THE MESSAGE has become increasingly clear: By shifting the palette of what we plant toward native, and refining the practices we employ in caring for our landscapes, we gardeners can make a contribution to the greater ecology. We can create pieces of functioning habitat that support biodiversity.
We’ve heard about saying no to vast stretches of mown lawn, about removing invasives, and leaving the leaves in fall, or how artificial light at night is harmful to insect populations, among many important changes we’re urged to make. But we probably don’t know all the nuts and bolts involved in best accomplishing each such updated practice. Now a new book can help.
Today’s guest has written “Nature’s Action Guide” (affiliate link) a sort of workbook detailing all the how-to’s of ecological horticulture needed to get us there – not just which key environmentally focused actions to take, but step-by-step checklists to accomplish each one.
Sarah F. Jayne’s new book begins with a foreword by Doug Tallamy. Doug’s own book “Nature’s Best Hope” inspired Sarah to write hers as a sort of companion volume. Sarah, who lives and gardens in Pennsylvania, has done a lot of the homework for us—distilling all the key points to consider in each project, and providing vetted lists of expert resources we can turn to for more information.
Plus: Comment in the box farther down the page to enter to win a copy of her new book.
Read along as you listen to the Dec. 9, 2024 edition of my public-radio show and podcast using the player below. You can subscribe to all future editions on Apple Podcasts (iTunes) or Spotify (and browse my archive of podcasts here).
‘nature’s action guide,’ with sarah jayne
Margaret Roach: I’m so glad to welcome you today and especially eager to ask about a couple of the topics that I’m bogged down a little bit right now in my own garden, including removing invasives. So, hi Sarah; I hope you’re ready for that one [laughter]. How are you?
Sarah Jayne: Very well, and it’s such a delight to talk to you today.
Margaret: Oh, good. So you’re in Pennsylvania and is your garden kind of wildish, or how would you describe it?
Sarah: I would describe it as quite wild. I’ve had to tame the front of the garden because I do live in a neighborhood, and I kind of use it as a test plot to figure out what are the best strategies for surviving in a neighborhood that has different standards than I do. But my back is quite wild and quite alive. In fact, the front is alive as well.
Margaret: So the book is very interesting. And I’ve been enjoying it. And it’s kind of structured. It’s like there’s 15 sort of action-item steps that are… They’re not exactly chapters, but sort of like the chapters, the sections. From like turn off the lights at night—get rid of artificial light at night—or have water in the garden year round, and all kinds of other things. And then one’s about planting and design. And so it’s quite a diverse list of possibilities, of actions we can take. Tell us a little bit more, I sort of hinted at it that you were inspired as many of us are by Doug Tallamy’s work. Tell us a little bit about how it came to be.
Sarah: Yeah, it’s kind of funny. You see, I was one day, after many, many, many hours of trying to remove invasives and plant native plants—it was very challenging, despite having had over three decades of experience in both farming and gardening. And I sat on my sofa and just thought, “Oh my goodness, it’s impossible.” And then I decided we should move near the Tallamys. And so that really energized me. And I went outside and I was weeding about a week later, and I came across a scrap of paper and it had a little return address label on it. And I looked at it and I did a double take. It was the Tallamy family. And I went, “Whoa, is this the Doug Tallamy family?” And it turns out that they lived two properties over from my house.
Margaret: Isn’t that crazy? So this was a piece of trash, like litter on the ground,
Sarah: Yeah. It made it underneath my persimmon tree where I was weeding out the ground ivy. And this was long before I had the idea for the book. And I couldn’t contact the Tallamys because I had come from a fruit-growing background and I had planted a lot of invasive fruits before I knew better, because our edible fruit plants, many of them are quite invasive. So I worked away at getting these eliminated before I could possibly show my face.
But then I got the idea for the book and I just thought, goodness, if this is so impossible for me, it must be really hard for the typical homeowner who doesn’t have any gardening experience. This is just kind of overwhelming. I created an outline for the book and I sent Doug a letter and I said, “I think your books are wonderful,” because they are, “but that they need a companion guide.” So he said, “Great, write it.” [Laughter.] Good. So four years later…
Margaret: Here we are. Well, the one section, as I said in the introduction, I think that particularly caught my attention because I’m focused on it right now at my own garden, which is in upstate New York, in the Hudson Valley of New York State, is how to tackle invasives. And it’s a good example of how you approach this. This is something that’s easy to get overwhelmed, and not all invasive plants have the same sort of life cycle, life history, or structure. How you get rid of one isn’t how you get rid of another, and so on and so forth. And it’s easy to just get paralyzed. It’s easy to just say, “Oh, it’s bigger than I am; I can’t deal with it” kind of thing.
And in the book you mentioned there’s more than 1,200 invasive species in the United States, and more than 700 of those are still for sale. So one thing we can do is not buy them anymore, like English ivy or whatever. But you have sort of a checklist of how to go about conceiving of your attack plan against invasives. And it’s very logical, and it kind of made me exhale and feel yes, that’s right, that’s the way to do it and not get overwhelmed. So can we talk about that a little bit?
Sarah: Oh yeah.
Margaret: What are some of the steps?
Sarah: Well, each action chapter starts with a checklist like that because I wanted to be really clear because it is very confusing, all these different puzzle pieces to creating a functioning wildlife habitat. So the checklist for removing invasive plants starts with the one that you mentioned, which is really get to know your plants so that you know which ones not to purchase, and which ones not to share. Even among gardeners, we’ve often shared plants, and often those are invasive plants. Those are the ones that are growing so aggressively, we have extras to share.
Margaret: A lot of our groundcovers traditionally in ornamental horticulture have turned out to be quite invasive.
Sarah: Yes. So we want to know which ones to avoid. And also we want to train ourselves to identify the seedlings of the invasive plants at their seedling stage, because if you can do that, you can save yourself hours and hours and years of removing invasives. And it’s so much easier to remove them at that seedling stage. So learning how to identify them, there’s wonderful online resources such as invasive.org and also a government site, which is invasivespeciesinfo.gov. So that particular site is very handy. It shows the most difficult ones that we’re all facing. So when you get to know those, you’re getting to the biggest troublemakers, should I say?
Margaret: So you advise us that we need to avail ourselves of those types of resources to become visually familiar with what these plants look like at all their different life stages so that we know who’s hiding, who’s lurking, so to speak. And especially at the fringes of your garden, a lot of times there can be a lot of visual distraction. It’s not so clear. And I think you say in the book, one thing is to sort of make a list, like note what’s on your property and where it is. Do that first, do a little bit of a survey, right? Take stock of what you’ve got, and then what to start with. What should we start with? I mean, because it’s not the biggest patch of the thing. I think you very helpfully say sometimes that’s not the place to go first, to the largest expanse.
Sarah: Yeah, counterintuitively, I say one does go to that because that looks like what you need to tackle. But the real trick is tackling the single stiltgrass plant that’s in your otherwise clean bed, because that single stiltgrass plant can put out a thousand seeds the next season, and for four or five years after that, you’ll be dealing with that. But if you happen to be right on top of it, and you get that out this year in that otherwise clean bed, you’ve spared yourself lots and lots of future work.
Margaret: So we look for these small isolated patches that really, if we leave them till next year are going to be medium or big patches. We go and get those; we look around for those, and that takes a little more looking. It’s not quite so obvious as a big burning bush that’s in its full fall color in October that’s already established itself and is 4 feet tall. It’s not quite so obvious.
Sarah: And then you can also take that inventory that you’ve created when you first monitor your property, and note what the seeding time is, because that’s the other trick. It’s getting them before they go to seed and learning which ones, because there’s no sense in removing stiltgrass now, for example, or even in October; it’s already set its seed. But if you can get all of these plants before they set seed, then you’re really also sparing yourself a lot and identifying from the invasivespeciesinfo.gov those biggest troublemakers; tackle them first because they’re on that list for a reason.
Margaret: So we want to remove, we want to identify, if we have some of the most problematic species like Oriental bittersweet for instance, or burning bush, I think for me in the Northeast, I mean, that’s one that really spreads around a lot. A lot of these are things that spread by fruit. You alluded to fruit being a fruit grower, but even non-human edible fruit, the fruit is the thing that moves plants around pretty easily a lot because of the birds and so forth.
But I have to say would rather, and I was glad your book kind of affirmed it. My approach is more, I’d rather spend the time on those than on the hours and hours on going after dandelions or creeping Charlie, Glechoma hederacea, in the lawn, which, you know what I mean? It doesn’t worry me in the same way that these prolific, these woody fruit-bearing prolific spreaders that have just taken over our woodlands and so forth do.
Sarah: Yeah, I think that’s a really good point. And it also feeds into the idea that one of the other things we need to attempt to do is to change people’s aesthetics. Because as we could do that, we can allow some of the less difficult non-native invasive plants, but maybe less problematic, allow them while we tackle really the ones that are damaging our woodlands.
Margaret: Because there are only a certain number of hours in the day. I mean, so you’re saying a triage approach is, which I think is really smart. And then what about disposal? Because we’re going to have a lot of stuff that we’ve either dug out or cut down, or both. What about disposal?
Sarah: Yeah, I think that poses a really good question. The way I handle it, it might not be how everyone chooses to handle it, but I don’t prefer to take it to the landfill. Some landfills don’t even permit invasive-plant debris to be delivered there, and I don’t want to burn it. So what I do is I’ve dedicated a small area hidden from neighborhood view, and I put a stack of the plants as I gather them there, and I monitor it.
And if it’s something really that has the potential for birds to feed on it, I cover it with a tarp until it’s covered with other plants. And I let that area be a place that collects all the real troublemakers, because a lot of times it may have a reproductive part, roots or a berry that I missed getting early. So that pile sits there and I monitor it so it doesn’t go in my compost, but it does go essentially in a compost pile. We call it maybe the toxic-waste compost pile [laughter]. Yeah, that’s how I handle, you can put a tarp under that, but I, I haven’t found that to be necessary. Maybe start with layers of cardboard underneath it just to, in case you have a root in your first layer, being careful about what the first layer is and then monitoring it.
Margaret: So you’ve segregated this stuff and you’re keeping an eye on it. You’re not putting it in the main compost heap. Yeah. Yeah. I mean I probably do. For me, it depends on what it is, but some of the things that are leafier, sometimes there’s so much bulk, and if it’s rhizomatous, if herbaceous stuff is rhizomatous, I may just cut off the rhizomes, the root sort of area, and compost the leaves, but do what you’re saying in the segregated pile: put the naughty bits, the roots [laughter].
Sarah: Yeah, the non-bad parts of the plant. I sometimes put them on the woodland pathways or on just an area. It’s kind of hidden from my neighbor’s view, but just to build up the soil for woodland plants, for example.
Margaret: So sort of composting in place, letting them just, the debris, just degrade as long as it’s not any part that can reproduce by either, again, like root material, rhizomes, or seeds, fruit and seeds and so forth. Yeah, definitely.
There were a number of tactics in the book that if you’re just a homeowner, not even a gardener, that I think are so important. And I’m still surprised that more people don’t do them. I mentioned one in the introduction about artificial light at night, for instance. It’s so harmful to insect populations, and yet we all have so many floodlights going on at night, home after home, and especially in public spaces. What I loved is that you give a lot more detail about how to think about it, and some of the tactics for dealing with it, I think, and that’s true with all of the sort of sections, the checklists and sections in the book. Or like water: you talk about ways that we can not only provide water all year long, but also about preventing animals from being harmed by bodies of water. Swimming pools are a real death trap for a lot of amphibians and so forth, yes?
Sarah: Yes. Well, it’s so interesting because you and I who are gardeners and have been gardeners for all our lives, basically almost all our lives, it sounds like, we do all these things for wildlife. And then we have these things that we’re not aware of, like a million birds striking our windows every day in the U.S. [Red-bellied woodpecker in a cavity carved into a standing tree or snag, above, from Sarah Jayne.]
Margaret: A billion a year at least. In fact, they’ve upgraded it. They even think it may be as high as 5 billion a year. And I mean, the estimates are so staggering. It’s unbelievable. Yeah, it is.
Sarah: And that’s in the U.S. that statistics globally are even more extreme. Cat predation is three times greater than that figure, the glass strikes and from the light at night. So these are things, and we love our cats, but here we are, we’re doing all the stuff from nature and then we don’t realize it. And we have our beloved cat out there kind of taking us up the well, and then we’re sliding back down 3 feet further, sort of like the snail going up the well.
These are things that we really can, as you suggested, take easy action, turning out the lights, screening and marking our windows, keeping our cats indoors or building them a nice outside catio.
Margaret: I love that: catio. That’s hilarious. Yes.
Sarah: And these are things we can all do non gardeners and gardeners alike, and we can do them today. So that was really important to me to try to get those messages out there and to make it easy for people to do them, to take those actions,
Margaret: Right. And to prevent, again, frogs or salamanders or whatever from getting into a pool of water that has no escape, where there’s no way to climb out. Like having some mechanism… I mean, I have some water trough-type water features as well as inground water features. And one thing each of them has, whether it’s the permanent in-ground ones or the temporary seasonal ones, each one has a little gangplank where they can get in and out. So even if the water gets, we have a dry spell and I forget to top everything up and you can’t climb out easily. There’s this little gang plank in or out. Do you know what I mean? So nobody gets stuck.
Sarah: An exit ramp. That’s what water source needs, even our buckets. It’s wonderful that you have those. And really part of the whole motivation on the protection action is to prevent people from having to experience discovering a dead bird in a bucket of water that they left. As I’ve done, and feeling for the rest of your life. You hold this small tragedy that you incurred. And so each of the actions that are about protection really come from experience of having not realized how my action might have hurt a creature.
Margaret: And then on the sort of the other side, the more maybe cheerful side, there’s the planting, and being more strategic in our planting. And you have, for instance, one section about something that Doug Tallamy talks about a lot about: how to identify and utilize keystone plants, the sort of most bang for the buck kind of plants, both woody and herbaceous. So tell us a little bit about maybe that approach to picking which plants we want to make room for in our landscapes.
Sarah: Well, it’s really fabulous because I knew when I started writing the book, keystone was a word that was even hard to find anywhere on the internet, really good information about it. And now there are fabulous resources courtesy of Doug’s tireless efforts working with others to create the National Wildlife Federation’s Native Plant Finder, for example. And there you can hop onto that Native Plant Finder, enter your Zip code and find the species that are the keystone species in your ecoregion. And this is a resource that just didn’t exist, which makes it possible for us to choose. The plants will most support our local fauna and that resource.
And then along with others learning, for example, once you know which plants they’re recommending, then using something like the BONAP maps, which are maps that show the distribution of plants, and use them to identify which species actually are native in your specific area. And you have to use some judgment, and you have to put together things. That’s what I actually explain in the book, but it’s just such a tool that makes it doable.
Margaret: Yeah, I was going to say, so BONAP is the Biota of North America Project, and it’s a series of maps that shows the nativity or lack of the same, of different species, of different genera of plants and so forth. And so you can kind of go through all the oaks and see which ones are native where, which states. It’s maps, it’s U.S. maps, and they’re color-coded according to where things are native. And it’s not super precise down to the town level or anything, but it gives you a sense.
So yeah, that’s an important, I was interested in the book, you talk about how much more so keystone plants, you could have a list and you kind of recommend to us that we become aware of what our keystone plants are, both woody and herbaceous, our top contenders, woody plants and herbaceous plants. But you point out that woody plants, in terms of attracting those all important Lepidoptera, the butterflies and moths, that give us those caterpillars that the birds rely on and so on and so forth, that fuel the food chain, the woody plants outperform so much compared to even the top herbaceous plants, don’t they?
Sarah: Yes. When you actually look at those numbers, it’s really amazing, because in our culture, it’s great. It’s coming to the forefront that we need to be planting these plants for our pollinators and our Lepidoptera, our moths and butterflies, and the caterpillars to be specific. So we sort of were out there and we’re planting goldenrod and asters. That’s wonderful because they do support, for instance, in the Atlantic region, 115 different Lepidoptera species, so that’s wonderful. But of the top, the oaks are 534, but even down, say 20 down, the chestnuts, for example, or even a beech tree, these provide 125 to 100 different species. So the highest of our perennials is still lower than some of the top woody plants. [Above: A red-spotted purple butterfly on Rubus, from Sarah Jayne.]
Margaret: So the woody plants, they’re really, they are the powerhouse of all powerhouses in many cases. So it makes us want to think about, when I was reading that section of the book, really think about making room for more sort of shrubberies, mixed borders, not just that herbaceous layer, herbaceous layer, herbaceous layer. But really think about not only the beauty of having the intermediate and the taller layers visually, but the power behind it.
I just wanted to ask you, in your own garden, are you at one of these junctures yourself? Are you currently taking some of these actions or focused on some of these actions most of all, or any projects planned for spring? Like I said, I’m doing very targeted invasive stuff now, is what I’m up to. I wondered if you have any such focal points.
Sarah: Yeah. Well, my goal, it’s slow because of course I’m doing that DIY and on a budget. But my goal is to get the front lawn to be ecologically valuable while also fitting into a traditional neighborhood, and then using that as more fodder for how to translate that message to others. We’re all in this together, so however we can figure out how to make it easier for everyone is really my goal. And so that’s what my main focus is on right now, and I use the book all the time to help me along with it, too [laughter].
Margaret: That’s great. So it’s your work, it’s your workbook and you wrote it as well. That’s great. I love that you sort of took all these things that I have saved in my browser on little notes here and there or whatever, all these resources, so many great resources here to explore, to learn how to do the different steps and where to go for more information about local plant lists and the keystone plants, all these things. Really, really helpful that you’ve gathered all this into one handbook/workbook. So thank you. Thanks very much.
Sarah: Oh, you’re so welcome. I’m just thrilled that if we can each take these actions and we can really make a difference, it’s wonderful.
Margaret: Well, it is. So thank you, and I’ll hope I’ll talk to you again soon.
Sarah: Likewise. It was a sheer delight.
enter to win a copy of ‘nature’s action guide’
Is there some aspect of ecological gardening that you’re particularly eager to learn more about?
No answer, or feeling shy? Just say something like “count me in” and I will, but a reply is even better. I’ll pick a random winner after entries close at midnight Tuesday, Dec. 17, 2024. Good luck to all.
(Disclosure: As an Amazon Associate I earn from qualifying purchases.)
prefer the podcast version of the show?
MY WEEKLY public-radio show, rated a “top-5 garden podcast” by “The Guardian” newspaper in the UK, began its 15th year in March 2024. It’s produced at Robin Hood Radio, the smallest NPR station in the nation. Listen locally in the Hudson Valley (NY)-Berkshires (MA)-Litchfield Hills (CT) Mondays at 8:30 AM Eastern, rerun at 8:30 Saturdays. Or play the Dec. 9, 2024 show using the player near the top of this transcript. You can subscribe to all future editions on iTunes/Apple Podcasts or Spotify (and browse my archive of podcasts here).
