“Living in the Liberated Landscape” with Larry Weaner

Discover the power of ecological garden design in this free national webinar, Living in the Liberated Landscape: My Yard, with award-winning landscape designer Larry Weaner. Join us for a personal look at how dynamic, self-sustaining landscapes can emerge when we partner with nature instead of controlling it. Drawing on more than 35 years of experience, Larry will share practical strategies for designing dynamic gardens that evolve naturally, support biodiversity, and bring lasting beauty to your yard.

Welcome everyone and thank you for joining us for tonight’s Wild Ones national webinar Living in the liberated landscape my yard with renowned landscape designer Larry Weaner. We’re so glad you could be here Tonight’s event is part of our ongoing Wild Ones present series Bringing together experts designers and practitioners who are reshaping how we think about our connection to the land Larry’s work has inspired thousands of homeowners and professionals to view their gardens not as static designs, but as living evolving ecosystems I’m Marlene Smith founder and president of the Wild Ones Chesapeake Bay chapter located in southern, Maryland Wild Ones Chesapeake Bay is deeply rooted in native plants and cultivating partnerships We have been described as a fast-moving chapter connecting people and native plants for a healthy planet through our shared passion to advocate educate and Collaborate to support Wild Ones vision of native plants and natural landscapes thriving in every community. I invite you to learn more about Wild Ones Chesapeake Bay by visiting our website Following us on Facebook and Instagram and subscribing to our YouTube channel I’m extremely honored tonight to be introducing Larry Weaner as our guest speaker But before we get started just a few quick notes This webinar is hosted on YouTube live. So feel free to introduce yourself in the chat If you’d rather not see the chat you can switch to full-screen mode closed captions are available in your settings and remember you can pause or rewind anytime with your player controls and If you enjoyed tonight’s program remember to like the video and subscribe to our channel For those of you who are new to Wild Ones We’re a nonprofit membership organization devoted to promoting native plants through education advocacy and collaborative action Our mission comes to life through the grassroots efforts of local Wild Ones chapters along with national programs and resources like this webinar If you are not a Wild Ones member, we hope you will join us in helping native plants and natural landscapes thrive in every community Now it’s my pleasure to introduce our speaker for tonight’s program Larry Weaner is a nationally recognized landscape designer and an expert in native meadow and ecological restoration His work bridges art and ecology helping communities create landscapes that are both beautiful and self-sustaining He is also an honorary director for Wild Ones During his term Larry created the Wild Ones, Washington DC Native garden design and has continued to provide invaluable educational content and long-term guidance to our organization Thank you, Larry for your dedicated service as a Wild Ones honorary director and for your continued partnership in advancing our mission Well, thank you all for being here and thank you Wild Ones for inviting me I just have to say that This organization meaning Wild Ones Long ago when none of this was cool or hip were advocating Native design and bringing ecology into landscape design and to really talk about it in more concrete terms Back when Lorrie Otto and others started Wild Ones There was ecological restoration and that was a science and there was garden design and that was an art And they had nothing to do with each other There was no conversation between those two worlds and I would as far as I can tell In terms of what I’ve seen in my 40 plus year career Wild Ones may be the first organization that really tried to marry those two disciplines in Africa And so I really have a lot of respect for this group and I appreciate you all being here and I appreciate being invited to do this presentation Which is about my house living in a liberated landscape my yard. You might want to ask Why would you want to spend a whole presentation when your house? Are you going to show us your Family vacation to Disney World next? Well, no, I’m not going to do that. However, I’ve spent over 30 years here Doing things and observing the reaction the vegetative reaction to those things that I did So not only could I do 40 minutes about my yard I could do a week about my yard because it’s taught me a whole lot So here we go and just starting with explaining the title when I say liberate living in a liberated landscape There are two liberatees so to speak Uh, there’s the person living there and there’s the plants that are also living there and what I mean by Liberated in terms of the people is Not being a slave to constantly manipulating and working because you’re allowing nature to make some decisions And to have a hand in what goes on and you’re participating in that effort So the people are being liberated the plants are also being liberated So the people are being liberated the plants are also being liberated plants have evolved for thousands of years Primarily to increase their efficiency Uh an ability to proliferate yet in the garden We traditionally we create an arrangement on paper or ad hoc We put that arrangement that we put those plants in the ground according to that arrangement and we weed everything in between Basically shutting down all of that effort that went into evolution and creating seeds and sending out Clonal root systems and all the things that plants do we don’t really consider in traditional garden design So that’s a heavy part of what i’m going to be talking about here today using native plants more often Whether it’s exclusive or otherwise is a good thing in and of itself if you’re planting a landscape Uh in a traditional manner except you’re using primarily native plants. That’s a good thing That’s a big advancement. However, I think we can take this a step further By increasing the percentage of our yard That we are devoting to native plants maybe as an alternative to lawn or big beds of pakisandra And once we increase the scale and by scale, I don’t mean you need a big property I mean a bigger percentage of whatever property you have Is devoted to native plants all of a sudden you can’t buy big fat plants to fill the whole place up Nor can you spend the time to weed every single? Volunteer that shows up in between them now we have to start being in between ecological restoration and garden design So let’s talk about that and before I leave this image Which is the backyard and the rear of my house and you can see some trees and a bunch of stuff growing on the ground layer I will just say most of what you see Not all but most of what you see I did not plant But would not be there had I not done something so that’s what we’re going to talk about today all right There are a number of terms that are commonly used in ecology and you would encounter in ecology Terrestrial ecology 101 if you were going to school for ecological restoration There’s a lot of terms that you would be encountering constantly That don’t tend to work their way in the garden design and one of them is disturbance Disturbance has a huge or lack thereof has a huge influence on plants grow whether plants grow or not and so Here we have the rear bank Of my backyard and it was covered in english ivy when I inherited this place when we bought my wife and I bought the place and Obviously removed it And we planted some things some of which you see on that bank But I didn’t fill that bank with plants that bank is filled with plants because the original ones I planted have proliferated And others have come in on their own but Okay, what did I do to prepare for it? I did nothing Except remove the ivy Well, didn’t you I I don’t have a good soil I have a Poorly drained clay soil. I’m in the piedmont right on the edge of the the piedmont in the coastal plain in southeastern Pennsylvania and it’s a heavy poorly grained poorly drained clay soil now a good gardener would come in there and maybe Tilt in some compost add some fertilizer Maybe some sand to increase the drainage and I did none of those things All I did was look closely at the soil that I have And research those plants that grow in that particular condition And plant them Am I limited did that limit to me? Yes But what would have been the opposite way to go? All right There are beautiful wonderful plants that will grow in a heavy poorly drained clay packer aureus or golden ground cells of yellow flower wild geranium Solomon’s seal is that hanging wave flower on the bottom? Ostrich fern is in there these plants all can tolerate a horticulturally poor heavy clay soil So they’re fine Why didn’t I just but but the plants that won’t grow in that are not in there I could have used them I could have had a broader palette of plants if I would have made it a nice well drained rich situation But I didn’t what’s the so the advantage of enriching the soil is I can grow a wider variety of plants The disadvantage of enriching the soil is a wider variety of weeds are happy to grow there also As well as the disturbance I would have created to bring in new soil or till in Compost or all the things that I would have then done would have generated a lot more seed germination And in most of our properties When we are getting started the soil seed bank meaning the seeds that are in the soil Already Are dominated by more weeds than desirable plants. Unfortunately, that’s just the way it is out there So by disturbing and tilling things in I am increasing the weed presence. I am widening the the ability of Undesired species to be able to come in Instead I am limiting their ability by preserving what is horticulturally a poor soil But picking the plants that go in that situation and here you can see the results of that After a number of years and we’ll talk about why the proliferation is successful. That’s really where we’re headed All right. So we talk a lot in ecological design and creating things for Vegetative compositions for wildlife that ecological species diversity is very important and yes it is However, there’s another type of diversity that’s important also particularly if you’re thinking about encouraging plants to proliferate and that is to use a diversity of Proliferation strategies Now here’s two examples. There’s really two categories in general of proliferation strategies They’re sexual and asexual Wild geranium geranium maculatum the blue flower here propagates sexually by seed And pachora aureus or golden ground cell the yellow flower propagates asexually by what are called rhizomatous roots that expand out in the landscape and increase the area of which that Plan is covering Two very different strategies. It is important if you want plans to colonize on their own Beyond where you have planted them to include plants that colonize sexually and asexually Because the way they move around is different and they will end up going to different places so intentionally using asexual and sexually Proliferating plants is one important thing but within those categories there are subcategories for instance plants that proliferate Asexually meaning colonally not by seed I mentioned rhizomatous root systems, which the golden ground cell has this is Foam flower. Tirella cordifolia. This is also an asexually proliferating plant, but it Moves by stolons not underground roots But above ground roots They look like stems, but they’re actually roots that crawl along the ground root in form leaves and then continue So above ground stolons below ground rhizomes But the stolons and the rhizomes operate differently and it’s relevant to how you’re arranging them And how why you are including both of them a rhizomatous root expanding plant It sends out roots and immediately sends up shoots. So that plan is expanding in a dense manner Because there are numerous shoots coming up as the roots are expanding a moniferous plant Is asexually proliferating but in a different way. That’s the roots are above ground Look like stems, but they’re really botanically roots But immediately upon leaving the original clump if there is dense vegetation Adjacent to it. It does not put out roots or leaves It continues on until it finds a gap where there’s some sunlight in a little open soil And then it puts down a little root clump and it puts down up a clump of leaves and it sends out the next shoot now What’s it really doing? Where are the weeds in a landscape? One of the things that is the most important in native design and in low maintenance or management design Is to have a dense ground layer that’s weed suppressive and you put plants that are adapted. So they’re going to be vigorous Weed suppressive they’re going to be planted densely Multi-layered so a weed seed has a hard time getting through but there will always be some weeds There is no such thing as no maintenance Where are the weeds going to be in that dense composition in the places that because something disturbed it or some condition caused it to be Weak where there are gaps the weeds will grow in the gaps Believe me. I’ve seen enough weeding sessions in my life to know that the weeds are generally in the gaps They’re not coming through the dense vegetation So what’s a stoleniferous plant doing for you? It’s reaching out with those stems finding the gaps putting down a root system putting up a clump and moving on to find the next gap it’s basically very efficiently reducing the Weeding of that landscape and so scattering these plants around as opposed to a clump of them in one place Is going to be much more effective because more plants will be near gaps that they can plug up Meanwhile the rhizomatous plants are just increasing the density Immediately around them and the result and seeds are moving around some by wind Some like geranium drop right at the base of the plant and so seeds are moving in different ways and so the gaps in your landscape have As support behind them plants that have multiple ways to find their way into that gap plug that gap and uh Keep the maintenance as low as possible so Here’s the rear bank Uh of my my house and the way the backyard is arranged. There’s this stone terrace, which I designed and and had built Adjacent to the house. There’s a stone wall that was actually there when I moved in rebuilt it to improve it There’s a little stream and pond you can see that was uh, uh My work then there’s the slope that had the ivy and then there’s a flat area up top and I want to make clear here This is an inner ring suburb of philadelphia, and this is between an acre Excuse me between a quarter acre and a third of an acre So we are talking about a very small property what’s in the front that we’ll see later is a postage stamp basically Um, so here’s the landscape. Uh, one thing I will mention is when I first put some plants in here One of the plants I put in was cardinal flower now cardinal flower is what is called a ruderal species All annuals and biennials are ruderal but some perennials are ruderal too a ruderal plant is one that uh establishes very quickly And has is very short-lived and non-competitive and that’s the story with cardinal flower. It’s not a long-lived plant So when I planted it Uh, it was there and then it got out competed by the dense vegetation that you see now and it dropped out And for many years there was no cardinal flower on my property after it dropped out That’s the nature of the plant and i’m okay with that however I would say A good eight years after cardinal flower disappeared from that bank one little scraggly plant showed up Right by my pond And I thought oh wow, man. It was you know, cardinal flower has been gone for a long time. Yeah I know that’s the way it works, but let’s bring it back if possible So I took a seed stalk from that plant I found a little gap down in the lower terrace area in the little garden that was planted there place the seed stalk in the gap and disturbed the soil a little bit because disturbance increases seed germination And i’ve just dropped a whole bunch of seeds there All right So, oh there it is. I got a cardinal flower. No big deal It’s not a hard plant to grow from seed Here’s the next year all of those plants with the white stripe in the middle leaves Those are all cardinal flower coming in in the cracks of the terrace There was the next year cardinal flower is growing where I actually set left that stalk Is if you can see the tree right behind the table That’s an american hornbeam and it was right behind that right to the right of that tree was where the original seed stalk went So here was the next year Here it is the next year I didn’t plant any of this this came from that one seed stalk that I placed Right by that tree that you see in the center Now my wife and I still would like to use our terrace As much as we like cardinal flower and the hummingbirds that it brings every single day When they’re blooming which is a long time So we removed it the design here Not we didn’t remove it all the design here is where we left it and the active part of the design is removal Not planting in this case So now we have a path to the steps and there’s a little bench to the right And eventually we decided because we had to move the table off to a not so great position that we’d like to Bring back the center of this landscape And Put the table back So there you have it now Here’s the story behind That weird gap between the time that cardinal flower was out competed on the slope And the time that that one seedling showed up by the pond and I placed it In a gap Why did the seeds never Move from the Slope Wash down on the terrace and start growing in the cracks and in these Garden beds like they are now So I had to do a little research and what I found was that cardinal flower seeds, which are very very tiny Attach themselves to soil particles Meaning that unless the soil is moving those seeds aren’t moving with water And that bank is densely planted so soil is not moving There is a lot of root mass and and and leaf mass Uh the preventing the soil from moving so the seeds were in place until I took that stalk and put it just to the right of that hornbeam tree and Now the seeds happen to be falling Directly on the stone and there’s no soil to attach themselves to and so they start moving around the stone and finding the cracks and germinating And germinating on the edge of the stone where the water takes it to so basically Wherever there is soil The cardinal flower is only there if it is adjacent to stone because it cannot travel the seeds can’t travel across the soil Now you might say there’s an aspect to this picture and I wonder if anyone’s picked up on it That can make a liar out of me because everything in that center around the tree Well, that’s adjacent to stone and wherever if you look off to the farthest left That’s adjacent to the stone and in the foreground you can see a little one coming up adjacent to the stone But what about that rear bank? That’s not adjacent to stone and seeds and water are not going to travel uphill even if they did not have this Attached to soil characteristic. So on that slope there was Asian azaleas Which I left for many years and finally took them off and instead of Of buying a bunch of plants I just took cardinal flower seeds and I took a couple little clumps of the pakora which expands By right by rhizomatous roots and some of the cortiorella which expands by stolen for stems And I just put all of those on the bank sourced from the plants that are already there and that’s why they’re growing on the bank So assisted seed dispersal Is a very important aspect of this plant plants not just for the plant but for the plants that it will generate And I am assisting it in doing that by taking it to places. It won’t go on its own On the other hand if I had understood this in the beginning when I first operated in this landscape I might have planted a few cardinal flowers at the top of the slope and just Made a few little scree. I don’t need to have stone walks or steps just threw some stone scree down the slope In in a few ribbons and take the cardinal flower wherever I wanted So the idea here is thinking about how plants are moving around how they are proliferating and how you can assist it By physically gathering seeds and moving them or maybe conducting them because you understand how they travel So here’s a bench That I inherited From a client We were doing a project this bench they had they didn’t want it They were going to throw it away and it actually was a fairly high quality bench It was old and the the wrought iron work was pretty nice. So I took it home and I dropped it here in front of the stone wall Now you can see some cardinal flower Which I did not plant Adjacent to the stone on the left. The cardinal flower has settled down some this isn’t wet down here. So When the seeds were first germinating it was heavy It’s not a long-lived plant so it starts to reseed but now they’re present In patches here and there not as dominant as before and that’s fine If I want to bring them back I can disturb the soil at the base of these plants and I will be opening up The ability for those seeds that are being dispersed to germinate more readily which they are not because of the dense vegetation That those seeds are mostly falling in So cardinal flower is still present not as dense as it was and I actually kind of like it better that way Meanwhile, the bench is forming moss and lichens Like nobody’s business and it’s become a piece of art and it’s uh, uh pretty old now and uh, the art is becoming Uh richer and richer And the functional ability of that plant to actually seat someone is becoming Not only less rich but downright dangerous because it’s too rotten to sit on anymore So the two pots of impatience that you see have two roles add a flower through the season to supplement whatever’s coming in and going with the uh perennial plants, uh, Cardinal flower and otherwise and hold up the bench because if you took one of those pots away that bench will collapse To the to the side and if someone ever sat on it, forget it So there’s packer aureus and geranium and some other things in a band right in front of that bench And a little cat pot which has nothing in it Why are they there? I don’t want anyone to ever sit on that bench So i’m basically blocking access to the bench and there was a little place to put your foot where the cat is So the cat’s there so you don’t do that So, uh figure okay, so big deal you planted some stuff I didn’t plant some stuff I weed whip the cracks of that terrace Maybe once a month or less Uh to be able to use the terrace And I go around plants where I places where I want the plants to grow because they’re not in my way or they look good there So I didn’t need to plant that packer All I needed to do was not weed whip it and let the packer on either edge of the terrace creeped across those cracks So again at this point What you see behind the bench what you see to the left and the right and what is in front of the bench? Of course with the exception of the two planted in patients 80 of that probably I didn’t plant I planted all of those plants, but the ones that you see were not the ones I planted They were the progeny of the ones that I planted and I assisted that to occur and the last question before I move on is Impatience Really, you know You’re talking native design and wild landscapes and habitat and all that and you’re planting some The most common annual that gets planted Yeah, yeah, I am the birds are not refusing to land and feed in my property Because they saw some non-native plants there. They don’t care and certainly in patients are not invasive So there are non-native plants on my property. I am not a purist There certainly won’t be any invasive species allowed and the important thing to me is not that your landscape is purely 100 native the important thing to me is there’s a hell of a lot of native plants there And if there’s some exotic ones in there, so be it and that’s fine. And there’s the impatience So we’re going to move over to the front yard now And keeping it much neater There’s a few people looks like i’m having some influence on in the neighborhood these days in the beginning You know, there was nothing else going on like this Um, so the plants are lower They’re more controlled but it’s still native landscape and things are still moving around because if you look At those yucara or coral bells that are around the non-native paperbark maple, by the way That’s planted right near the front door The only ones I planted are the ones above the stone wall immediately around the trunk And you can see that there is coral bells at the base Uh the foot of that wall. I didn’t plant those you could see some on the bottom left That’s down by the curb. I didn’t plant those and what is going on is yucara. Velosa is Ger seeds are germinating in the landscape, but only where there is little competition so that they can germinate And it’s really dry because that’s where that plant grows in nature I’ve seen it growing out of con out of asphalt cracks out of concrete Uh, but cracks out of a concrete bridge abut abutment. So where it’s germinating is Little competition so the seeds can germinate and extremely dry And it’s moving around the landscape, let’s move out to that bay window on the top left That was a crumbling, uh bay window Uh that brick was the base for it that when we bought the house was a mess and we removed it And put in a new bay window on the top and by the way that uh messed up, uh, uh, uh Siding, uh on the bottom right has long ago been fixed But here we’ve got in the concrete base that was the floor Uh of that room in the cracks is growing yucara and columbine Which is another plant that grows in that kind of condition not planted naturalizing not in the nice soil Naturalizing in the cracks of the concrete Within that brick thing. So let’s go around the corner now this is Again less than a third of an acre here So the left side of that picture is my property line And this to me was just a little passage from the front to the backyard. I didn’t care much about it There’s a hose bib right out of sight there. Um And a bunch of overgrown shrubs when I inherited the property or bought the property And so I ripped that all out And I just put pea gravel down three eighths inch pea gravel only on the right There was peccasandra on the left. I put pea gravel on the right And I was thinking about it planting anything there And guess what? Here comes the yucara vellosa in the pea gravel in the low competition and it formed a solid mass there So on the left at that time was peccasandra right up to the uh, uh stone terrace So I decided to get rid of that right up to my property line And you know yucara is doing well, so why don’t I plant that but i’m not going to buy yucara. I’ve seen it enough Moving around in gravel and on the edge of the asphalt and on the edge of the curbing The walkway between the walkway and the curbing down by the street I’m just going to put pea gravel there and i’m going to get yucara i’ll bet So here’s what happened Cardinal flower Remember I said it won’t travel across soil the seeds because they attach themselves to soil Well, it followed that stone path from the back terrace All the way down the stonework. It doesn’t continue beyond that because the seeds will only you know Once they go off the terrace onto the soil, they’re stopped But that’s what came in and you can even see the centrifugal force of the water coming from left From right to left as it goes around that curve would be taking it off to that side and not to the inside Where the yucara still is? so one thing i’ll say about this kind of landscape design is uh a sophisticated design Of traditional garden one of the strategy you might use is hide some feature in the landscape take a path around That mass that hides it and all of a sudden it unfolds is a great surprise And you know, that’s one garden design technique to create some drama, but let’s face it You have a property whatever paths you have you’ve walked them a hundred times There’s no surprise anymore when you go around the curve and see the beautiful sculpture or the bone side pine No, now, you know, it’s there. What is a surprise? What is stimulating is something like this where you did something you thought it was going to be yucara and it turns into cardinal flower And then who’s more adapted to the dry gravel situation cardinal flower or yucara? And the answer is yucara and who has longer lived cardinal flower or yucara and the answer is yucara So while the cardinal flower was the fastest thing to come in It also was the fastest thing to drop out and what I was intending to happen Uh that didn’t happen right away ended up happening As the dynamic changed over on the left of the pathway So let’s move to uh, uh what i’ve been talking about And let’s just check the time here what i’ve been talking about Which is planting some things and then taking action to increase, uh, uh their colonization abilities Now let’s talk about encouraging the natural recruitment of things that you might want but aren’t even planting That is a pig nut hickory and that is the bank in the early days before after I ripped out the ivy but Shortly after I had planted it so it’s not dense and intermingled as you’ve seen in the later pictures Now what’s going on on the surface there? There’s wood chips What’s what are the wood chips about? Well, there was research that I read about at ruckers university new jersey where they took bare patches of ground And applied different things to those patches and inventoryed what plants naturally recruited They didn’t plant anything and where they put down raw wood chips They got a higher percentage of trees but not pioneer species of trees like tulip tree or or or bass wood That you would expect to be the first trees to come up early succession pioneer species It was oaks and hickories the species that you would expect to come up underneath the shade Of those pioneer species So i’m thinking wow and I got some big either right on my property or adjacent big oaks big hickories So there’s a seed source here So I ripped up the ivy and I put down the wood chips and sure enough I got oaks and hickories. I got four hickory oaks on that bank and one hickory I’ve gotten three oaks on my property naturally recruiting On the entire rest of the property over these years and i’ve never had a hickory naturally recruit I’m, not sure why I would have think there would have but clearly these wood chips generated those trees And there they are a few years later. There’s the grouping There’s oaks the hickory is the one on the top the branch on the top right and now you can see the ground layer is filling in And there are those trees. Um, I don’t know maybe five or six years ago Um, and I would say probably 20 something years after they were planted and guess what? The year I took that picture I was on another property where we had planted a large caliber trees like three to four inch trees The same year that we planted those trees elsewhere I put down the wood chips and I knew it was the same year because of something that had occurred in my life that year Uh that I could associate with both of those activities And so I measured the trees that were planted and I came back and measured these trees and they were much bigger Meaning these trees were much bigger think about that the same year that I planted three to four inch caliber trees Uh a chipmunk or a squirrel planted, uh acorns and hickory nuts and those trees are bigger That’s pretty incredible So am I saying and in much of the united states if you do nothing you’ll get trees And some of them might be invasive plants You don’t want like bradford pear or something or rilanthus and but others will be ones you want and so the strategy would be uh, and and to when they come in to remove the undesirable ones and set the trajectory for the desirable ones to dominate but Uh, you know, i’m not saying don’t ever plant any trees Well, I got some nice oaks and hickories out of that because I analyzed the situation looked at some ecological research and determined What I could do to encourage that to happen on its own, but on the bottom left you can see a pagoda dogwood I have no reason to believe no matter what I do a pagoda dogwood is just going to show up So I bought a tree and I planted it This is design intermingled with spontaneous recruitment Now there’s looking through that arbor as an oak tree that came up on its own also And this was really weird i’m walking around my property and i’m noticing that uh, That oak sprouted and the weird part of it is it sprouted immediately right in the center of the View access from my dining room table up those concrete steps Through that arbor which wasn’t there when I first discovered the tree growing In other words right on the central axis this uh of my main view Out of the house in the backyard this thing shows up Exactly, and i’m thinking what’s the chances of this? This is this is really weird, but then I remembered No, I had for the hell of it while walking around my property one day with a little bit of wood chips on hand Made a little like three foot circle of wood chips intentionally right on that view that axe axial view And then forgot about it. This wasn’t a big plan. This wasn’t a big deal It’s just something I did while wandering around because it happened to have some wood chips forgot about it Didn’t even realize I did it when I did get a sprout until I thought about it a little more and then I was like Oh, wow, I can not only get oaks and hickories. I can Influence where where they actually are Very specifically now what I tell a client i’m going to put three feet a three foot circle of wood chips right here And you’re going to get an oak or you’re going to get a hickory or you’re going to get anything. No, I would not But if I was doing that in different places, it may very well work in some of them And the arbor is there because the tree once the tree showed up Uh, that was really important. That’s just this, you know, it’s going to be beautiful someday, but it’s no big deal right now It’s just a young oak trunk It is a big deal to me because there’s a whole intellectual series of events and landscape interactions from research to putting down wood chips, uh to Putting down some more wood chips and then the tree grew Uh, so that is an important tree to me intellectually emotionally So that arbor is there because sunday that tree is going to be great Uh, but i’ll always think about how it came about So I increased its importance. So an altered seed bank I mentioned very early on that Uh in most properties where houses have been built and things have been disturbed Uh, the soil has more weed seeds in it than native plants not always but more times than not That was the case when I first moved here 30 something years ago, but now I am not allowing any weed plants to uh form seed and I will say that Most of the weeds that come in here that I don’t want I am just cutting them at the base And not digging them by the roots. Why because when you dig by the roots you create a disturbance What does the disturbance do it encourages seed germination? And if most of the seeds in the soil, uh seed bank are weeds you’re encouraging weeds You’re pulling one weed and getting 12 in return It’s a never-ending cycle of weeding if I have a dense vegetative cover on the ground And I reach at the base of right at ground level and cut that weed out It’s got to resprout through three four layers of 18 inches of vegetation there and a dense root systems And it’s got no light until it gets to the top the plants around it have not had to Use, uh food reserves in the soil to regrow they’ve been they’ve never had their life cycle disturbed they’ve been enjoying all the light and all the uh, uh, uh space, uh, um Because they never were cut And so consequently after a couple of cuts most weeds will expire and if they don’t completely expire They never expand and never take over the landscape and they’re okay The caveat with this is you can only do it if you have a dense cover Already because if you cut it in a mulch bed at the base the minute it resprouts, it’s got light So it will come back many more times And this doesn’t work on highly aggressive rhizomatous root system weeds like mugwort or japanese knotweed They’re too aggressive. You can cut them too many times. They will come back. So the most regret you need a dense cover first And then cut instead of uh, uh Cut instead of pull by the roots except the most aggressive rhizomatous seeds. And what is the result of that over years? There are no i’ve cut those plants. They’ve never Produced seed the ones I didn’t want So the seed bank is now altered The plants that I either planted or I have encouraged to proliferate are throwing millions of seeds around Their roots are expanding the seed bank is now altered in favor of native plants And so where there are gaps now, it’s more likely to be a native plant that either planted or that i’m allow have allowed to uh, colonize Uh than a weed and so here’s a little patch with pennsylvania sedge Is the grass there? That’s a beautiful ground cover open woodland sedge. I didn’t plant it anywhere. It came in on its own There’s wild geranium kind of on the top. I planted it but not there There’s a cardinal flower kind of a little lower center left I planted it but not there. There’s some uh, uh, uh Violets, uh, I didn’t plant those And they’re fine and people think they’re weeding in a garden But they intermingle beautifully in this kind of a composition the point is I i’m getting plants all over the place that I want This was my vegetable garden those were towers that I made to support, um, Uh, the three sisters garden actually with corn and beans and squat growing up and squash spreading And then the the pandemic came and we just didn’t plant any vegetables And it wasn’t a great place for vegetables anyway, because it was not full sun So I didn’t plant it that year and here’s what’s grew Here’s what grew and i’m not going to show you all the stuff that grew in that garden on its own because the seed bank Has been altered and there’s cardinal flower and there’s joe pie weed And this year I took this picture a couple weeks ago pokeweed Came up now pokeweed is a weed to most people but it’s a native plant and it’s got wildlife value And it’s actually quite beautiful it can be very wrangly it can be ugly in the wrong place But coming up in amongst these towers, it was kind of cool. So I left the pokeweed. Not only did I leave it But I pruned it a little bit to thin it out. So it had a little structure and it wasn’t just a big mass How long that take? Oh, yeah, that’s that’s persnickety maintenance. You must do a lot of maintenance No, I must have spent 10 and a 10 hours 10 minutes making a few cuts and now i’ve got uh I may be Uh, the only horticulturist in the history of horticulture to prune a pokeweed. I can’t say that definitively I hope I have at least I got at least I got something that i’m unique about And here’s just a close-up, you know pokeweed is a beautiful beautiful plant and it can be the ugliest thing in the world when it’s sprawled all over amongst amongst uh invasive plants or or right on the edge of a planting where it would spill over onto the you know Nine times out of ten from a visual standpoint in a garden It’s not going to work but once in a while it does and i’m okay with it when it does So management design intermingle. This is that upper area above the bank And I planted some allium cernum and they have increased over time, which is the plant that you see there I did not plant the goldenrod that’s here and I did not plant the aster uniola That’s here, uh, but i’m considering them desirable. Um, oh Selective height cutting this part of this little meadow patch and i’d barely call it a meadow because it’s just a little gap in the trees this patch, uh is basically um I want to keep it low And so the things I few couple things I planted in there and pennsylvania sedge is coming in on its own a lot too I planted low and the maintenance is to weed whip if nothing is taller than 18 inches in that planting I weed whip it at 18 inches a couple few times a year So anything that comes to is taller i’m cutting it and I want it to stay short and that plant will either resprout shorter Or it will expire because it’s continually getting cut and so that’s the perimeter area and the center where I cut Now there are two patches that I don’t cut And i’ve got this aster a goldenrod and some other things coming up So where do I cut and where I don’t cut is the design? And selective stem cutting that I said here is the goldenrod can get taller than I want So I just cut the tallest stems like you would artistically prune a shrub instead of shearing it instead of cutting it back I just cut the longest stems leave the shorter ones and that also is about a 20 minute job once a year And the aster is a perfect height as is Now here’s a picture I took this morning Now this is uh, obviously much later in the year. The flowers are gone. We’re in the you know, latter stages of fall However, you can see there’s my oak tree Now it’s thicker. It’s years later. You can see the pergola that you’re looking at it through and where did I cut? I cut the perimeters The foreground but then I cut a swath right through the center To that oak and then I left the taller goldenrod aster and other taller things Uncut on either side of it. So I have framed the view of the oak simply by cutting lower And letting the vegetation be taller and just making individual cuts on the tallest plants If you look all the way to the right you can see a few goldenrods immediately to the right of the uh, the upright part of the uh arbor there If those were in the center, I probably would have just cut those taller stems and left the small the shorter ones But now it’s off to the perimeter. So i’m not even bothering with that, but I didn’t want it too tall I wanted a height differential to highlight that tree that’s designed 20 something years after Uh, uh, I primarily planted this landscape now. What about the trunk? You know, it’s going to get bigger and more beautiful as years go on but it’d be nice to do something with it And here is a model this isn’t my house this is in the coastal plain This was a client who had some kind of a garden in front of this And it was kind of wild and she didn’t like it and she wanted me to redesign it So I walked behind it and this is the coastal plain This is the pine barrens and there was this beautiful mountain laurel naturally occurring and periodic branches Encircling the beautiful platybark of the pitch pine And that was a beautiful composition. It was like kind of windows Of the trunk that was created by the crossing branches. So I decided Uh, and I saw this years ago It’s a bad photographically bad because I used to have a terrible camera and I was a terrible photographer. I’m a little better now um So that’s my strategy So I did plant a bottle brush buckeye there Uh, and you can see the branch starting to cross And there I pruned to expose the bottom window Another branch will cross over top and i’ll prune to have a series of windows up that trunk and that will be the design And the last image I wanted to show here before we just whip through some some some quick wildlife shots Just to see the kind of bird life that is here is The idea that’s a glass. Uh, that’s that glass has rye whiskey in it And I put it there. I use this picture This is the edge of that little meadow with the allium cernum and the gold rye and everything to show that that whole operation uh Of selective cutting Was done one day when I was just walking around with a glass of rye whiskey in my hand And took a half hour off to just grab a weed whip do a little weed whipping because I got inspired This is not This big plan with crews and I do have a landscape crew that we work with on projects that come in three times a year during the growing season and just do the the weeding cutting the most weeds and uh pulling by the roots The ones that are really hyper aggressive and there are a couple of those like mugwort So the idea here is that this isn’t like, okay We’re going to do a big maintenance job for the next couple days. No, this is i’m walking around and like the the uh, uh, uh, um, Pokeweed There was no big plan there just happened to be out there. I’ll grab the shears and make a couple cuts Oh, yeah, that looks much nicer So i’m just going to go quickly through some images of the wildlife that is on this Uh less than a third of an acre in entering suburb of philadelphia and some of the reasons that they’re there water Not just a pond but a stream with riffles and small Little pools that the small birds can the birds will be on those riffles Much more than they’ll be on the edge of the pine because most of them can’t even reach the water So vertical structure is something okay. You want berries to feed the birds you want water. That’s pretty obvious But I my wife and I have seen birds. They don’t They don’t fly from the they don’t fly up to the top of the tall oak tree From the ground they’re hopping to the shrubs and then to the small trees and then to the big trees and back to the ground So vertical structure at every level is visually I can just see how important it is by watching them So they got the ground layer Those are the trees that came from the wood chips. You’ve got a non-native Tortured beach that I planted in the bottom right Physical structure chipmunks they want to be in the stone some places like that and here’s some of the birds cedar wasps wing on the right baltimore oriole on the top Uh ruby-throated hummingbird monarch butterfly on the swamp milkweed carolina ran on the feeder harry woodpecker on the feeder Red-bellied woodpecker on the feeder Oh, I copied and pasted and that’s the wrong Obviously, that’s not a red tail hawk. That’s the dangers of copy and pasting and then attempting to change the the word. Um, that is a ruby, uh breasted grosbeak And deer we have deer They cause some damage not a lot. Why don’t they decimate the ground layer? They they’re worse the shrubs the trees are too tall for them to reach uh, the branches and we did buck Uh, I I know we didn’t have deer when those trees first came up we do now Um, but the the the ground layer is all dense intermingled They can’t get a bite of something they like without a bite of something they don’t like and so the herbaceous ground layer is For the most part with a few exceptions pretty untouched and it’s because of intermingled planning They don’t like pennsylvania says they don’t like anything in the men family they love asters But if they’re all together, they can’t get one without the other Squirrel picture of a great horned owl a horrible photograph, but it’s the best we could do My wife took that from the bathroom window upstairs She loves the groundhog people hate groundhogs. I don’t see you know, they eat plants. I don’t know I don’t see damage and my wife laughs every time she sees These Red-tailed there is the red-tailed hawk sitting on the adirondack chair morning does on the adirondack chair a catbird Which during the pandemic my wife was feeding grapes and that bird was coming up to her and eating grapes next year She was hoping that bird would come back because evidently they do come back to the same place But that bird never came back again and she could never repeat that That bird would sit on the grill next to the door The back door leading to the terrace waiting for my wife to come out with the grapes Cold finch wood thrush sparrow indigo bunting scarlet tanager Red-tailed hawk once again, uh up in the pagoda dogwood and this is another one my Something that my wife observed That hawk was in the tree Although there was tons of birds down on the stream The hawk dive bombed after the birds and the birds fled into the thicket of the lacotha way Where the hawk was too big to get into and what I learned from that is wherever there’s a bird hot spot If you have dense thicket forming shrubs Adjacent it forms a refuge for birds and it increases the habitat value And there’s the hawk Looking into the shrub. It wasn’t these pictures were put to the story is real These pictures weren’t taken during the story. She didn’t get the whole sequence oh the fox Family was denning in our shed on the back corner underneath the shed on the back corner of the property That’s what we one year it happened. We see foxes wandering through but the den being there was one year And so uh winding it up here Here’s my landscape plan. I was always going to do a landscape plan like I do for my clients next week Uh, here’s the end product of it. I would never want to Design my landscape now go back and do it Uh, it’s a partnership now between me and what nature wants to do Um, which is a very different way to live and the last thing i’ll say these are the To live and the last thing i’ll say the one of these last few slides is um Part of what i’m doing is creating a beautiful place for my family to live in uh Creating a productive place for wildlife to be in and setting the stage for beauty Uh and wildlife what i’m doing with these plants is about the plants themselves and setting the stage For what comes along with those plants like the light patterns that was a bank of ivy It would not even if you like ivy it would english ivy it is There’s no way that the the sunlight on on that bank would be anything as interesting as that is And things like that. Those are the trees that came from the wood chips I Love being out there at night And that is one of the trees that was the source one of the oaks that was the source For the trees and that’s the moon at night and I just love the architecture of that tree And there’s the pond and there’s a cardinal flower Oh, guess what? That’s almost exactly where the original one was but that’s not the original one anymore and um Um one little scraggly plant over the water with the uh Reflection of the fern which I did not plant anywhere Sensitive fern came in on its own and it’s welcome and the last image I have here is a pic going back to the uh, Lichen moss bench with one little cardinal flower that peeks through uh and ostrich ferns behind There’s nothing that I did nothing there that you see that I planted And I can’t design anything any more beautiful I can’t design anything more, uh, uh, um I can’t design anything more rich than that lichen and moss pattern Uh, I can’t create the surprise intentionally that that cardinal flower Gave me when it popped through that bench and I thought oh man. That’s that’s photo worthy. Uh, so Again, I would refer back to living in this kind of a landscape is very liberating Uh for the people on the plants and uh, it’s very rewarding and a very different experience and I would encourage you to Uh, give it a try even if it’s in a small patch of property And work your way bigger But I think you’ll find it Gives a whole other dimension to how you live and how you interact with your property and how you feel about it So thank you very much for attending. Thank you Wild Ones for having me here Uh, I really appreciate having the opportunity to talk about this stuff and uh happy trails And I wish you all the best in your landscape efforts So larry, thank you so much for such an inspiring presentation You’ve really helped us to see how dynamic living landscapes can come together when we work with natural processes instead of against them We’ve had so many great questions come in from the audience everything from practical planting challenges to big picture design philosophy We’ll take a few of these now Our first question comes from allison w and it’s one I think a lot of people are wondering as we head into this season She asks, what does your fall cleanup look like? Uh a good question and it has to do with ecology and it has to do with the visual aspect of the landscape And it has to do with the neighbors in the front yard I removed the leaves And I put them in a compost pile that’s hidden in the back corner of the property And at the same time I take from the bottom of that pile some compost that’s kind of got a little bit of leaf matter still Uh small leaf pieces in with what is more soil like so it it’s it’s kind of between mulch and and I and I Then I and I redeposit it in the front um Uh as a mulch And so that’s what I do there in the back and one of the reasons I do that in the fall is If I don’t remove those leaves, it’s going to blow on to other people’s properties and it’s the and it’s going to tick them off And I have no interest in doing that. Um, but in the backyard I leave the leaves in the fall and in the late winter end of winter very early spring Uh, all of that herbaceous vegetation gets weed whipped and chopped up And that gets removed along with the leaves and put on the compost pile and again instead of doing it in the fall We’ll bring the partially decomposed compost back and spread it On that slope And um, I don’t know that I have to do that anymore. Um, but it it I think it’s keeping Uh, there’s not as much suppression of seed germination in the woods You know my landscape is much more shaded than not and in the woods, uh, you know the leaf cover Prevents a lot of seeds from germinating and in many cases There’s a lot of just leaves with patches of uh ground layer vegetation. I want dense vegetation I want weed suppression. I want diversity So, uh, I’d rather keep the nutrient recycling going but without especially with oak leaves, which can be very flat and suppressive So that’s what I do with the leaves Our next question comes from Karen w and it’s one that a lot of people echoed in different ways Karen writes I have an average size suburban lot with native shrubs perennials and grasses that attract all kinds of wonderful wildlife frogs birds and insects But also a thriving population of cottontail rabbits They’ve made it hard to get new plantings established even with fencing Over your years in the field have you dealt with this challenge in your own yard or in a client’s landscapes? What advice do you have for managing or coping with rabbits when a dog isn’t an option? Yeah, um, it’s a good question and I will say that of the small mammals Um, the ones that i’ve had the most problem with are voles and it’s not because they’re eating the foliage They’re chewing the bark at the crown of the plant and the plant just kind of breaks off But it’s not something that is pervasive and is constantly happening and we can put some protection If we’ll see it happening a couple times we might put protection around it It’s it’s pretty rare, but I will say when you talk about things like rabbits and groundhogs and even deer Which I mentioned um When the deer first started showing up because they weren’t there in the early days of my property I was you know Should I put up fence should I not put up fence wife and I talked about it and we decided not to Um, you know, we didn’t want to inhibit other wildlife and we just and she loves seeing the deer too Even though she understands they’re problematic so we never did and They as I said the the things that i’ve seen them eat most are shrubs Like they leaves off some gray dogwoods that I planted they leaves off of mountain laurel But then they get bigger and out of their reach But the herbaceous layer they have for the most part left alone and I think it’s the two reasons that I mentioned Or one that I mentioned which is the anger intermingled nature Uh, there’s just too many plants growing together And in fact you could say well when you first plant them They’re not they got to grow to grow together. Not really I plant plants where uh, Two perennials in one hole and one perennial is one that is not palatable. This is often for deer Uh, not palatable and one that is so if I plant a white wood ester Which deer will love with a pennsylvania sedge which they will never eat in the same hole They can’t get one without the other and they leave them alone So I think what’s happening in my yard is the intermingled nature of the ground layer Which is the plants that they can easily chew up whether it’s a rabbit or a deer or a groundhog And I have groundhogs and there are rabbits here and there um I don’t see much damage from them and I think it’s the intermingled nature of the plantings Uh herbaceous plantings. I also think they’re just overwhelmed. There’s just you know It’s it’s a third less third of an acre, but there’s no lawn, you know, it’s all vegetation There’s just a lot of vegetation there. So, um, why they’re not chewing it up I don’t know meadows are very resistant again because of the intermingled nature of them And i’ve only really had a few meadows over these many years that have really had Enough damage from deer that you know, they had to be dealt with Uh Thank you larry Our next question comes from kathy h who’s asking about something that sits right at the heart of ecological design kathy asks How do you balance the idea central to matrix planting? Covering the soil horizontally with continuous plantings which fill the visual horizon vertically With the need for open ground to accept plants that reseed Larry your work often celebrates this dynamic between structure and spontaneity How a design landscape can still evolve on its own? How do you approach that balance? That is a really good question And there are specific strategies and the terminology that I would use to describe them is selective disturbance um I talked about cardinal flower Now cardinal flower is short-lived but it puts a lot of seeds out quick So you’re going to get a lot more plants. However, if you have correctly, uh, as this person is correctly, uh pointing out If you have dense vegetative cover You are not going to get much germination of cardinal flower but If i’ve got patches of cardinal flower in my garden Which is what I have now because it’s quieted down from that massive show that was initially uh that initially occurred So the patches that I have around when those plants expire Their seeds are not going to germinate much but I can apply selective disturbance If i’ve got 10 patches of cardinal flower or 10 plants scattered around my garden If I go to each of those plants and just take a rake And scuff it up at the base of that plant And don’t apply disturbance anywhere else. I know there are Thousands if not millions of seeds cardinal flowers tiny seeds and they drop Basically the base of the plant So I know if I create a little disturbance at the base of the plant cardinal flower has a good shot of being the result And if there’s other things mingled in i’ll go in and weed them uh So i’ve got disturbance where the cardinal flowers are to keep them going and i’m avoiding disturbance everywhere else Because I don’t want weed seed germination And i’m cutting plants at the base instead of pulling them in between or weed whipping over the top of that composition So taller things that come through get cut automatically And there are a number of strategies that we use With an understanding of disturbance if I plant 10 individual patches of herbaceous plants mixed patches And I want them to colonize the whole area And there’s undesirable weeds in between those patches That’s what I call mother colony strategy where we’ll plant the patches We will weed whip or cut Everything between the patches assuming they’re weed dominated just to weaken them and prevent seed form formation Once that initial patches fill in and are forming seed and are dense and weed, uh suppressive We’ll remove the weed in a circle in the perimeter adjacent to that patch So we’ve created a place where roots can move in easily from the original patch and seeds can germinate easily because we remove the competition The patch is low maintenance because it’s dense and weed suppressive The big picture between the patches is being cut to just hold the weeds back But where the maintenance now is is in that new expansion zone around that and we got to select who wins and who’s not going To win in there because both seeds of the undesirable plants in the patch are there And then when that fills in you make another remove of the perimeter of that So each patch gets bigger and bigger over time In the meantime the weed whip between the patches becomes smaller and smaller until it becomes colonization So those are two very specific strategies that are applying disturbance where you want seed germination to occur And withholding disturbance where you don’t and it’s based on where you The seed composition in the soil at a particular place Is what I call that I love those two strategies. Definitely something i’ll apply Our last question comes from megan d who writes. Thank you for sharing your expertise with us As someone looking to pursue a career in the ecological field What advice would you give to someone facing challenges and finding their initial footing and aspiring to a leadership role? And aspiring to a leadership role Could you share how you first established yourself in this field and what steps helped you to get there? Yeah, a really good question. Um when I started It was me and one employee and uh, we were just doing very very small little backyard gardens And I was interested in wildness and I was interested in native plants, but I had by no means the kind of intellectual Uh thought process is going on that I do now that has Been learned over time My background my degree is an associate degree in ornamental horticulture. I don’t even have a bachelor’s degree in anything. So And it was actually a very good program for what it was and um So I started off very small time and I will say one thing about Getting clients to go along with this kind of an approach when I was started my business over 40 years ago Nobody wanted this Forget it. It was nobody was interested in this I was um And so when I was meeting a client for the first time and talking about what you know, the design could entail I was not out there Talking ecology and talking saving the world and talking I was really listening to what they wanted And I know a lot of people said back in those days Oh native plants are all scraggly and they all have white flowers and you can’t really do a beautiful garden It’s ridiculous native plants here do the same things native plants do in china and japan and north africa Uh, you know just there’s beautiful ones. There’s ones you love there’s ones, you know So you can create anything with native plants that you can uh with a mix Uh in my opinion, so I gave them what they wanted with primarily native plants But I didn’t make a big deal about it and I still think that that is important Many many many more people are interested in pollinators and ecology and rain gardens and meadows and all the things That nobody was interested in then so it’s a lot easier But I still think you have to make sure that you are listening to the specific Uh Needs whether they’re practical or aesthetic or experiential Of the client and make sure that they understand that you are your intention is to fulfill those needs And guess what? It’s going to be a highly productive ecological landscape along with that and different clients have different Interests in that more or less So I would say you know, that’s the thing and the other thing I would say if you’re trying to Start a company That has an ecological focus whether it’s landscape architecture firm or a design build firm or a contractor any of these things The way to gain credibility Is not paid advertising. It’s not fancy websites. It’s not direct mail Those things i’m not saying don’t do any of it. You should have a good website Uh advertising is not wrong But the way that you you’re asking people to go out on a limb a little bit You’re asking people to do something that they don’t see all around their house today Even today and so your credibility Is more in question Do you really have the ability to do? What other people aren’t doing and not a lot of other companies are even doing on on much of a scale So credibility does not come From a website where you wrote something about yourself or you paid something to write about you or an advertisement or direct mail That’s all coming from you about you and our clients are not stupid. They know that So what i’m going where i’m going at to the here is I think the best way to establish credibility, which is crucial In this arena is to do things that indicate someone else conferred credibility on you write an article for the local Nature center or for a local arboretum and they’re dying for articles in their publications, you know, they’re short on staff and Volunteers are doing things and they’re trying to get them write an article Maybe offer to do a lecture if you’re so inclined if that’s not something that you’re comfortable with fine Get on the advisory board of the bowman’s hill wildflower preserve Now that’s on your resume Just think about things that confer That others have conferred Competence have decided you are competent as opposed to yourself and then use those materials Very heavily in how you’re promoting your company. So that’s a little bit of kind of niche marketing, I guess I have no training in marketing. So, you know take what I say in there with a grain of salt But I did successfully form a company that continued to do this kind of work For 40 plus years I would second that idea you had to write an article and i’m sure Wild Ones wouldn’t Enjoy anyone who would like to create an article and submit to them for their Journal Or even for a local blog on one of your local chapters Larry on behalf of Wild Ones Thank you for being part of this conversation and for everything you do to support native plants and natural landscapes It’s been great to speak with you and we look forward to doing this again soon Thank you very much Marlene. It was a pleasure and I love what you folks do every day