The Garden ...from the inside

During the past two years of COVID when we have all been cooped up so much of the time, I’ve found new ideas in observing my garden from inside the house. This photo is a view of the Sage Advice front garden, as seen from inside the living room. It illustrates how the garden will show its beauty in winter if you just let it! Shrub forms and textures pop in the winter when there is little color to hide their subtle beauty. If the design of the garden allows these features to work together, the palette is as pleasing as can be!

Now is a good time to walk around inside your house, stopping at each window to ask, “How can I enjoy the garden from this ‘inside out’ view? What should I do to improve it?” I tried this exercise early this morning. From the bedroom window I could see the finch feeder right outside the window, tucked beside the Limelight hydrangea, but beyond that, at the north edge of the yard I spotted the rain garden that has been filling and freezing of late with a lot of rain-then-snow days. Outside the kitchen window I can see bird feeders in two directions, positioned so that the birds can go from one to the other, hide in the hemlock tree, perch on the heated birdbath or fly high up into our massive silver maple tree.

I love best the sprawling bare branches of the bottlebrush buckeye, with a tall bird feeder pole right in the middle. The bottlebrush buckeye, a native Illinois shrub, is unique in having branches that grow out almost laterally. They look very sturdy but they are not very climbable! We love watching the squirrels tightrope walk up these branches … almost to the peanuts they can smell in the birdfeeder… until they fall off the top most-bendable branches …. before they havereached the treats!

And so, even though we are all beginning to wish for spring, I can end this short blog to say, with certainty, what a beautiful and entertaining late winter snow we had last night!

Watching for the Ephemerals

Spring is the time for ephemerals – a fancy term for the tiny plants that emerge from damp, cold soil before the trees or shrubs have even thought of coming to life. Ephemerals are so named because the word ephemeral, which literally means “lasting only a short time.” Emerging sometimes with blossoms before foliage, they appear typically in the woods, in early spring when moisture and sun are abundant because the overhead trees are bare. By the time the forest canopy is leafed out and shade covers the ground below, the ephemerals are already gone. They live on underground until the next spring when they will bloom again. Their above-ground life cycle: leafing out, blooming, seeding and dying back, is already complete, or persists only as remnant foliage. 

Gardeners in Illinois have many native ephemerals to consider. They do best in spots that look empty when the snow melts, but become shady under shrubs or trees later in the season. An example: I filled the space underneath a grove of large viburnums with Virginia bluebells. The bluebells bloom in April and fill the empty bed with bright blue flowers, then die back just in time for the tall Korean viburnums to leaf out and blossom with snowball-like white flowers that are full of the fragrance of spring. In the back garden, another spring ephemeral, Mayapple creates an unusual carpet of umbrella-like plants under tall shrubs for all of the spring season.  

I also like to use ephemerals in my designs by walkways or doorways, where observant people are most likely to see them.  Their blossoms are tyrically very tiny! In my own garden, the front bed walkways are lined with shooting star, Dutchman’s breeches, hepatica, trillium, bloodroot, trout lily, and others.

For a list of spring ephemerals in your area, ask for “native spring ephenerals in (your state) “ in your search engine. Here you see a number of examples in the pictures I’ve provided. They are, from left to right, starting with the top row:

Pasque Flower ( Pulsatilla patens), Prairie Smoke (Geum triflorum) , Birdsfoot Violet (Viola pedata) Bloodroot (Sanguinaria canadensis) , Mayapple foliage, easily recognized by its umbrella-like leaves. Virginia bluebells (Mertensia virginica), Mayapple blossom (Podophyllum peltatum), Dutchman’s breeches (Dicentra cucullaria)

Winter Reveals the Bones of a Garden

Winter is no excuse for your garden to be uninteresting. In fact, winter is the perfect time to assess the strength of your garden’s design. Once the flowers are gone and the leaves have dropped from deciduous shrubs, the basic structure of the garden emerges. Suddenly, you can see how the size, shape and features of the plants in winter work to create the “bones” of the garden.

If you have been brave enough to leave perennials or grasses intact, winter will also be a chance to see how these provide unique winter beauty quite different from their seasonal glory, and how effectively they contribute to the basic design structure that emerges in winter.

Finally, winter can show the stark beauty of snow as it changes the structures in your garden. And, as you look at your garden structures in the winter you will immediately be able to see if they are spaced aesthetically or not. No plants in the way to mask your decisions in the winter!

Studying your garden in winter is one critical way of assessing your overall garden design and predicting how the garden will improve as plants change and grow. In this blog, we feature some examples to illustrate this important point.

Planning Your 2021 Lawn Care

Even though it’s deep winter. this is the time to make arrangements for the most sustainable thing you can do in your yard in 2021, Yes, January is the time to make sure you will be saving money and building a health lawn, by doing one simple thing: making arrangements to save your own grass clippings!

Every summer truckloads of grass clippings are hauled AWAY from residential lawns by mowing companies even though we’ve long known that grass clippings are the best fertilizer for the lawn. They are the very best source of organic nitrogen, and actually provide approximately 25% of the nitrogen, potassium, and phosphorus needs of your grass, if left on the lawn when mowing is done. Why give grass clippings away and then pay for fertilizer additives?

Here’s how to ensure that you keep your valuable grass clippings:

·       If you mow your own lawn, mow no closer than 3.5 to 4 inches and use a mulching mower if possible. “Mowing taller” as this is called allows the clippings to fall easily into the lawn. Using a mulching mower will distribute the clippings so they do not clump when the lawn is thick and growing fast in the spring.

·       This means not mowing at all in midsummer when the weather is hot and dry and the grass is not growing.

·       If you use a mowing service, ask these two questions:

1.       Will you cut my grass no shorter than 4” and refrain from mowing if the grass does not require it?

2.       Do you use mulching mowers?

Your landscape maintenance company should answer both these questions affirmatively. If  they don’t, look elsewhere. It is possible to find qualified companies who will say “yes.”

If you make these plans now, before you sign a maintenance contract for 2021, or before it’s time for you to be in the yard doing that first mowing, you’ll be taking the first step to a healthier lawn.

Then if you want to realize the savings that your grass clippings provide and you use a mowing service, limit your contract to mowing only and switch to an organic lawn care company for fertilization, aeration and other techniques that will support a healthy lawn.

What's in a Nativar?

Published again this month in Landscape Architecture Magazine, Carol Becker explains that "‘nativar’ is a trade term for cultivated varieties of native plants. Her article describes the role of nativars in the landscape and presented the new research that defines which nativars are useful to pollinators. Read the full article here

Butterfly Gardens Emerging

It’s encouraging to see so many people putting in butterfly gardens now that summer is really here. At Sage Advice, we’ve put more in every year for the past 5 years . Each time we do, we THANK our customer for caring about and investing in insect life. Our own well being demands that we do, but it’s still something to be thankful for every time someone creates habitat for butterflies, bees, and other insects.

After we say thank you, we REMIND our new butterfly garden owner that “it takes time” for the garden to emerge to its full beauty. Truth be told, we don’t typically post pictures of these gardens in their first year. Compared to ornamental gardens, they look puny at first. But later on, like the tortoise that eventually outstrips the hare, native plant butterfly gardens far outshine and outlive the ornamental garden in beauty and value. Here we post the pictures to prove our point. CLICK on each picture to see the next one!

This particular butterfly garden, a small one by any standard, was first planted in 2015. Today, it is beautiful thriving and supporting wildlife. It doesn’t seem small anymore. It takes time. Nature requires our patience as well as our concern.

Creating a Butterlfy Garden with Annuals

When I got the request this season to create a butterfly garden with annuals for a Wisconsin client, I really had to stop and think. Typically, we build a butterfly garden around perennial native plants that return every season. But this couple loves to plant annuals as part of their summer garden, so what would I suggest? My answers to this question might help you in creating a butterfly garden with annuals.

Their garden space is approximately 11 feet square. I designed from in the center because I wanted the garden to move from that center outward, and also to have levels of flowers from low to high throughout. So roughly speaking, I was working within a cube. Some of the plants and shrubs I used are perennial in warmer climates, but function as annuals in Zone 4, the location of the property.

In the very center, I put sunflowers. They are showy, tall and great for pollinators including bees, butterflies and hummingbirds. Then, dividing the space into quadrants, I designed each with different predominant colors, making sure I would have flower heads at three levels: high, medium and low. In each quadrant I used a shrubby plant, alternating lantana* and hibiscus. Around the outside I put a border, ageratum alternating with alyssum*.

Here are the common names of the additional flowers I included inside the quadrants: Brazilian vervain, black and blue salvia, cosmos,* zinnia, marigold, tropical milkweed, gaura, foxglove, petunia, snapdragon and cleome*. Those starred are puictured below.

For annuals like zinnia that are available in several colors, I selected only one color. Thus each type of flower represented a color block in the design. This gives a cohesive look to the garden as a whole, especially when many flower types, many colors and many levels are combined in one garden.

To plant the garden, we will position all the plants in the quadrant before planting to ensure that the color pattern works. In this way adjustments can me made before planting where necessary.

We’ll be photographing this garden throughout the season to see how it turns out. Why not give it a try in your garden?

Earth Day SHOUT OUT for Go Green Park Ridge

Another Earth Day, and many communities are having events this weekend. At Sage Advice we SHOUT OUT to Go Green Park Ridge, a community group in our own municipality that has worked tirelessly to teach and model sustainability throughout our city. When the group started a couple years ago, we already had natural lawn care in our parks, thanks to enlightened staff an the leadership of Park Board Commissioner Cindy Grau. Recently, with the support of Go Green Park Ridge, the city council voted in favor of natural maintenance practices on parkways and all city properties. Most recently, Go Green Park Ridge and other local groups are working with and supporting the school district, where staff are testing natural lawn care at one school.

To keep up the effort and do more in the future, Go Green Park Ridge also helped elect two sustainably-minded members to the local school board and two to the city’s park board.is

Natural lawn care eliminates the use of herbicides to keep lawns healthy and replaces these with several techniques to care for lawns: enriching the soil with compost and organic fertilizers that are not harmful, cutting grass no shorter than 4 inches, mulching grass clippings back into the lawn, using natural weed control applications when necessary, core aerating the lawn once or twice each season to help create space for oxygen around the roots, and overseeing each spring to keep the lawn thick and healthy.

Why is this so important? Because herbicides are harmful to anyone who spends time on the lawn, especially children and pets.

If you wish to read more on this topic, Paul Tukey is an expert on the reasons WHY to do this.

We’ve followed this approach for 10 years in the Sage Advice test garden (pictured below), and we have a lawn that stays green, seldom if ever needs watering even in midsummer, and is always healthy for those who work and play on it. We save water. We save our health. We help save the planet, even by the little bit that we are doing to make our lawn safe. We do have some dandelions to pull in May when they first bloom, but for the rest of the summer — no problem!

Why not make the change in your own lawn and in your own community? At Sage Advice, we know providers who can help! And you can do so much beyond your own yard if you work together.

Choosing the Best Native Plants #1: Birdsfoot Violet

Do I have to have ALL native plants in my garden to support birds, butterflies and bees? This is a common question and an important one for all of us, but especially for those who are just getting to know native plants and are not comfortable with changing over the whole garden!

The answer is, surprisingly, NO! In fact, it’s much simpler than that. Dr. Doug Tallamy, who has written the now-popular book Bringing Nature Home, tells us that all we really have to do is pick from the 5 to 10 most important plants. But how do we know what those plants are?

It’s really quite simple, thanks to the the searchable database on the National Wildlife Federation website. I followed the prompts to type in my ZIP code and selected PLANTS from the three options. There was my list. The plants are listed by Genus, in order from those that support the most wildlife to the least. Among the top 10 is Viola, a good host plant to 28 different butterfly species It just so happens that a member of this family, the Birdsfoot Violet (Viola pedata) is one of my very favorite spring-blooming native plants.

Birdsfoot violet got its name from the fact that its leaves are shaped like bird’s feet, unlike other violets that have heart-shaped leaves. The leaves of Bidrsfoot Violet are thin and delicate and actually do look like a bird’s foot or footprint. The plant likes sandy and dry spots in the yard and grows to only about 3 inches, blooming in early spring with a lovely blue-violet flower.

Look for it in the woods and plant some in your own garden for a delightful surprise in spring! Birdsfoot Violet is easy to grow and rewards with a lovely light blue flower.

Can I Dig in the Garden?

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With the first warmish days finally appearing, I’ve had several customers text or email to ask if they can begin working in the garden. We are all so anxious for spring, and the emergence of snowdrops (pictured) is the first sign that the soil is warming up.

But it is too early right now because the ground is too wet. Working in the garden under current conditions will damage the soil structure that is so important to plants at all times (but especially in spring as they break dormancy). While you are waiting, think about the soil, or take some time to find out more about soil, which is the critical foundation to your entire garden.

We all know that soil differs from one region to another, depending on its content of clay, sand and silt. Because you are a gardener, you are already well acquainted with the clay-like consistence of Chicago area soils! But that’s not all. Soil that is good for gardening also contains organic matter (bacteria, fungi, and millions of small one-celled creatures, insects and earthworms that relate to each other in what we call the soil food web). Healthy soil must have space between particles for these organisms — especially the earthworms — to move around. Space between soil particles also allows for the movement of water and air within the soil. Think of the soil not just as the mass that you can see if you grab a handful, but a collection of organisms and chemicals that move around in a dark universe where the roots of plants extend tiny hairs into open spaces to absorb nutrients and water. It’ the best way to imagine what might happen when you step on a patch of wet soil in the spring. Your shoes get muddy, yes. But more important, the spaces within the soil get squished. This is not good news for the delicate plants that are trying to emerge.

This is my first blog to help you imagine the soil and what is really going on there. It explains why you cannot work in the garden just yet, why your should always spread your weight by walking on a board when you CAN get in the garden, and why we no longer recommend rototiling the soil — all these practices cause soil compaction — the breakdown the soil spaces. Foot traffic is the #1 culprit.

Soil compaction starves your plants of oxygen, water and organic nutrients. Why does this matter? Here are some of the results of soil compaction:

• A decreases in soil organisms that over time decreases the organic matter in the soil. Your soil gasps for life and eventually becomes dead. Nothing good is going on in there.

• Earthworms die or leave your yard for better digs. You no longer have the very best of natural soil tillers at work in your garden!

• Plants gasp for air. Even the newly planted ones that you just got at the local garden center don’t grow, turn yellow, and die.

• When it rains, the water sits on top of your garden beds. you have puddles. Water meant for the plants to drink cannot get to their roots.

• Underground, the shrubs you plant this season are resting on hardpan dirt (not soil). Water collects under them and cannot drain away. Their roots are drowning, but you cannot see that. You see them wilt and die and you don’t know why.

When CAN you work in the garden? A simple “ball test” will help you know when it’s safe. Scoop as small amount of soil into your palm and roll it into a ball. If the ball stays together, the soil is still too wet to work. If it falls apart, you’re good to go.

More on soil to come. For now, enjoy the emerging snowdrops, crocus, and — soon to be featured — spring ephemeral wildflowers.

5 Ways to Be a Sustainable Gardener in 2019

It’s time to begin thinking about the 2019 garden. If you are new to sustainable gardening, or if you want to introduce others to how to be more sustainable, here are the places to start:

1. Mulch grass clippings into your lawn. This is the most basic thing for everyone to do. If your landscape crew rakes and disposes of grass clippings, you are giving away the best source of nitrogen in your yard. Ask your crew foreman to use a mulching mower, and if your company does not have them, ask them to buy one. If they won’t do so, look elsewhere! Over time, using your own grass clippings will help you reduce the cost of lawn fertilization significantly.

2. Make compost and use it to fertilize your soil. This is another way to save money and it’s not hard with the wide variety of compost bins on the market today. Start small and increase your operation as you learn.

3. Use native plants. If you are just starting out, commit to trying a few native plants in your garden where you have space. Here are a few that are easy to grow and adaptable; purple coneflower, bee balm, coreopsis, black-eyed Susan, butterfly weed and Summer Beauty allium. These all grow in dry to medium sites and they like half or full day sun.

4. Conserve water by installing a rain barrel and using its contents first and watering only in the early morning or evening.. You can go even further to conserve water by using drip irrigation on your garden and NOT watering your lawn. We’ll have more to say about the lawn in a future post.

5. Provide for the birds, butterflies and bees by giving them food and water sources in your yard. If you follow step #3, your plants will be providing food! Then all you need to do is install a bird bath. For butterfly water, invert a wine bottle and bury it most of the way. Then fill the bottom indentation with a small amount of water.

Read The Hole Story

Sage Advice principal Carol Becker has been published this month in Landscape Architecture Magazine. Her story about how the Hornsby Quarry in New South Wales, Australia, moved from an accidental money pit to the best new thing Australia has to offer in the way of parkland is all about politics, geology, preservation and conservation, and the best in landscape architecture idea-making. You can read it here.

Photo courtesy of Hornsby Shire Council

Gardening for Birds and Bees with Sage Advice July 14

You've probably heard about Colony Collapse Disease in beehives, but did you know that we've also lost half of all songbird species in the U. S. in the last 50 years? You can help reverse these trends! Sage Advice will be teaching a class on the morning of July 14th at The Morton Arboretum on Gardening for Birds and Bees. You'll learn why birds and bees are crucual to gardens and to human life, and you'll gain techniques for attracting them to your garden. Come join us on July 14th from 9 a.m. to 1 p.m. Register here

Do you need a soil test?

We had a great class at the Morton Arboretum last Friday, and while we were planning front gardens for all 20 students, we got into talking about soil testing. Everyone in this class has a new build or a mature landscape that has been long in need of a spruce up! Both of these scenarios require a soil test to know how to care for the soil. After all, in a sustainable garden, it's the soil that nurtures the plants.

Soil tests can be simple or very complex, and what you choose to do should depend on your specific questions. We typically recommend a high level lab test if you have never had one done and you want to know about the overall health of your garden soil. On the other hand, if you are only testing for lead content in an area where you plant to do edible gardening, less expensive tests are available. Finally, if you want to do a simple test on your own, you can buy a do-it-yourself kit at your garden center.

Proceed as follows: Select an area where you want the soil tested. This should be one garden bed or an area not bigger than 150 sq. ft. And remember tat the topsoil is what you are testing -- the darkest and topmost area in the cross-section shown above. Dig down about 4 inches in 3 or 4 spots in the area you want tested, and take a half cup or so of soil from each. Mix well and place a total of about 2 cups of the mix in a PAPER bag. Seal the bag and place in a mailing box. Send this to the lab. If you need to test other areas, send a sample in this fashion for EACH area you want tested.

You can find reputable labs on Google, or by checking with your local garden center or conservation associations. Sage Advice can also recommend soil test agencies.

Congratulations to our client

Congratulations Carol!

Carol Receives the Woman of the Year Award at the CLC Annual meeting December 7th

Sage Advice is proud to be the landscape company of choice for Carol Calabresa, who has just been honored by Conserve Lake County as their Woman of the Year, for her 30-plus years of community service in support of conservation initiatives in Lake County. Carol has served on the Conserve Lake County Board, the Forest Preserve Board, and the Lake County Board, where she is still a Trustee.

Sage Advice has worked for the past several years helping Carol and her husband Bill build a completely new residential landscape with native shrubs and forbs, on their property in Libertyville, Illinois.

Get the Kids into the Garden

Planting a vegetable garden or a row of summer flowers gives kids even as young as 4 or 5 the chance to dig in the dirt, learn where food comes from and feel comfortable outdoors. To help our kids avoid having Nature Deficit Disorder, a documented problem these days, it's best to start early!

Are You Planting Milkweed?

From New Terrain, a newsletter of Ball Publishing: As many as 1.8 billion additional stems of milkweed plants in North America may return imperiled Monarch butterflies to a sustainable population size, according to a recently published U.S. Geological Survey (USGS) study. Habitat plants in the Monarch’s Midwestern flyway are most important.

“Milkweeds in corn and soybean fields produce more Monarch eggs than milkweeds located in non-agricultural areas,” Wayne Thogmartin, USGS Research Ecologist, said in a USGS press release.

“Competing demands for space in these agricultural locations limit the highly desirable habitat available to milkweeds and Monarchs.”

More than 860 million milkweeds were lost in the northern United States over the last decade. Scientists with the USGS and collaborators examined the density of Eastern migratory Monarch butterflies overwintering in Mexico from 1979-2002 and the amount of milkweed plants available to them in North America. The study found that 3.62 billion milkweeds are needed to reestablish the Monarch population, but only 1.34 billion remain in the U.S.

Support birds and butterflies no matter where you live

You can provide food and shelter for birds and butterflies no matter where you live. In the city of Chicago, this customer turned her parkway into an oasis that is not only beautiful but functional for wildlife. The parkway is only 20 by 11 feet but that's big enough!

Act Sustainably in Your Garden!

Winter is a great time to re-assess what you are doing to promote sustainability in the environment. Every gardener can do this, and it doesn't need to be hard. Here are a few things to think about for next year!

Do you have a rain barrel? Do you compost in your yard? Are you returning the nitrogen in grass clippings back into your soil by using a mulching mower? Have you added native plants to your garden, to help attract butterflies and bees? Would a rain garden help the drainage in your yard?

These are a few questions that might help you think about sustainability!