dug through millennia of discarded avocado seeds and documented that they got progressively larger over time. As of 4,500 years ago, evidence suggests that people were actively planting and pruning trees, pushing back and diversifying plant husbandry in the region.

• We’ve long known that synthetic fertilizers are bad for soils but new research shows that they’re bad for seeds and flowers as well. Seedbanks are how plants travel through time, paused in suspension until it’s time to grow again. Nitrogen decreases the number of seeds in the soil because plants invest more in foliage. But N also triggers seeds to germinate quickly, robbing the plants of their ability to persist. Another study out of Sussix, England which has run for >150 years, determined that synthetic fertilizers reduce the number of flower in fields fivefold. Which then reduces pollinators by half. Bees were most sensitive and found to be 9 times higher in untreated fields.

• The Pantone Color of the Year is brown. Yes. Brown. And I say, it’s about damn time. Brown is a GREAT color in the garden and too many of us can’t even see it, much less design with it. From tree bark, to dehisced grasses, to chocolate aster seedheads, we should all get more familiar with browns.

• As birds decline, so do their songs. This is bad news for many reasons, even selfish ones. Previous studies have shown that birdsong increases feelings of wellbeing while deminishing depression and loneliness. But a new study found that birdsong also makes people appreciate their landscape more. Researchers hid speakers in an English vineyard and played louder and more diverse birdsongs for some visiting wine-tasters. Those with the boosted birds reported connecting more with nature but they were also “more satisfied” with the landscape. So designers, take note: plant for birds and people will literally like your garden more.

• I’m sure most of us gave or received copies of Robin Wall Kimmerer’s new book on Serviceberries for the holidays. It’s certainly one of the most joyous arguments against capitalism that I’ve ever read. In this interview with professor Mary Evelyn Tucker, Kimmerer reminds us that we should be learning from nature, rather than about it. So many of us are alienated from the world around us. Our media reflect a species that knows only itself - profoundly lonely. Kimmerer dreams of the future, “when we finally realize that we are not alone here, and that there are intelligences all around us that could really help us all.”

• The coolest west coast design firm is in the news advocating for an ecological approach to fire-adapted planting design. Terremoto has developed a set of guiding principles in response to the LA fires that seek to coexist with nature rather than fight to control it. They do not believe that all deadwood should be removed and chaparral cleared, as many others advocate. But prefer to support and organize community initiatives, teaching people to care for land themselves, in ways that keep each other safe. “This tragedy, if handled well, could result in a period of radical experimentation towards alternative modes of building, development, landscape-making and being".

• Want more bees? Plant different SHAPES of flowers. A study out of Montreal found that city plantings had far more diverse bee communities when floral corollas were of varying sizes and lengths.

• Ok, bad news round up: one third of all tree species are at risk of extinction and the global number of trees has fallen by half since the start of human civilization. But for some reason trees aren’t in the news, even though the number of threatened trees is double the number of all threatened birds, mammals, reptiles and amphibians combined. Also, nectar in vacant lots in Ohio have been found to contain potentially damaging amounts of trace metals. One might expect that the amount of metal in nectar would vary depending on how much is in soil, and it does, but the biggest driver of metal concentration was plant species. This means that various flowers collect soil metals differently. The highest concentrations were found in Chicory, followed by Bindweed and Queen Ann’s Lace, but there was also variability with various metals. Dandelion and Clovers had as much lead as Chicory. This is a good graph to spend some time with.

• And for the good news! An adorable blue mining bee has been discovered in Texas: Andrena androfovea, which translates roughly into “eyeliner boy.” AND a new tiny adorable flower was discovered in Texas! Ovicula biradiata, the Wooly Devil, is in the aster family, super fuzzy, and looks to be fly pollinated. Are there many fly-pollinated asters? Seems funny.

• Congratulations readers! You made it to the end. Remember a few years ago when we found out that some moths can jam bat sonar with ultrasonic clicks? Then recently we heard that some plants make ultrasonic clicks when dehydrated? That was amazing. Well now researchers have found that some moths HEAR those plant clicks and use them to decide where to lay eggs. Females strongly prefer to lay eggs on healthy plants and use the clicks to determine plant heath! I love to think of animals and plants listening to each other in all the ways we haven’t figured out yet.

UPCOMING EVENTS

• Spring Cleanup 2.0

  March 27

  Virtual

  Thrilled to work with Margaret Roach on this virtual class covering EVERYTHING spring clean up. We’ll talk for an hour and then answer all your questions. Please join us! (it will likely sell out)

• North Carolina Botanical Garden

  April 6

  Free, hybrid, and open to the public

  Come learn about Adventures in Ecological Horticulture! If you’re around North Carolina, come in person, but this lecture is also online for free.

• Managing Invasives - Mindful Ecological Approaches

  May 7

  Open to the public

  Perfect Earth is hosting another full day symposium in Tarrytown, NY. I’ll be speaking on new approaches to managing plants that cause ecological damage, alongside researchers and practitioners who will teach on: managing Mugwort, woody plants, and asses how nurseries promote the spread of harmful plants.

• Thinking with Plants and Fungi Conference at the Harvard Divinity School

  May 15 - 17

  Hybrid and open to the public

  Truly honored to speak among such legends as Banu Subramaniam, Zoë Schlanger, and Merlin Sheldrake. I think I am going to speak on hope, but we shall see.

• Hardy Plant Society Garden Study Weekend

  June 27 - 30

  In person but sold out!

  I hope you already have your ticket for the Garden Study Weekend in Portland, OR. I’ll be speaking on ecological horticulture alongside Giacomo Guzon, Sean Hogan, and Marilee Hanks.

• AHS National Children & Youth Garden Symposium

  July 8 - 11

  In person and open to the public

  I’ll keynoting the national conference on gardening with kids this year. I’m going to speak about storytelling and specifically, native plant stories that resonate with children.

• Darrel Morrison teaching at The Clearing Folk School

  July 13 - 19

  Open to the public

  This may well be the last year that Darrel teaches his week-long workshop in Wisconsin. He really is an absolute master and if you do this work, you should go learn from him. It’s full, and worth figuring out how to get in.

www.rebeccamcmackin.com