From away to garden.com and Robinhood Radio.com, this is Away to Garden with Margaret Roach. You're a weekly invitation to dig in and grow. Besides their native heavier plant pallet and looser style, ecologically designed landscapes have another difference. The way we maintain them is not the same as with more traditional orn focused gardens. I'm often asked by gardeners who planted a metal-like area or some other habitat-inspired naturalistic feature about how to handle its aftercare, about what to do when the picture changes a couple of years down the road when the balance of the plants and their design starts to shift and there's too much or too little of something for their liking, or when some unwanted weedy element finds its way in. I saw some hands-on advice from Dan Wilder who manages native plantings professionally on thousands of acres of conserved natural lands and also on his own home garden scale. So more in a moment but first these messages. Underwriting support for a way to garden provided by Colorblends

wholesale flower bulbs. A third-generation bulb company offering top-sized flower bulbs directly to landscape professionals and ambitious residential gardeners on the web, Colorblends.com. And by high-moving seeds, Wolcott Vermont, professional quality vegetable, flower, and herbal seeds that are 100% organic and non-GMO project verified. On the web, highmoingseeds.com. And by Whiteflower Farm, offering a wide range of carefully selected and expertly grown garden plants. On the web, whiteflowerfarm.com. Dan Wilder's a longtime native plant expert in the director of Applied Ecology for the nonprofit Norcross Wildlife Foundation in Massachusetts and 8,000 acre sanctuary. He's also a board member of the Ecological Landscape Alliance, a leader in promoting sustainable approaches to the landscape to professionals and gardeners alike. With Mark Richardson, Dan co-authored the book, Native Plants for New England Gardens,

and I'm so glad to welcome him back to the program today. Hi, Dan, how are you? I'm doing as well as I can be, Margaret. Thank you so much for having me. It's great to speak with you again. Yes, I've missed talking to you. And I think of you each time somebody calls me, as I said in the introduction, you know, asking me one of those questions,

like because with these more naturalistic plantings

that a lot of us are excited about incorporating into our landscapes and shifting, you know, part of our lawn over to or whatever, even familiar horticultural terms like weeding aren't exactly the same as they were with our hostas and defffodils. But you know what I mean.

Oh, sure, definitely. I mean, we can spend the next hour if we want to. Just trying to figure out what a weed is. I mean, this is, it's a very kind of personal choice. And so it makes it a really hard kind of decision when you give someone the heads up, hey, just go weed that area. It really doesn't mean anything. It's complicated. And I think the other thing is that for a lot of us,

we maybe say if it's like a meadow, you know, meadow style planting or some mixture of herbaceous plants, you know, we see the picture on the package or the, you know, where we purchase the seeds or something like that. And it's one moment in time that's being portrayed, right? It's not the whole life of that planting. And in the mix or the various ingredients we plant, there's plants that are annuals and there's plants that are by annuals and there's plants that are for annuals and there's something that live a long time and there's something that don't live very long and it's going to evolve, isn't it?

Yes, absolutely.

I mean, if you take a meadow, you know, as a really good example, you know, a one-year meadow is completely different from a three-year meadow, a five-year meadow, a 10-year meadow, And even that once you hit whatever stride you're going to hit it 10 years, a dry year versus

a wet year versus the trees on the edges kind of overgrowing it.

So many factors can really make this area change on a regular basis. And sometimes for the better and sometimes it's a challenge, but it's a very dynamic system. One of the running jokes that we tend to say a lot of times is in the northeast meadow is just another name for not yet forest. And I think you know anyone who's grown a meadow or a meadow planting realizes that if you just don't do anything to a meadow, eventually it's shrubs and trees and no longer a meadow. You know, these are dynamic landscapes. Succession as the eight television show or whatever succession, right? That's what we're watching unfold in front of us is the process of succession where different plants join the community and then begin to dominate the community. Yeah, and with those plants and those different stages comes different wildlife and different wildlife that take advantage of that one year or the three year or the 10 year meadow or getting into those youngest forest stands that we'll call like early successional or thicket habitat you know that kind of period where it's really hard to define if it's still a meadow or if it's a forest yet you know you get different wildlife at every different stage of this process. So you've worked in as I said again, again, in the introduction at North Cross, you've worked in thousands of acres of natural lands and you've also worked on your own home garden scale. So learning from it and you worked elsewhere before that in the native plant world, what are the lessons that you take home as the home gardener? When you go to try to figure out how to quote weed or edit or why don't we even know what word to use? Like when you manage your home plantings, like what are some of the a-haz you've had or what are some of the things that we want to tell people about guidance and so forth that are front of mind for you? Yeah, I mean, I tend to kind of start pretty broad and then kind of narrow down as I go as I kind of think through these concepts. I mean, for me, the first question I ask folks, and this includes myself when I'm in an area is what is my goal? What am I trying to accomplish? And then even, you know, a little bit more narrow than that is what is my goal for this site for this area I'm standing in. I mean, because even at my home gardener scale, I've got the veggie garden that's right outside of my back, you know, door, and then I've got the kind of slightly more wild, you know, kind of what I think of as my woody garden, where I've got things like blueberries and raspberries and those sort of like still cultivated but a little more kind of less managed areas. And then I've got my area I think of my kind of back lot which is not unmanaged but is nothing like a vegetable garden. So your goals are obviously very important but your goals are going to shift drastically depending on where you're standing. And I see that at Norcross too, I thousands of acres, you don't manage thousands of acres in any sort of monolithic way. It's every area kind of gets a whole new set of goals. There are general kind of, for me, it's wildlife, it's habitat, it's native species. You know, those are kind of the really broad goals that that don't normally change drastically. But the specifics of the site can really vary greatly from area to area. And I think when people start looking at it that way, you realize that common milkweed might be an ally for me in one of my more naturalistic meadows, but maybe doesn't belong in my vegetable garden. And looking at specific areas can make a big difference. So common milkweed you just cited because it's an enthusiastic grower. It will take up a lot of space. It's a tough one. I hear that a lot about golden rods. People are like, my whole meadow is becoming golden rods. People are panicking and they want to know what to do. That in milkweed are two of the ones I hear a lot about among herbaceous plants. Certainly. And thinking about these kind of sites specific goals, I have certain meadows where if roughly goldenrod, which I think of as the most vigorous goldenrod out there, I have some meadows where if roughly goldenrod started taking over the meadow, I would consider that such a success. you know, it would be roughly golden rod in place of the mugwort that my metal currently looks at. Right. I have other areas where if roughly golden rod started taking over, I'd be managing it out because I'd be worried it would be out competing the showy golden rod in the bird's foot violet. And this is the same plant in areas that are really not too far away, but it is very specific to what I'm trying to accomplish in that area. Okay. And this is, I think this is where editing really starts to make sense as kind of our choice of word, because it really does become a choice of the individual and of the landscape. And you really got to not always do what the landscape tells you, but you're sure ought to listen to it before you make up your own mind. So, so if, and again, boiling it down to the home garden scale, if too much of that milkweed or too much of that aggressive golden rod starts to poke its head up and take up territory, what, what is the intervention method? That's yet because, as I said before, it before, it's like, among my hostess, I know how to pull a weed, but weeding here, am I opening up soil and bringing up more weed seeds from the seed bank beneath, the sort of hidden supply? I'm gonna make more trouble. What do I do? Do I mo? Do I, I mean, I know you have a lot of expertise in burning, for instance, a more traditional method. You know, how do you know what to do when you encounter one of these? Is that the next step after you've decided what your goal for that area is to know tactically? Yes, I think it is, but I think even kind of before you get into what to do for it,

you got to look again at kind of what you're trying to accomplish in terms of that specific species. So let's say you've got that that roughly golden rod is showing up. Are we trying to make the roughly golden rod go away entirely? Are we trying to remove it? Are we trying to simply knock it back so that we can keep the diversity of other species, you know, kind of up there. And a lot of time that comes down to the difference between,

you know, say a weedy native species versus an invasive species,

you know, appearing in the meadow.

When mugwort shows up, I try and make it go away, you know,

and stop.

When roughly golden rod comes up,

more often than not, I want it there,

and I want it to stay, I just want to see less of it. Okay. And that's where I find that instead of kind of weeding it out in the traditional sense as in, you know, grabbing it by the stem and pulling it out or uprooting it comes in, I am more often finding myself going into a kind of, I'm going for cutbacks. I'm getting in there and kind of cutting this thing back with the goal of not really disturbing the soil as much, but really knocking the plant back. I've got a wet meadow that I work in where

Ruffleaf Golden Rod is quite vigorous and we've got a population of fringe gentsion that we are trying to kind of manage for. And we will go into that meadow usually twice a year with brush cutters and we will just go after the big fat, chunky, you know, kind of populations of Ruffleaf Golden the rod and we'll just hit them with the you know the brush cutter and cut them down

to size. We don't actually try and remove them, but by doing that, all the plants around them, all of a sudden, have this new competitive edge in that they're getting the sun, and the roughly golden rod isn't because it doesn't have any leaves left. Right. And it starts to really kind of tip the balance against the species that you're trying to kind of. And I find it takes a lot less effort from me to get into that area with a brush cutter and just start hitting the big patches of Roughleaf Golden Rod. I can do that whole meadow in a matter of an hour. And that's one person on a pretty large meadow and it's very doable. If I was actually trying to remove that plant or weed it out by hand or even go after every roughly golden rod I saw versus just those big chunky patches. That'd be a matter of a week. So I tried really kind of go for the least amount of effort for the highest gain and in this case I find cutting back is really effective. I pressed in Montygu, a landscape designer in the southeast.. He trusted me. He's great. He loves his string trimmer for that. He'll go in and edit out, not dig out, but do what you just have to zap them. The unwanted he'll do is editing with the string trimmer and give the plants around it, as you just said, more of the light and the room to take advantage, and the undesirables have are not photos of the sizing. And he finds that to be an effective tactic. And like you said, very quick, relatively speaking and less laborious. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, I agree with him wholeheartedly. I think I might kind of shift the string trimmer to more of one of those kind of like, you know, star-bladed sort of brush cutter heads I like those a little bit more because it gives me the option of letting things go a little further without having to worry about the string not doing the job. That and I tend to like trying to reduce the plastic in the garden when I can and the metal heads are great to work with. Yeah so okay so that's one that's one example what about when it's a woody thing that comes in? Like I have in my meadow, I have a lot of blackberry or raspberry or something in ruby. Sure. Sometimes, depending on, you know, exactly, again, we've got it to find our locations, but sometimes I'll do the same thing I just described, get in there with that metal head and brush cutter and just kind of go through through things individually

But when we start looking at kind of larger meadows and and especially, you know blackberry being a common example a Standard kind of mowing can really do a lot and if you time it right and kind of do it correctly It can really you know favor the plants you want to favor. Let me give you some more specifics. As soon as you've got a larger meadow,

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