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  • From: "Tradingpost" <tradingpost@gilanet.com>
  • To: livingontheland@lists.ibiblio.org, nmgreens@yahoogroups.com
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  • Subject: [Livingontheland] Native plants are the way to grow
  • Date: Fri, 19 Mar 2004 21:35:51 -0700


Native plants are the way to grow
By Becky Homan Post-Dispatch Garden Editor
02/07/2004
http://www.stltoday.com/stltoday/lifestyle/stories.nsf/Life+%26+Style/Garden/A01F159073E7120586256E32006D96EA?OpenDocument&Headline=Native+plants+are+the+way+to+grow+

The native New England aster (Aster novae-angliae) is a lovely
3-to-6-foot-tall fall bloomer. Here it grows alongside the seed pods of rose
mallow in the Whitmire Wildflower Garden of Shaw Nature Reserve.
(SCOTT WOODBURY )
spacer

THE HARD-PACKED CLAY under Dan Sammartano's work boots is beige, bordering on
gray, and it looks more like rough-hewn concrete than soil.

And yet, Sammartano insists that in a year or three, it will be covered with
grasses and flowers.

They'll all be native plants, he adds, or ones adapted to be drought-tolerant
and resistant to pests and diseases in this climate.

And they'll also be easy for the public to drive by and see when Alberici
Constructors completes its new headquarters on some 15 acres at the southeast
corner of Page Avenue and Interstate 170.

Sammartano is Alberici's sustainable-design manager as well as a speaker
Thursday at the first of a series of talks about using natives as landscape
plants.

The event is open to the public. It takes place at Maritz Headquarters
Auditorium, 1400 South Highway Drive, near I-44's Bowles Avenue exit in
Fenton. It costs $35, including lunch (call 636-451-3512 for reservations),
and will include such other speakers as:

- Darrel Morrison, on native landscape design in a talk that's subtitled,
"where art and nature meet." He is professor emeritus in the college of
environment and design at the University of Georgia.

- Austin Tao, on "using garden-worthy natives in home landscapes." He is a
St. Louis landscape architect, and he'll share this talk with Morrison.

- John Bell, on the topic of "landscaping in the prairie style." Bell also is
a landscape architect and designer of native plantings along the I-44 Henry
Shaw Ozark Corridor, sharing a podium with several other speakers, including
horticulturist Scott Woodbury of Shaw Nature Reserve.

- John Hoal, discussing "native landscapes in public places," such as Forest
Park, for which this professor of architecture at Washington University was
lead designer on the master plan.

Why such an emphasis on natives, at home as well as in parks?

Two reasons, says Bell.

"To educate gardeners to the beauty of natural plants," he says. "And then
just to emphasize how low energy and low maintenance a native landscape can
be."

This education can be a challenge, Woodbury admits.

"Let's face it," he says. "A lot of people are afraid of native plants
because they're too big and because they have a reputation for being a little
aggressive."

So there is a place, Woodbury adds, for the more compact, better behaved
cultivars of natives in the backyard garden."

He compares the lovely deep-purple native New England aster (Aster
novae-angliae) that grows to a height of three-to-six feet with one of its
cultivars, 'Purple Dome' - growing 18 to 24 inches tall, "a great little
plant, like a chrysanthemum in shape, really well behaved sizewise, and there
are a number of other cultivars."
Among them, Woodbury likes the compact intensely pink aster cultivar called
'Andenken an Alma Potschke.'

Bell tentatively agrees.

"As an opening position, I'd want to use as many natives as possible," Bell
says. But another "opening position is the right plant for the right place."

"I'm not as dogmatic as some people are," he says, "and it also has to do
with the design context and what's available in nurseries."

He finds that many local garden centers are beginning to carry natives along
with ornamentals. Find one list of such nurseries at the Missouri Department
of Conservation's Web site, www.grownative.org.

"There is a unique and special aesthetic to native plants in terms of color
and in terms of fragrance," Bell says, "and in terms of the features of the
plants as well as that they promote food and shelter for wildlife.

"And when plants are established for three years," Bell adds, "you should be
free of any supplemental watering and fertilizing."

For Darrel Morrison, the yards of Madison, Wis., are a benchmark.

When he taught at the University of Wisconsin in the early '70s, "it was hard
to get a lot of the native plants," he says. "Now there are many native-plant
nurseries, and every fifth yard in Madison is a woodland garden, as opposed
to the sterility of lawns and hedges that used to be everywhere."

Morrison isn't completely against lawns, but he likes "much smaller ones for
circulation. A lawn might emulate a river," he says, "where it guides you
through islands of prairie in sunny areas."

In Dan Sammartano's dream garden on the Alberici site, the "lawn" will do
just that. But it won't be typical St. Louis cool-season turf. Instead, he's
planting hardy native buffalo grass.

It will be part of what he calls an ecotone - or transition area between two
adjacent ecological communities. Prairie plantings go on one side, a series
of ponds slated to become fish- and wildlife-filled wetlands on the other.

Raised boardwalks and paths are to wind to and from the two-story building
that will house 200 Alberici employees. A rooftop garden was considered and
scratched recently when highly-reflective roofing material became "much more
cost-effective," Sammartano says.

"This land has been seriously abused," he says. Tons of asphalt and heavy
traffic to and from a steel fabricator there did the harm.

No new topsoil is in Alberici's gardening plans, however. Natives are adapted
to the area's poor soils, Sammartano says. And three years after the first
seeding, he says, "We are going for a zero-irrigation plan.

"We want to create an environment that, for lack of a better word, will be a
showcase without having to go to exotic ornamentals."


Reporter Becky Homan
E-mail: bhoman@post-dispatch.com
Phone: 314-340-8238




  • [Livingontheland] Native plants are the way to grow, Tradingpost, 03/19/2004

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