At Home with Native Plants

Landscape designer Larry Weaner acknowledges that naturalistic landscape designs can ride a fine line between graceful beauty and unruliness, and that the concept can be misunderstood.

“Too often, random informality passes for ‘natural,’ when in reality nature is highly ordered and anything but random,” Weaner wrote in the February 2010 issue of CHS Newsletter. “Understanding this order and using it in our designs is the key to making natural design workable and successful. This does not mean, however, that we must design exclusively with native plants, attempt to copy nature exactly or exclude the influences of other design styles.”

Weaner will urge his audience to discover how to use Connecticut’s native flora to achieve landscapes that are beautiful, diverse, low maintenance and are easy on the environment.

He will explore the ecological processes that occur in the Nutmeg State’s native woodlands, shrub lands and meadows, and illustrate how they can be applied to various residential landscapes. He will highlight solutions to common landscape problems, including entrance areas and screen and bank plantings. And he will describe how to establish native wildflower meadows and woodland gardens in the appropriate context.     

Weaner has been creating native landscapes throughout the eastern United States since 1977.  His award-winning firm, Larry Weaner Landscape Associates in Glenside, Penn., has a national reputation for combining ecological restoration with the traditions of fine garden design.

In 2008, the firm received the top three design awards from the Association of Professional Landscape Designers. In 2009, he received the New England Wild Flower Society’s landscape design award for a property in Salisbury, Conn., that features extensive meadows.

Other projects close to home include creating gardens for a 17th century residence in Danbury and for a natural-areas public park in the center of Wilton. Along the Taconic Parkway, he designed and installed a series of native meadow plantings.

High-profile clients have included Bruce and Patti Springsteen of Freehold, N.J., where plantings focused on ecological restoration and meadows.

He is a guest lecturer and instructor for horticultural and environmental organizations throughout the United States. His landscapes and gardens have been toured by many organizations, including The Garden Conservancy and the American Horticultural Society.

In 1990, Weaner founded New Directions in the American Landscape, a nonprofit educational programming series with a national following among landscape professionals.

Read what Jane Garmey writing in The New York Times had to say about Larry Weaner. 

 

Sustainable Lawns (To lawn or not to lawn, that is the question)

One of the biggest “eco-villians” these days is lawn, and the demonizing of this landscape feature does not sit well with Tom Christopher. He suggests that the focus ought to be on gardeners and our practices instead.

“Suppose you fed your children a diet of junk food. Would it be fair to abuse them for becoming obese?” Tom says. “This is just what American gardeners have done to their lawns. We’ve turned the lawn into an eco-villain by planting poorly adapted grass species and gorging them with fertilizers, water and pesticides.”

It’s time to consider lawn and its role in the landscape in a new light, Tom says. In Connecticut, he adds, the news is good: “Turf can be an eminently sustainable, low-maintenance and environmentally friendly landscape treatment.”

How? By planting new cultivars and mixes that can produce attractive, disease- and pest-resistant turf while reducing the need for mowing by 80 percent or more. By selecting a turf that suits our climate and soil. By understanding why organic maintenance doesn’t always translate into sustainability. By following some of the practices that were in place before the era of chemical pesticides. By increasing the biodiversity of our lawns.

“Lawn is overused but it deserves a place in the landscape,” he says. “It definitely needs to be done far more intelligently and used more imaginatively.”

Tom, who serves on the CHS Board of Directors, was born in Rome, Italy, the son of a Time magazine correspondent. He grew up in various locations in New York. After earning his bachelor’s degree in classics from Brown University, he took on a two-year horticultural apprenticeship at the New York Botanical Garden and worked for 10 years as a Columbia University horticulturalist.

He began writing about horticulture, eventually for magazines that included Horticulture, Town and Country and Martha Stewart Living, and for The New York Times. He has written 10 books and was the editor of “The New American Landscape” (Timber Press, 2011). He is writing a book about perennials with Ruth Clausen, his first teacher at the New York Botanical Garden.

Tom has grown increasingly passionate about the impact of global climate change on the landscape. Last year he started a consulting practice in Middletown, Smart Lawn, to help clients build sustainable lawns. He is creating a small demonstration plot of native grasslands on property owned by Wesleyan University.

His own turf portfolio includes a few efforts worthy of admiration for their creativity or seat-of-the-pants imagination. Both involved a small yard in College Station, Texas, where his wife Suzanne, a geologist, was teaching.

One summer the couple filled the space with spicy globe basil. “It stopped traffic” and elicited a few mutterings about “crazy Yankees,” Tom says. But it yielded a lovely “tufted green carpet. And when we got tired of it we made pesto.”

Another season, unbeknownst to the other, Suzanne was planning a barbecue for her colleagues while Tom was planning to redesign the yard. He ripped out the plantings a month before the barbecue, and then had to devise a quick-fix solution. He bought a big sack of fast-growing garden cress seed and planted it in patterns—zigzags, curlicues, lightning bolts. On party night he lit the yard with spotlights and voila, “garden graffiti.”

That’s not everyone’s idea of a lawn, he readily admits. Even so, “you don’t have to do it the bad way. …Why accept (lawn) as a necessary evil? Why not turn it into an asset for the garden? I’d like to enlist folks into rethinking the whole process.”