IF YOU’VE EVER tried creating and then caring for a habitat-style garden with native plants, well, let’s just say it’s not exactly the same thing as combining a group of hostas with some astilbes and a couple of bleeding hearts.
In the process of writing a recent “New York Times” garden column about Wild Ones, the nationwide nonprofit membership organization that promotes native plants, I was introduced to the artist and landscape architect Preston Montague of Durham, N.C., who patiently schooled me in some of the whys and how-tos of naturalistic garden design and care that I wanted to invite him to also share with you, including some very crafty uses for a string trimmer.
Preston (that’s a little late-season swath of his own front yard, above) is a landscape architect and artist who teaches undergraduates at North Carolina A&T University in Greensboro. He contributed one of the 20-something regionally focused native plant landscape designs available to download on the Wild Ones’ website, plus a series of videos on naturalistic design for Izel Native Plants nursery available on YouTube—just two examples of his various efforts, as he describes it, “to help translate very complicated ideas of landscape ecology into an approach that gardeners of all skill levels can deploy.”
Read along as you listen to the Sept. 23, 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).
naturalistic gardening, with preston montague
Margaret Roach: Hi, Preston. Good to talk to you again.
Preston Montague: Hi, Margaret. Thank you for the invitation. I’m so excited to be here. And hello-
Margaret: Hello, everybody [laughter]. I feel like I learned so much from you. As I told you when we were speaking for the Times interview, I can tell that you’re a teacher. You have a natural flair. So good for you.
Preston: Oh, what a compliment. Thank you very much. That is hard-earned.
Margaret: [Laughter.] Well, thank you. So I said in the introduction a little bit about the backstory of how we got acquainted. I was doing this “New York Times” story about the nonprofit native plant membership organization called Wild Ones, with chapters all over the country. And your name came up as one of the designers who has contributed one of the native garden designs for their very popular library of free downloadable garden plans. Each of them is regionally appropriate for a particular ecoregion around the country. You contributed one of those [below], and that’s how we got introduced.
In the process of doing our interview, as I said in the introduction as well, you just turned me on to a lot of thinking that just made light bulbs go off for me. So I wanted to just … You said to me in our interview for the Times, you said something like “native plants assembled according to native community structures and densities can be more complicated. They can be a little hairier.” I love that. I can’t stop thinking about that. So they’re hairy, huh? [Laughter.]
Preston: Yeah, it’s one of these words I help to … that I think people pick up on and can visualize. Really what I’m talking about there, really what I’m trying to encourage people to do is to, I don’t know, get accustomed to these sorts of plant assemblies or these styles of gardens being a little grassier than they may originally design or hope for.
And I’m noticing, as I begin to study people’s reactions and preferences for these sorts of more natural, ecologically informed, ecosystem-rich gardens, that there are, I don’t know, cues that you don’t care embedded throughout them. What I’ve noticed is that grasses, particularly certain types of inflorescences, or the grass seed and flower heads, trigger responses.
What I’m noticing, for example, is that in a plant assembly, if you have, let’s say, for this climate, 60 percent grasses, 40 percent flowering plants I call forbs, I’ve noticed that that ratio tends to survive a little bit longer than, say, 60 percent forbs, 40 percent grasses.
I think that’s specifically where I practice here in the Piedmont of North Carolina, I mean, don’t forget, we have three summers, and in August, it’s extremely wet, but all the moisture is the air, which is just tough on everybody. I think what I’m noticing is that these plant assemblies just get grassier than flowery-er. These are really crude words that I use with the public and I think it’s just part of my experience teaching. I’m not embarrassed to use these fanciful and sometimes made-up words if they get the point across. I hesitate to even use the word forb, but I don’t know; in this case, it’s helpful.
Margaret: Yeah, but it’s the word. The thing is you’re telling me, as someone who’s tried some of this myself and I thought, “Uh-oh. I failed. I’ve done something wrong,” or whatever, and you’re telling me, “Hey, it might get a little hairy.” [Laughter.] It’s different. It’s not … And I think, again, when we did The Times story, you said something like it’s not like you put three of this here and five of that there and one big thing here and done; that’s the design. It’s not like that. These are more dynamic communities of plants, aren’t they?
Preston: Indeed. I think what is happening is that we are recognizing that so much of design happens after planting, that maintenance is a design process. It may be the biggest, most important part of the design process. I mean you want to raise this beautiful planting upright, and so you want to have great site prep, hygiene; you want to assemble plants in a way that you feel like is going to elicit the reaction you want. You want make plant selections that are sustainable and durable in the climate you’re planting in.
But you may have a decade or more of that planting to manage, and that is where I think the bulk of design is. I think this was one thing that I became dissatisfied in a conventional design practice, in that all of the emphasis seemed to be getting you to Day 1. But so much of the difficulty with sustaining that planting was Days 2 through 2002.
Margaret: Right. [Laughter.]
Preston: I think it suggests a radical reorganization of the way that we approach design professionally. Fortunately, unfortunately, there’s not really a lot of accountability for how these landscapes perform afterwards. It’s at the mercy of the maintenance crew. Designers can be not held accountable in a way that I think might be in a more sophisticated, civilized situation, at least from the plan’s perspective. But designers have a responsibility for how their design unfolds over time.
Margaret: Yeah, and it seems like if we’re going to be the “maintenance person” in our own home landscape or work with someone who is, we’ve got to get that knowledge. And so, I think I hinted at it in the introduction to the show, I said something about your string trimmer tactics [laughter].
Preston: Yes.
Margaret: I don’t even have a string trimmer, but boy, oh boy, do I want one? It’s on my Christmas list right now, because you talked to me about as opposed to trying to eradicate certain, and I’m going to just put in quotes, “weeds,” like I think you were talking about crabgrass, nutsedge, things like that, that are-
Preston: Uninvited guests.
Margaret: Yeah, uninvited guests; good. That you have a different tactic for trying to subdue them a little bit and make them behave well enough to let the design come through. You’re not pulling weeds out of the soil and leaving holes that other weeds are going to germinate in. You had a whole different kind of approach that really appealed to me.
Also, just in terms of shaping the groups of plants, you had a whole approach, and maybe you should tell us about that. You don’t think of each individual plant as much as the groups of plants, I think, in a design.
Preston: Yeah. I like to use this phrase “vegetative body.” There’s a reason for that. I think that people can accidentally … I’m guilty myself, being too precious over that Schizachyrium and that Rudbeckia and that Echinacea. These plants can behave and … They can have very ephemeral behavior, of course, depending on the species. [Above, a buffer area between Preston’s yard and a a neighbor’s, alive with sumac, Rudbeckia and more.]
And so, helping people just not take individual species or individual plants, so regard them as precious, and really think about this plant mass. But I think it takes some of the pressure off of getting every piece of nutsedge, crabgrass, and Bermuda grass they find out of the system. Additionally, I’m finding that using tools like a string trimmer, which I discovered was my favorite tool for, let’s say, these sorts of herbaceous plantings under an acre, that walking through and flossing, like you might floss your teeth, or tweezing like eyebrows, that you get in there and you angle the string trimmer in a certain way to zap any sort of uninvited guests.
If you just, over time, zap the plants you don’t want and leave the plants you do want alone, those plants you do want tend to fill in that gap. I never get rid of crabgrass, Bermuda grass, nutsedge, and these other familiar interlopers, but I can suppress their population and keep their population so stressed that they remain kind of in stasis or they remain kind of just locked in at a ground cover level. I’m finding for things like crabgrass, for example, if I just prevent it from going to seed, its population disappears sometimes entirely.
This was just a discovery I made after really wrestling too hard with weeds on a couple of, let’s say, pocket-scale grassland projects, where I was just pulling weeds and just never getting on top of the matter. When I had a small urban grassland to take care of, actually specifically the one in the Izel videos [below], and if I just used the string trimmer, I was able to, within a season, completely get ahead of what turned out to be a really rambunctious Bermuda grass and crabgrass population.
Margaret: Yeah. No, I mean the idea of giving the desired plants a little more breathing room, so to speak, I love that, and that you’re not opening up… because I have a meadow above my house. It’s old. I’ve been doing it for a long time. It’s in its umpteenth stage of succession now [laughter], and we’re getting some woody things and whatever. But I made … And I shouldn’t say mistake because that sounds like I’m a bad girl. But earlier on, I was pulling things and I was finding that by doing so, as anytime we pull weeds and open up the soil, more weed seeds were germinating from down below, and there were plenty of them in the seed bed.
So I was actually making more opportunities for trouble than I was fixing. And so, you’re talking about this flossing, the zapping, and I’m like, wow, O.K., that doesn’t open up those opportunities for germination of weed seeds, which is great.
Preston: Yes, it was a lucky discovery because I was, otherwise, at the time struggling to communicate to clients and to other people really an effective management strategy. I had to go back and say, “Well, wait a minute, Preston.” You have been telling clients and telling people that now that we really have begun to understand the importance of native plants, the particular native plants that are best for our individual areas, why don’t we now begin to expand this and start looking at native structure and native change?
Native structure, of course, is organizing your particular herbaceous planting to reflect what you’re seeing in your climate. The way I may tackle this in Flagstaff would be different than I’d tackle it in Richmond. And so, the way I’d structure plants is differently.
Also, I encourage people to be the hurricane, be the lightning strike, be the goat, be the change you want to see in your garden. I realized that pulling weeds doesn’t really have a natural analog.
Margaret: No.
Preston: In fact, browsing is what I wanted to simulate.
Margaret: See, that’s such a good thought. I don’t know why I have never thought of that. You’re absolutely right. The analog is an animal would be munching to the ground plant A and not plant B and so forth, and plant B would have an advantage, therefore. Yeah, and even fire and even then man-made mowing, same thing. We’re not pulling them. We’re not yanking them out of the ground.
So you have another fascinating use for your string trimmer that I’ve never used one for, which is that you make … In your designs, you want some structure, some hedging, for instance. You may take some native shrubs, carefully chosen ones, and you may actually also use your string trimmer to shape those into sort of hedges. What are some examples of that and why do you choose certain shrubs for that?
Preston: Oh, well, what can I say? String trimming can be addictive. It is so pleasurable. It’s so satisfying.
Margaret: [Laughter.] Uh-oh.
Preston: I see why mowing is so popular. But it’s just … Basically in a landscape that I was helping a client manage, I was with the string trimmer already… They had just purchased basically about half an acre. They had a half-acre project and a budget that only allowed … We worked exclusively from seed with a couple of areas that we were able to add saplings and tubelings of certain shrubs. We were using these shrubs as a way to catch soccer balls and other things that were flying into the neighbor’s yard [laughter]. Over time …
By the way, this is … I was using alder, Alnus serrulata. I was using a couple of viburnums, I think nudum and prunifolium I believe, as well as silky dogwood, Cornus amomum, and Ilex glabra, the inkberry.
Margaret: Oh yeah.
Preston: I’ve selected these because it gave me a range of habits and evergreen and deciduous and floral displays, deer resistance in some cases. They were all growing together themselves into another vegetative mass. And so, I’m pursuing this with shrubs now as well.
But I just turned the string trimmer on them to hedge them up and was like, oh, well, wait a minute. If you are able to turn the string trimmer on these shrubs that are flexible, “plastic,” with short internodes, that they can be sculpted actually really quite deftly with a string trimmer. It wasn’t a condition where I had to get in there and expertly prune them to mimic their natural shape. I could be as weird and artificial with them as I wanted them because what I wanted was a hedge. I wanted you to not really tell where the Ilex glabra or the Viburnum prunifolium … Or where the inkberry started and where the Viburnum ended.
Margaret: I think of that as a bio-hedge. That’s what I used to call that years ago when I first started learning about native plants.
Preston: I love it.
Margaret: A bio-hedge is like mixing things together and turning them into this community of sometimes largely woody and sometimes there’s vines through it and so forth. Yeah, a bio-hedge. But yes. So you would choose … I’m inferring from some of the plants you mentioned, like the viburnums and the Ilex glabra, and also from when we talked before for the Times story, you’re choosing shrubs that will respond well to this trimming because they have the short internodes, the space between where the leaf nodes are. Is that it? Is that the criteria for why you’re choosing-
Preston: Oh, I am now … Originally, it was just what was available.
Margaret: Oh, I see.
Preston: At the time, the only availability I had is a nursery me called Mellow Marsh Farm, who supplies products for the DOT and other very large-scale planting projects. I thought at the time, can I adapt this catalog to a residential-scale grassland, and realized, oh, this is the only source I have right now for this work.
And so, I was using their seed products, their plugs. They also offered trees as saplings and tubelings, these smaller sizes that really leap to life when they’re placed in the right conditions, that they were originally sold for mass, mass planting projects by the DOT.
Margaret: Right.
Preston: And so, originally, I just lucked out.
Margaret: O.K. All right. But these are things that do respond well to being trimmed this way.
Preston: Right. There’s also maybe some just aesthetic, an aesthetic switch that some people may have to have with the idea of, I love this phrase, bio-hedges.
Margaret: I’ll license it to you if you want. I can license that to you.
Preston: [Laughter.] We’ll talk about that after.
Margaret: Just kidding, just kidding, just kidding. So when you are getting started with a design and you’ve got it conceived and it’s planting time, you go heavy, right? You’re not just putting a little bit of this and a little bit of that. You’re combining seeds and plugs, little seedlings, so to speak, young plants. You’re working with a heavy hand when planting, yes?
Preston: Yes. Ideally … I use the word supersaturate. What I’m just trying to do is not give weeds or these uninvited guests a fighting chance. It depends on the project. It depends on the budget.
But in an ideal condition for creating the sort of garden that you see I’ve created for Wild Ones, I’d like for the beds to include a seed basis, which would be focused on plants that I would use as groundcover and maybe a couple of surprises from this or that native annual or forb. But then really use plugs to have a lot of design control and introduce species that perhaps isn’t in the seed mix, or perhaps species that are … or keystone species that may not be in the mix, so that I’m not only having some design control aesthetically, but I have some design control functionally, particularly with providing resources to pollinating insects and songbirds.
The plugs also allow me to look at the root physiology and make sure that I’m also trying to create diversity below ground and not just above. You’ll notice by pulling plugs out of their container, that there’s a really quite a staggering range of rooting strategies that plants have.
Margaret: Yes.
Preston: You have big fleshy roots in conditions that may be really dry. You have very, very fine roots that are very delicate and may cause that plant not to persist in a heavy clay system; these sorts of things.
And so, this is for me new work. I don’t even know how I visualize it, but increasingly I’m trying to create diversity below ground, because I suspect that a diversity below ground is more stable and more responsive to stress than a monoculture. So I’m just applying all of those things that I’m learning about the deficits that monocultures bring to planting above ground and just replicating those below as well I can until I figure out how I measure and even record it.
Margaret: Yeah. You’re reminding me of the historic pictures that I remember seeing at University of Wisconsin-Madison, when they did their Curtis Prairie restoration and all the research that went into that. They had these underground … Drawings of what was underground, the root mass of the prairie community. It was like, whoa, talk about different root structures of different kinds of plants serving not just the upper part of the plants, but the underground part having a whole community structure, too. It was amazing, really amazing.
So I just want to have you put in a word for alternative groundcover choices, because I know that you’re probably in the land of, what, lilyturf, Liriope, and what is it? Mondo grass, Ophiopogon, and from stem to stern in a lot of yards, I bet [laughter].
Preston: Corner to corner.
Margaret: Any suggestions for those of us looking to having any success with any ground cover choices?
Preston: Yeah. I also am interested in providing people with the lawn alternative that I get so many requests about. By the way, I find that this is very specific to a climate. Here in the Southeast, or at least here in the Piedmont of North Carolina, I don’t think that plants remain short and compact. It’s too hot, it’s too humid. I think the plants have to breathe some.
And so, I’ve got a very short list of things, like I find yarrow, Achillea, some sedges [above, in one of Preston’s designs], but stoloniferous plants that are responsive to the string trimmer and actually activate and remain low even if they don’t flower. For me here in North Carolina, the list is extremely short. And so, I really haven’t knocked out the dynamite lawn replacement.
But I would look for herbaceous plants that are stoloniferous, spread by stolons. Then there are a handful of sedges that I think respond favorably to foot traffic and with being hit by the string trimmer as well. But in the mountains of North Carolina, the list gets longer, and at the coast of North Carolina, the list gets longer.
Margaret: Right, because the Piedmont includes both those areas, yes?
Preston: Right. The challenge here is that we have the clay that shortens the list that would otherwise be longer at the coast with sandier soil and plants adapted to living a lifestyle close to the ground. In western North Carolina, you may bump into clay, but it’s more than likely on a slope and well-drained, but it has more consistent moisture and cooler evenings.
Margaret: I see. I see.
Preston: And so, that’s why the list expands there, whereas it’s really short here. Honestly, I heard someone say that if you can garden in the Piedmont of North Carolina, you can garden anywhere [laughter]. I expect that might be true.
Margaret: Oh my. Well, Preston Montague, I love talking to you. The Izel videos that you’ve done, they’re so much fun, kind of about walking in the wilderness looking for inspiration in some of them, and then distilling that into things we can take home and use in our own designs. So very enjoyable. But I’m just so glad to speak to you again. Thank you so much for making time today.
Preston: Thank you, Margaret. What a treat it’s been. I appreciate it.
(All photos from Preston Montague, used with permission.)
more from preston montague, and from wild ones
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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 Sept. 23, 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).
