This is part of a series of stories that accompany our podcast, “No Matter the Water.” To hear from someone who is gardening at home with natives, you can listen to Episode 4, “De Sha.”
Three years ago when Jillian Godshall and I were just starting research for a podcast about the environment in South Louisiana, the first interview we landed on was with Matt Conn. He owns and runs an environmental and ecological consulting company, but more relevant to us was that he restored 67 acres from dirt to a mecca for nature lovers in the area.
Since then, Jillian and I worked together on the film Louisiana Grass Roots about our coastal prairies, and that podcast came to fruition and is called No Matter the Water. Full disclosure, I’m now also in a relationship with Matt Conn.
Jillian and I started with native plants because we knew how growing more natives can help solve a lot of our environmental problems: they are incredible at storing carbon, require less water, are better adapted to our weather, provide more biodiversity, and can filter out a lot of the chemicals that go into our waterways.
In the episode “De Sha,” we talk to a local gardener who had no success until she stumbled into native gardening. So we decided to circle back to where we started, for another perspective on the benefits of natives, and hopefully get your mind going on how to incorporate some of this into your own life. Below is a condensed and edited version of a conversation between Jillian and Matt.
Jillian Godshall: You grew up spending a lot of time outdoors and had a lot of mentors. Could you tell me about that?
Matt Conn: As long as I could remember, I would spend time at the Acadiana Park Nature Station, which has quite a few miles of trails and big woods and a sort of museum-like structure that’s like a tree house. I started as a volunteer worker there when I was really young, younger than 10, and did work around the nature station and guided some tours and night hikes and those sorts of things. I guess that planted the seed and it stuck. It was hard to not learn about whatever you were interested in because you had somebody there that had spent their whole life studying those things, and they were willing to share.
Now, I can’t go anywhere without stopping and spending a whole bunch of time staring at something that’s in the woods or in the prairie or in the swamp. It’s either a plant or a reptile or a bird or an insect, something’s gonna grab my eye.
Jillian Godshall: I know Acadiana naturalist Bill Fontenot is still a big mentor for you, could you introduce who he is?
Matt Conn: When I met Bill he was running Acadiana Park. He had a native plant nursery and was just a wealth of knowledge. And in the birding world he was already very well known too. By now he’s written quite a few books and pamphlets on native gardening. He really was one of the first doing native gardening, and growing and selling native plants before it was cool. Now there’s a lot of really well developed yards that are beautiful and native-scaped that were either done by, plants provided by, or consulted by Bill Fontenot.
He really inspired me to do my personal restoration because he bought tracks of land and then restored them to a more native landscape. Bill and his wife Lydia, in their neighborhood, bought some of the woods that were behind it and replanted it in native trees, shrubs and other grasses and things. They also bought lots that were meant to be developed and turned them back into forest as well. They wanted to be surrounded by nature, and they saw the importance in keeping that resource healthy. It’s different from the second you walk up. There’s more of everything that you would want to see.
Acadiana naturalist Bill Fontenot has been a mentor for Conn, who followed his blueprint to create a native habitat. Photo by Rachel Nederveld
Jillian Godshall: Could you tell me about your property and how it came to be?
Matt Conn: It was a work project. There was an entity that cleared several tracks of wetlands and didn’t go through the permit process. So they had to come up with a restoration plan or purchase mitigation banks, which is more expensive. The company I was working for at the time took on that job. We had restored two tracks and then when it came to do the third one, they made a comment one day that they might wanna sell it as long as somebody would take over the violation.
I couldn’t sleep that night, and I drove back to their office the next morning and said that if they really would let this land go for a reasonable price, I would take them up on it. I got a call about a week later, I went back, and I literally wrote a check and walked out with a cash deed for that property. That was in 2010. Two days after I bought it, I left on a deployment to Iraq for 18 months. So I bought it and I hadn’t been on the entire property.
It did take me about five years of planting and doing the restoration work just to get it kind of set and in place. And then at that point it was more of a maintenance. It’s got marsh habitat, bottomland hardwoods, a little bit of cypress swamp and some coastal prairie habitat. It’s about 67 acres, just south of Lydia, Louisiana.
Jillian Godshall: Why was it important to you to make sure that you secured the property before your deployment?
Matt Conn: I knew I was gonna be gone for at least a year, and people change their minds. For a lot of people the land was mostly useless, other than hunters. And even though I love to hunt, I don’t do it on the property at all, it’s become sort of its own preserve. And I’m surrounded by landowners that do hunt. I get bears and deer and bobcats and all those things. They become more prevalent during hunting season because now it’s been 15 years and nobody’s shot at them on my land. It’s kind of a safe zone.
To me it really is therapeutic just to be out in the quiet. When things get stressful, it is one of the places that I can go. Whether you find one spot and sit down and watch, or you just take a nice walk, you always come out in a better state than when you got there.
Jillian Godshall: This is a tremendous amount of work and ongoing maintenance. What drives you to keep that up?
Matt Conn: Yes, restoration is a lot of manual labor and it’s time consuming. But if you like being out there in it, then the work is also therapeutic. I had examples that I got to see. This wasn’t a pretty piece of property when I bought it, but neither was Bill Fontenot’s. I don’t have the opportunity or the capital to go buy a big chunk of land that has old growth forest or something close to it. And whether or not I live long enough to see the forest completely mature is okay. But my kids will.
Not all of my children are as enthralled by being in nature and doing work to preserve it as I was at their age. However, I always encourage them to come with me to visit or do work at the property, and to take outings in nature in general. All three of my children have enjoyed helping plant trees and spread prairie seed, and can now watch the fruits of those labors, and I think they all appreciate that.
I had this talk recently with one of my daughters. I told them a conservation servitude or a conservation easement is a legal document which would protect it and keep it that way. And my oldest daughter was like: “That’s a really good idea. We should do that.”
Matt Conn’s daughters take a break on the family land. Photo by Matt Conn
Jillian Godshall: Yeah. That’s an incredible inheritance. Why is that important to you? What will they be inheriting from this land?
Matt Conn: When you go to Chicot State Park or the Atchafalaya Basin and find some of the older areas that are still there — they get to have some of that, and it’ll be their property and they can share it. I bring out different groups, Master Naturalists and Louisiana Ornithological Society and LSU Youth Ag Groups.You don’t have to just lock the gate and keep it all to yourself, although it is nice to be able to go out and have that quiet place all to yourself if you want it.
And it’ll only get better over time. We have live oaks and cypress, I think I have about 30 different native tree types that are planted. Parts of the property are even tidal so when we get storm surges and hurricanes, some of those things will die back and get knocked over. And that’s just part of the natural world around us and how things evolve. But the ones that make it are just gonna be gnarlier and twisted and look great when they’re older.
Matt Conn often invites scientists and students to visit and observe the diverse flora and fauna of his property. Photo by Matt Conn
Jillian Godshall: Do you have any advice for people who are looking to get started?
Matt Conn: Anybody can do it in their backyards. And you don’t have to do it all at once and make it a big ordeal either, you can put a little here and a little there. And I think what most people don’t realize about native plants is they’re what wants to be here. So it’s usually the one that grows the best and the fastest and reproduces easily, and is better at dealing with too wet or too dry conditions. So native plants usually are easier plants to grow.
Anybody can do it. And there are a lot of resources now and greenhouses where you can buy at a very affordable price. So you stick a few in this year and you stick a few in next year, and before you know it, you’ve got this great habitat at your house or at your little chunk of land. And it doesn’t have to be something that eats up all your time.
Jillian Godshall: Right? Yeah, I’ve seen that just in my own yard. As I was making Louisiana Grass Roots, I was seeing all of these incredible landscapes and these plants I’ve never seen anywhere else. I personally wanted to have those at my house. It’s really nice to walk out the door and to be able to see these plants. And like you said, they are thriving.
It’s almost like a lifestyle shift, you’re not just gonna put some plants you bought from the nursery in with some mulch and call it a day. And it’s not a tremendous amount of maintenance, but you are creating an ecosystem. And so you get to reap the benefits of what comes along with that.
Matt Conn: And it pulls you into it. Cause you get your first few plants and the next thing you know, there’s a butterfly that you’ve never seen in your life and it’s there on your flower in your yard. Right? So it puts the hook in. And with the native, you’re not putting plants that don’t work, that the birds here didn’t evolve for, or the insects didn’t evolve for. You’re putting something that’s helping something else. You know, it gives you that emotion in the back of your mind that you’re doing something good, because you are.
Comments are closed.