When asked how to design a new garden, my favorite response is: Keep your camera with you everywhere you go. When you see something you like, take a picture of it. Later, match the looks you love to your property while considering sun, water, soil, and grading. It’s the best advice I can give because someone with no idea what to do needs a bit of inspiration before they can start buying plants.
If you’re thinking of restoring your property to nature—using native plants—and you need encouragement or inspiration, then Let the Earth Breathe should be one of your first resources. It will complement your stack of pictures because you’re following the authors on their journey while you start your own. This isn’t your ordinary gardening book with lots of information on culture, botany, and so on. The book does include a lot of information about the native plants they chose, but plant culture isn’t the focus of this book. Instead, this book chronicles one family’s journey back to nature.
The book starts with an introduction to the importance of using native plants and why you should avoid invasives. The rest of the book shares the route they took to return their new property to nature using native trees, shrubbery, and wildflowers. Throughout the book, you’ll see patches of gorgeous plants and some hardscapes. In fact, this book has inspired me to assess my yard for hardscape and that intention quality that appeases neighbors. Every fall and winter, I plan better paths but somehow that just hasn’t happened. After working my way through Let the Earth Breathe, I’ve decided that this is the year!
Their journey begins in 2010 when they put in a rain garden filled with native plants that love moist soils. Their reason for the rain garden was to help retain runoff. The book ends in 2016, but trust me, their journey has just started.
You gain the benefit of their decisions and as you turn each page, you get the joy of viewing beautiful swatches of their rebounding yard. So, back to what I said at the beginning—this book will inspire and encourage you. I know that I said, “Ooooo, I want to do that…” every time I turned a page.
Read how the authors did it knowing that you can do it too.
Anne Milligan is a former Clinical Social Worker, an artist, singer/musician, and landscape designer. She and her husband, author and historian Stephen A. Brown, live in Southeast Jefferson County. Their Kentucky native plants sanctuary has been featured in The Louisville Courier-Journal and the Louisville Magazine.
Susan Harkins is the Managing Editor of The Lady Slipper. In real life, she is a technical journalist with 35 years in the IT industry, but her passion is native plants. A long-time member of the Capital Area Extension Master Gardener Association, she enjoys using her publishing skills to share her love of Kentucky’s native flora and fauna.
In 2015, I began to visit Hisle Park in northeast Fayette County on a regular basis. Every time I drove out there, I was mystified by a property on Briar Hill Road where a very large number of young oaks grew in a dense plantation. In the winter and early spring, a house became visible at the end of a long curving driveway. What contrast to the surrounding pastures where horses grazed in expansive fields! Who created this planting and for what purpose?
Ann Whitney Garner
Then, in the summer of 2020, I met Ann Whitney Garner, the owner, and she invited me to her farm. On that first visit I drove through the opened gate with intense expectation and followed the driveway in awe at the extent of the plantation. The trees growing in rows stretched almost up to the residence. Ann Whitney showed me the garden, chicken coop, barn and small tree nursery behind the house, then took me through a small natural woodland to a substantial creek, David’s Branch, that forms the rear border of the property.
A view from the entrance gate.
She and her husband Allen Garner bought this 20-acre lot in 2006. In 2008, they moved with their three school-aged children into their newly constructed home and engaged a landscape contractor to design and install the plantings typical of Bluegrass residences: many boxwoods, cherry laurels, which are now dead, and more than 500 liriope plants, which Ann Whitney has since dug up and discarded.
The Garners do not come from farm backgrounds, yet they wanted to use their land for some kind of agrarian activity that would reduce the amount of mowing on their empty space. They knew that they did not want horses. They considered a vineyard but found out that their land was too alkaline. They played with the idea of growing corn or organic tobacco but had to acknowledge that they would get no return on their investment of money and effort.
They knew that they cared about nature, and Ann Whitney anticipated the moment when her children would go to high school and then college, and she looked forward to a new kind of work. She couldn’t exactly define what it would be, but she wanted to work on her property. In 2010, she had an epiphany: “Why don’t we grow what’s supposed to be here,” she asked herself and her family. She had walked her property almost daily pondering what she observed: the way bush honeysuckle and winter creeper intruding from the perimeter suppressed the regeneration of plants, and the possibilities offered by the large expanse of open space. It occurred to her that the property called for trees, because that is what Nature would plant on it. Trees would create wildlife habitat, beauty and—in the very long term—financial value.
The Kentucky Division of Forestry helped her move forward with her project providing several forest management plans, offering tree seedlings for a very reasonable price and eventually loaning her a mechanical tree planter. During the first year she ordered and planted 100 trees: many redbuds, some pecans, sycamores, and bur oaks. Then she put in an order of 300 trees, including many bald cypress for a low-lying area.
Oaks planted with the help of a mechanical tree planter.
Then, in 2013, the Garners took a big plunge ordering 5,000 oak seedlings, 1,000 each of swamp white, bur, northern red, Shumard and chinquapin oak. They chose oaks knowing that they would be slow-growing and not immediately overwhelm them with labor-intensive management tasks. They also assumed that an investment in oaks can provide a financial return in the distant future when selective harvesting for some kind of a niche market may become feasible. Also, Ann Whitney had taken note of Doug Tallamy’s argument in Bringing Nature Home, that oaks are immensely valuable as habitat trees and a food source for a huge variety of caterpillars thereby sustaining a large bird population.
When they ordered their 5,000 oaks, the Garners knew from experience that this number could not be planted with shovels, and that is where the mechanical tree planter came in. Hitched to a tractor, it carves grooves in the ground where individual workers riding on the machine place bare root plants at regular intervals. The entire Garner family participated in planting the oaks which turned into a surprisingly efficient and gratifying project.
Encouraged by their success with the oaks, they embarked on their last large planting endeavor two years later by installing 1,000 tulip poplars in a remaining empty space behind the house. Ann Whitney had observed how fast the poplars grew and decided she wanted to speed along the development of a canopy cover on at least part of the property.
With the restoration of the Bluegrass underway, birds became more abundant, and the soil began to absorb water more readily due to the expanding roots that channel it into the ground. But with the planting done, new questions arose: How does one live as a good steward on a property into which one has invested so much time, energy and money? Does the property lend itself to other uses that are still compatible with the goal of sustaining Nature?
In 2019, Ann Whitney started a tree nursery. Having handled thousands of tree seedlings over almost ten years, she concluded: “I can do this myself.” She studied up on propagation techniques and collected seeds of native trees growing in the Bluegrass.
Nursery trees tucked in for the winter.
She wants to inspire other property owners to follow her example restoring the Bluegrass, creating habitat for wildlife and helping the soil heal. She would like to make resources available to help them get started, and first and foremost among these are young trees. At this point her nursery has a number of native species available in 3- and 5-gallon containers. Her website is at https://www.fieldstoforest.com/.
Many landowners in Kentucky live on properties that they do not imagine ever returning to agricultural use. In Fayette County a single residential house can be built on 20-acre lots outside the urban service boundary with the official explanation that it serves agricultural activities, even though there is rarely any evidence of them. Instead, one drives past large lots with a house in the distance, possibly a few trees here and there, but otherwise with the ground covered in turf grass subject to a relentless mowing regime. It doesn’t have to be this way.
Ann Whitney Garner let her land speak to her. She walked on it and she worked on it. And she reflected on what she saw. She considered agricultural ventures. She became interested in ecology reading about plants and the animals they sustain. She sought professional advice and consulted with local arborists and biologists. Now, more than ten years after the big decision was made to reforest her land, she says: “I just know this is what we are supposed to do on this kind of property.”
Plants Mentioned in this Article
Buxus sempervirens – boxwood
Carya illinoinensis – pecan
Cercis canadensis – redbud
Euonymus fortunei – wintercreeper
Liriodendron tulipifera – tulip poplar
Liriope muscari
Lonicera maackii – bush honeysuckle
Platanus occidentalis – sycamore
Prunus laurocerasus – cherry laurel
Quercus bicolor – swamp white oak
Quercus macrocarpa – bur oak
Quercus muehlenbergii – chinquapin oak
Quercus rubra – northern red oak
Quercus shumardii – shumard oak
Taxodium distichum – bald cypress
Beate Popkin is the owner of Living Gardens, a Landscape Consulting business in central Kentucky. She is also the President of the Lexington Chapter of Wild Ones, Native Plants/Natural Landscapes, an environmental advocacy group. She lives in Lexington where she manages a number of native plant gardens on public and private ground.
Two of my favorite things are floating in the water and growing native plants–so building an organic swimming pool has been on my wish list for years. We finally finished the project just in time for this year’s swimming season and it is a delight!
We found a pond design that was the perfect fit for both growing native wetland plants and cooling off in the water. This pond combines a deep swimming zone (ours is 8’ deep) with an adjacent shallow planting zone.
Since our soil does not hold water, we used a liner beneath the entire area. The swimming zone is enclosed by a wooden box (ours is 10’x20’) that separates it from the planting zone. Outside of this box is the planting zone–3’ of sand and gravel that slopes towards the swimming area. The wooden box holds the substrate back from the deep area.
Our planting area surrounds the entire pool and varies in depth from 0-1.5’. Ideally you want equal areas for the planting zone and the swimming zone. A perforated pipe is beneath the sand and gravel, and a bubbler circulates water through the plant roots, into the pipe, and back to the pool. The plant roots work together with the substrate to keep the water clean and clear.
The pond is built above grade to prevent run-off from entering the pool (run-off carries nutrients from the soil into the pool and causes algae blooms). This means you have to wait for rainfall to fill the pond–luckily, we have a nearby spring we were able to use to fill the pond more quickly.
It is wonderful to finally have a wet area to plant species like soft rush, lizard’s tail, pickerelweed, rattlebox and blue flag Iris. Blue vervain, foxglove beardtongue, swamp hibiscus, fox sedge, blue lobelia and other species are thriving right at the edge of the pond where they are out of the standing water, but their roots are wet. The plants were put in the ground in May but are already doing their job to keep the water clear. (See the list of botanical names below.)
We are not the only ones enjoying the pool. Tadpoles immediately colonized the pool. It has been fun watching birds drinking from the shallow area and we have a red-eared slider who sometimes basks on a rock between swims.
Margaret Shea has a M.S. in ecology from Indiana University and has worked for a number of Kentucky Conservation organizations before starting Dropseed Native Plant Nursery 16 years ago. Margaret’s past employers include The Kentucky State Nature Preserves Commission, The Kentucky Chapter of The Nature Conservancy, and Bernheim Forest.
A variety of seeds grown and collected from native species, at just one of the regional mini-swaps in 2021. Photo: Louisville Central region swap host Deany Collard.
By Anne Milligan
When I was asked to write a summary of our Kentucky native plants and seeds swaps in Louisville, Kentucky, I was excited to share, but I also felt a bit of trepidation. How does one adequately describe a project that seems to have tapped a societal nerve, so to speak, and taken on a life of its own over the past few years? With three swaps under our belts, I want to share how this project began, and just a hint of how it is evolving, as more people come on board. I’m hopeful that our experience will help others establish swaps in their own communities.
2010
Stephen Brown and I moved to Louisville after having lived in the middle of the woods for three years in “employee housing” at the Abraham Lincoln Birthplace National Historical Park in Hodgenville, Kentucky. We loved the woods so much that we decided to look for a house surrounded by trees. We moved to a property abutting some woodland acreage and began our 12-year creation of a Kentucky native plants sanctuary.
2010-2019
That first decade involved a whole lot of physical labor on our part, creating a series of connected rain gardens flowing gradually downhill across our back, front and side yards. These gardens (plus some drier areas) are now populated with over 80 Kentucky native flowers, ferns, shrubs, and trees.
From the very beginning, we have carefully documented the project in photos and daily journal logs at Let the Earth Breathe, Inc. Please refer to our 2021 book Let the Earth Breathe for a more detailed narration of our home project, what we’ve learned so far, and some delightful surprises we encountered along the way.
2019
When we had established about 60 varieties of native species, we realized that we were running out of room to expand our “yarden” and decided to form a Facebook native seed swap group to share some of the abundance. We had a grand total of six people at our very first swap meeting in November of 2019. We were small but mighty though, because the Facebook group began to expand dramatically in a very short time after this swap.
2020
As you probably know, the Covid pandemic forced many people into quarantine, which catapulted many of us into home landscaping projects. Our annual swap was cancelled. We then divided the original group into five regional “socially distanced,” mini-swaps that covered most of the Louisville area. Besides our own swap in the southeast region of Louisville, four leaders stepped up to host their own regional swaps.
A lot of seeds were exchanged by mail and porch pick-ups. Our primary inspiration for creating home native plants sanctuaries (or “yardens”) was, and still is, Dr. Douglas Tallamy’s book Bringing Nature Home. Another very helpful book for beginning native gardeners is Wildflowers and Ferns of Kentucky by the late Dr. Thomas Barnes.
2021
Unique seed display from a regional swap group.
On November 6, 2021, regional swaps took place again at the hosts’ homes. I think everyone will agree that the regional swaps are here to stay, because smaller communities are developing in local neighborhoods within these regional swaps. Together, many of us are gaining more courage to remove those tidy, but unsustainable, grassy lawns and replace them with landscaped native plants, shrubs, and trees.
A regional mini-swap meet in 2021.
November 27, 2021
Three weeks after the regional swaps, our annual “citywide” swap took place at the Louisville Nature Center. We held this citywide swap to further distribute the extra seeds, plants, and tree saplings that were left over from the regional swaps. As I posted in our Facebook groups after this citywide swap, “I have never seen such a marvelously biodiverse collection of native seeds, plants, and trees in my entire life.” The people were equally diverse by age, gender, culture, and even in the unique ways we packaged our seeds. Labeling the seed packages with name, bloom time, and year collected, was stressed as very important in the weeks preceding the swaps. Some of the species were even brought over the river from New Albany, Indiana. From 1:00-4:00 PM, a steady, but never overwhelming flow of people swapped native seeds and plants.
We organized the seeds by placing tables in a large semi-circle according to the bloom times of individual seeds and plants, beginning with early spring ephemerals, all the way around to late summer and fall. We had to add extra tables to handle the generosity and abundance.
All of the regional hosts were present to greet our visitors, many of whom were surprised that all of these seed packages, plants, native grasses, and trees were free. And yet that is part of the magic of what I feel will become an annual event. My vision is that our swaps will always, first and foremost, be neighborly and welcoming, without the trappings and competition of buying and selling.
I hope that, as you read this, you will consider forming your own swap group, and hold fast to a primary rule, which is to share only species native to your region. If you are a Facebook group administrator, please know that a successful swap group also requires that you keep people engaged throughout the year, sharing books, articles, and so on and that you clarify again and again that our pollinators depend on native species for their very survival, and thus, human survival on the planet.
Most of all, keep it fun. As Margaret Shea, of Dropseed Native Plants Nursery, once told us, “It’s fun to put things in the ground.” And it really is.
Citywide swap on Nov. 27, 2021. Photo: Deany Collard.
Final Notes
On a personal level, I am happy to say that these swaps have given many participants a much-needed social connection with people who care about our planet and love gardening. We need these connections, sometimes more than we need extra money or material goods. Making positive social connections around native-plant gardening keeps us well and helps strengthen our resolve to free ourselves of our addiction to non-native grassy lawn care and help restore our planet to its natural goodness.
Lastly, please consider donating to the non-profit foundation created by Anne Milligan and Stephen Brown called “Let the Earth Breathe, Inc.” to help fund other small native species projects around our area. You can do so by visiting Let the Earth Breathe, Inc..
Happy planting!
Anne Milligan is an artist, singer/musician, and landscape designer. She lives in Louisville, KY with her husband, author and historian Stephen A. Brown.
Lonicera sempervirens f. sulphurea, a yellow-flowered form of the red native honeysuckle
By Alicia Bosela, owner of Ironweed Native Plant Nursery
The native species of trumpet honeysuckle is a deciduous woody vine that typically grows to about 15 feet. It produces red tubular flowers with a yellow throat and is pollinated by hummingbirds and a variety of insects. Ornamental uses include trellises, fences and as a ground cover. Trumpet honeysuckle differs from native yellow honeysuckle (Lonicera flava) in that L. flava is not known to occur in Kentucky and has distinctly different shaped flowers.
Lonicera sempervirens f. sulphurea; Photo Credit A FothergillLonicera sempervirens f. sulphurea , @ Tara Littlefield
While much of our wild flora is at risk from various human activity, the beautiful, red-flowered trumpet honeysuckle can still be found if one is doggedly persistent in searching. One such pursuer of native plants, Neville Crawford, located what was clearly a trumpet honeysuckle that was completely yellow and appeared to be growing in natural habitat within Mahr Park in Madisonville, Kentucky. John Swintosky, Senior Landscape Architect at Louisville Metro Public Works, discovered a yellow trumpet honeysuckle growing in Iroquois Park at least 15 years ago and confirmed its presence again in September 2021. This yellow form was reported in Iroquois Park in 1945 by P.A. Davies. Botanist Julian Campbell also encountered the yellow form in Boyle County, Kentucky.
Julian Campbell and Tara Littlefield under an arbor of the regular red trumpet honesuckle and the yellow variety that Julian collected from Boyle county, at Julian’s Botanical Garden in Lexington, Kentucky, May 2021. Photo by Christy Edwards.
Were these plants naturally occurring color variants of the red trumpet honeysuckle or an escape from cultivation? Britton and Brown’s Illustrated Flora of the Northern United States mentions the yellow form as early as 1913. The yellow form has been noted for sale in catalogues as early as 1938 and is likely “within the range of phenotypic plasticity for the species,” according to the New York Botanical Garden (personal communication). Therefore, this is almost certainly a natural yellow form of the typically red trumpet honeysuckle. How interesting!
Editor’s Note: You can see the yellow variety at Salato Native Wildlife Education in Frankfort, Kentucky at the headquarters of Kentucky Department of Fish & Wildlife Resources in the backyard exhibit.
Alicia Bosela owns Ironweed Native Plant Nursery in Columbia Kentucky, a certified woman-owned business. Before opening her own nursery, she was the Assistant Director of Clay Hill Memorial Forest Environmental Education Center. You can contact her at www.ironweednursery.com.
Ironweed, Vernonia gigantea. Photo credit: Theodore Webster, Common License.
August is time for the giants in the gardens to bloom. Of all the natives, these are my favorites and, ironweed was my first.
Your blooms mesmerized me and when I grew you,
your height fascinated me.
Farmers hate you. They can’t eradicate you with poison so,
they mow you down. A mere image of your true self.
You can be considered a bully. Nuisance is used
to describe you.
Not picky where you grow—fields,
pastures, roadsides, and in the urban garden at
the woodland edge. You are welcomed there, not a bully nor a nuisance.
Prevailing winds constantly at your back,
always standing tall.
The other giants with their issues,
requiring support, to stand tall.
Your presence reminds me year after year, how much
I love the colors of your blooms.
Intense in the sun; subdued in the shade.
Such a welcomed color amongst the other giants
in the urban garden.
You started the pursuit of always having your color
while yellow and white also still in bloom; from the beginning
of the garden season to the end; and, that love affair
started more than thirty-five years ago.
Perception—how it defines you.
David Taylor, Forest Service
Tall ironweed, Vernonia gigantea, is a member of the sunflower family, Asteraceae. In Kentucky, plants begin blooming in August, occasionally, late July, with some individuals blooming as late as mid-October. The plant has alternate leaves each up to 10 inches long and 2.5 inches wide. Stems are typically 5-6 feet tall but can reach 9-10 feet in bottomland. The purple flowers are small, only about ¼ inch long, but because 20-25 are clustered together a head, and 50 to several hundred heads occur in one inflorescence, the plant is showy. Many species of small bees and butterflies will feed on the nectar produced by the flowers. A large plant can produce 1,000 or more wind-blown seeds.
Tall ironweed is a clumpy plant producing multiple stems from each root system, which is extensive and tough, firmly anchoring the plant in the ground. A few caterpillars and beetles eat the leaves, but otherwise the plant is relatively resistant to herbivory. Once established in a field, especially if overgrazed, the plant spreads quickly, aided by bare soil patches, and general immunity from grazing. The plant is difficult to eradicate and is generally controlled by mowing. In a garden setting, it is wise to cut the inflorescence off once the flowers are finished blooming if you don’t want them to spread. Dispose of the old flowers in the trash to prevent spreading of seed.
Debra Parrish lives in the heart of downtown and spends a lot of time and expends a great deal of love on her urban native gardens. She frequently offers summer tours for gardening clubs and other native gardening organizations.
By Heather Doolin, Office of Kentucky Nature Preserves
Heavenly bamboo (Nandina domestica), also commonly called sacred bamboo, is an evergreen shrub, vaguely resembling bamboo. Heavenly bamboo began its journey in North America as an ornamental plant, escaping cultivation and invading forests of ten southern states, Kentucky being included in those affected.
