On Monday, March 17, at SUNY Westchester Community College, budding anthropologists, ecologists, botanists, landscape designers, community activists, and gardeners gathered for the second annual spring landscape conference. The theme of this year’s conference, “People–Plants–Place, Blending Ecology, Beauty and Spirit,” was explored by four speakers and organized by Peekskill’s own Carol Capobianco, the director of the college’s The Native Plant Center. The presenters included Jared Rosenbaum, ecosystem restoration practitioner, nursery owner, and author; Nohham Cachat-Schilling, Six Nations Medicine Elder, ethical archaeologist and ethnobotanist; Jan Johnsen, landscape designer and author of several books including Heaven is a Garden; and Shanti Nagel, landscape designer and community organizer with roots in Manhattan and the Hudson Valley.
The atmosphere crackled as only it can when filled with antsy native plant aficionados in mid-March (it’s a little too cold to plant most things, and definitely too early to start cleaning up, at the risk of disturbing overwintering pollinators.) In case you haven’t heard the buzz, native landscape restoration is the aim of many in the gardening world. Its goal – to restore access to the best-adapted foods for organisms like pollinators and birds – strikes on multiple levels, sounding at its most lofty like a bid for ecological justice. As a recent convert to the world of native North American plants, I’ve found a deeper meaning beyond creating gardens because they look pretty to my human eyes – I see them as a way to give back to the natural world that has sustained me. It may come as a shock to apprehend the scope of how landscapes and land management practices have removed access to food, and therefore life, for many.
For example, bees native to North America, like the fuzzy American bumblebee, have been observed losing their way inside exotic (non-native) flowers, and then having to waste resources re-navigating once inside another foreign bloom. No wonder that its population is in decline. If we want to maintain the biodiversity that fuels our world’s natural systems, perhaps the answer lies in recreating the plant underpinnings of the ecosystems of the past, one native milkweed at a time?
First presenter Jared Rosenbaum offered perspective on just this question. A Manhattan-born kid who grew into a native-plant obsessive, he went on to “rewild” a patch of western New Jersey as a native plant nursery, Wild Ridge Farm. Rosenbaum champions a return to the cultivation and use of native plant species as food, medicine, and community healing. His encyclopedic work, Wild Plant Culture: A Guide to Restoring Edible and Medicinal Plant Communities presents a range of native perennial flowers, shrubs, and trees, with detailed information on edible and medicinal applications.
The second presenter, Nohham Cachat-Schilling, offered a glimpse into how our own regional backyard was maintained by the Indigenous people of the Hudson Valley. Cachat-Schilling’s presentation opened with a Six Nations greeting and grounded the conference in reckoning: the native plant knowledge we seek has been known for centuries, but the pathways for knowledge have often been extinguished by colonization. Through research into real-world archaeological sites in nearby Pound Ridge, Cachat-Schilling brought to life a picture of the plants used by the Munsee Lenape, and transmitted the reverence with which plant “relatives” were cultivated and harvested. Seeing the familiar Latin names of natives next to their Munsee counterpart helped me appreciate the gifts of knowledge and of the plants themselves that otherwise could have been lost to time.
The third presenter, Jan Johnsen, veered from the historical to the practical as she outlined several premises of landscape design honed over decades of designing gardens in Japan, Hawaii, Kenya, and right here in the Hudson Valley. She explained principles to introduce serenity and delight to landscapes, from creating a sheltered seating spot as a visual anchor to disguising the slope of a steep hill (The trick? Make the steps wide, low, and in six-step increments.) She also advised on tying horticultural design to the ordinal directions (such as planting thin-petalled flowers like roses in the east of a property to make the best use of the morning sun’s gentler rays). Her many books, including Heaven Is a Garden, The Spirit of Stone, Floratopia and Gardentopia, provide more insight on these topics.
The fourth presenter, Shanti Nagel, brings native plant landscape restoration to the street – literally! Nagel, the founder of landscape design firm Design Wild, has planned public and private gardens by putting the community at the helm from consensus-gathering to volunteer plant installations. Centering her garden development in an understanding of happiness as a combination of community, purpose, and wonder, she looks to incorporate native plants for their durability, alignment with ethical development, and undeniable beauty. Especially notable were Nagel’s lush before-and-afters of urban lots near NYC’s Lincoln Tunnel and next to a 7-Eleven in her native Saratoga Springs; the crowd was left inspired and even more anxious for spring to truly begin.
Look forward to more information from Shanti Nagel on exciting native plants for your yard, and more, in next month’s “Read It and Reap”! Don’t forget to send gardening questions to Lucy at [email protected] and think spring!
