Gardening Nature's Way

By J. MADELEINE NASH AUSTIN

WHAT LOS ANGELES ATTORNEY MICKEY WHEATLEY HATES IN A garden is the big showy blooms that most everyone else loves. So three years ago, right after buying his first house, he set out to uproot the prize roses the previous owners had planted. While neighbors looked on in horror, he tore out the camellias too. In their place he put California poppies, fragrant sage and drought-tolerant manzanita. "Where everything is lush and green, maybe it's appropriate to grow roses," explains Wheatley. "But here it just doesn't feel right. For me it's almost a spiritual thing. The plants in my garden belong to the deserts of this region, and having them here helps me keep some small connection to the wild."

A decade ago, gardeners like Wheatley would have been considered eccentric, if not downright demented. These days they fit right in with the preserve-the- planet crowd and give a new meaning to the term green thumb. The goal of the back-to-natives style of gardening is to blend the landscapes of private homes into the natural world around them. Why should Texans plant daffodils and tulips when native bluebonnets and prairie paintbrushes create such glorious displays? Why should Southern Californians, who are trying to reduce water consumption, plant thirsty impatiens rather than the vivid wildflowers that decorate nearby hillsides? Why should Chicago suburbanites plant petunias and geraniums but scorn the coneflowers and compass plants that once delighted westbound pioneers?

Back-to-natives gardening is driven partly by a desire to get away from the monotonous landscaping that makes suburban lots in Arizona look virtually identical to those in Tennessee. "Our landscapes have become homogeneous," observes David Northington, executive director of the National Wildflower Research Center in Austin, Texas, "because they have been painted with an identical palette."

Just as important is the growing concern that typical lawns have become almost sterile -- separate from nature rather than a part of it. Nature writer Sara Stein joined the back-to-natives movement after she noticed the disappearance of fireflies and frogs, butterflies and birds from her five-acre property in Pound Ridge, New York. To bring the critters back, she put native grasses among her perennial flowers, planted a woodland garden, resurrected an old pond and created a wildflower meadow. Author of the new book Noah's Garden, Stein decries "the vast, nearly continuous and terribly impoverished ecosystem" consisting of copycat lawns and gardens from coast to coast. "We cannot in fairness rail against those who destroy the rain forest or threaten the spotted owl," she says, "when we have made our own yards uninhabitable."

The first rule of native-plant enthusiasts is to go for diversity. While a traditional garden may have a dozen species of plants, a well designed nativescape will have as many as 100 species in the same space. This variety ensures a healthier, heartier ecosystem because not all the plant life will be susceptible to the same diseases and pests. As an example of what happens when diversity declines, Dallas-based landscape designer Sally Wasowski cites the beetle-borne fungus that threatens to wipe out the majestic oaks that shade the homes and ranches of Texas hill country.

Back-to-natives gardening doesn't require a lush suburban spread; tiny Edens can sprout within the biggest cities. Ten years ago, video producer Jack Schmidling began constructing a woodland, a prairie and a wetland in the small backyard of his Chicago bungalow. Now his miniature ecosystems attract a wealth of winged wildlife, from birds to butterflies. While Schmidling is delighted, some of his neighbors are not. Although the enclave is concealed behind a high fence, they have reported him to the city, charging that his secret garden is an overgrown mess.

In places with fewer neighbors and more space, nativescapers can be more adventurous. Marti Springer of Tallahassee, Florida, surrounded her home with native plants and planted parsley as a special caterpillar food. She asked the county not to spray her bog for mosquitoes because they are eaten by bats. Now she is planning to set up a bat house. "Bats should just love it here," she predicts.

The goal is not always to create a wildlife refuge. Many gardeners just want a landscape that is easy and inexpensive to maintain and not particularly vulnerable to the vagaries of the weather. Barbara Humberger of Austin began going native in 1989 after an unusual cold spell killed many of the nonnative shrubs that surrounded her lakeside home. Her property shimmers with blackfoot daisies that bloom from early spring until the first fall frost. UCLA neurologist Andrew Charles wanted an attractive but drought-resistant cover for the steep hillside behind his house. His solution was to plant deep-rooted California lilacs punctuated by the orchid-like blossoms of sticky monkey flowers.

Because native plants are well adapted to the regions in which they grow, they require little in the way of care. They seldom, if ever, need watering, and they tolerate insect pests as well as extremes of heat and cold. They are, for the most part, resistant to disease, and will flourish without chemical fertilizer. By contrast, says John Dromgoole, who runs the Garden-Ville nursery in Austin, "poorly adapted plants put gardeners on a chemical treadmill, a treadmill we're trying to help them get off." Dromgoole, host of a popular radio and TV garden show, tells his audiences to get rid of Kentucky bluegrass and seed their lawns with buffalo grass, a robust short-stemmed native needing only occasional mowing. Instead of finicky azaleas, Dromgoole recommends lantana, an attractive flowering shrub that, in central Texas at least, thrives on benign neglect.

As gardens become extensions of the natural world, the gardeners who tend them inevitably see themselves as caretakers of a precious and endangered heritage. "In the U.S.," estimates Donald Falk, director of the Center for Plant Conservation in St. Louis, Missouri, "we have around 20,000 kinds of native plants. And 1 of every 5 is presently in trouble." Midwestern gardeners affiliated with the Nature Conservancy have started to grow some of the rarer species of prairie plants, incorporating them into their flower borders and carefully harvesting their seeds for replanting elsewhere. Other nativescapers play the role of modern Johnny Appleseeds. Andrew Charles admits that he has been sprinkling the seeds of California wildflowers ever more widely, "even on land we ourselves don't own."

Most back-to-natives gardeners find that getting close to nature is easier than they expected and even more rewarding than they imagined. Ken Stoffel, a dentist in the Chicago suburb of Palos Park, noticed that he never set foot in his front yard except to mow it. That's when he decided to tear up the sod and seed in a prairie. This spring he noticed a hawk hovering overhead, hunting for prey. A rabbit built its nest amid the tall grass. A fox prowled through. "We've taken over all this habitat that used to belong to other species," says Stoffel. "This is my way of sharing the living space."