Ask the Gardener: COVID has shifted views on gardening for the better
Ask the Gardener returns from hiatus to herald the coming of spring and solicit reader questions. Continue reading at realestate.boston.com.
My garden column returns today to appear every other Sunday through the fall, and the news is mixed: There’s no Boston Flower Show this year because of COVID, but spring arrives next Saturday, March 20.
When the pandemic hit, it turned many people into first-time gardeners who discovered the almost magical ability of nature to melt away anxiety and depression. After all these years, I still find that whenever I garden or even just walk outdoors, grievances and stresses drop from my shoulders like an old coat, and I find myself suddenly standing free in the here and now.
So get outside on these early spring days when the weather is decent. You will be surprised how much you will find to do. Buy seed packets — but not too many — and plan where and when to start them. It’s still too early to plant and dig, but you can start spring cleanup. Sweep the lawn clean with a springy rake. Cut down last year’s perennials and free the crocus beneath. Clean and sharpen tools in the garage. You will need a round-tipped shovel, a garden spade and fork, a rake, a pruner, a trowel, a wheelbarrow, and of course gardening gloves.
I clean out old birdhouses and buy new ones. One of last March’s surprises was the emotional impact of wild birdsong when it is not competing with traffic noise. After that introduction, I think many people started feeding the birds during last year’s quiet daytimes at home. It’s a little thing, but birds are our backyard ambassadors to nature. For many of the “woke,’’ gardening became more of a bridge to the natural world and less of an outdoor decorating activity.
So, did quarantine change our attitude toward nature? Of course gardeners have been skeptical about insecticides since Rachel Carson unmasked DDT in her book “Silent Spring’’ in 1962. But what feels new is more gardeners becoming sympathetic to insects as part of the food chain. After generations that generally believed the only good bug was a dead one, gardeners want to attract pretty butterflies and endangered pollinators like bees. It’s a thing. Native plants became more popular because they serve this food chain better than most purely ornamental flowers. Kudos to the pioneering Native Plant Trust, headquartered in Framingham. You can find lists of plants native to your area at nativeplanttrust.org or by plugging your ZIP code into www.nwf.org/NativePlantFinder.
Entomologist Douglas W. Tallamy’s influential books (“Nature’s Best Hope’’ and “Bringing Nature Home’’) have documented which native trees provide the most digestible protein (mostly caterpillars) for baby birds. On his website, homegrownnationalpark.org, he even rates plants by how many kinds of birds and insects they support instead of how pretty their flowers are. (Native oaks, willows, cherries, and birches are among the essential keystone species, so don’t cut these down to expand your lawn.) It is a very different way of landscaping, and one I increasingly practice, though I still have plenty of peonies.
Though native asters, sunflowers, and goldenrod are good providers, trees are the true heroes in this scenario. And, like insects, they have gotten more respect recently. Two best-sellers, Richard Powers’s 2019 Pulitzer Prize-winning novel, “The Overstory,’’ and “The Hidden Life of Trees’’ by German forester Peter Wohlleben, have popularized research challenging the view of trees as easy-to-grow building material. They write of forests as very complex organisms with underground webs of chemical reactions transmitted by root tips and intertwining fungus that cannot be duplicated in commercially planted tree plantations. As a gardener, I’ve cut down many trees casting unwelcome shade on my flowers, but now I work around tree roots rather than sever them after realizing that a mature native tree is more valuable than anything I can plant. It distresses me when I see local developers clear-cut century-old oak stands that mitigated downhill runoff with their deep roots and replace them with little tree sticks that are expected to grow with most of their roots cut off and a century of uncertain climate ahead.
“In the past, we have asked one thing of our gardens: that they be pretty,’’ Tallamy writes on his website. “Now they have to support life, sequester carbon, feed pollinators, and manage water.’’ Tallamy’s vision is to restore native diversity right in our own backyards. Climate change freights such gardening with urgency. Its arrival will be signaled by rising food prices as a result of crop failures like we saw last month in frozen Texas. So this may not be a bad year to plant a fruit tree and learn how to grow some of your own produce as well.
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