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Native Gardens
| Article
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20131 |
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Section : |
LIFE
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| Issue
Date : |
2 / 1992 |
2,431 Words |
| Author
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Carole Ottesen
Carole Ottesen is an author and freelance writer who
specializes in gardening topics. She lives in Potomac,
Maryland. |
Farmers and poets and people who live in the country have long known and loved the beauty of winter fields. Now, the same native wildflowers and tawny, frost-touched grasses that dazzle in country fields are being used as refreshingly new landscaping. Replacing the ubiquitous combination of lawn and clipped evergreens, landscaping that uses native plants-for example, meadows composed of indigenous grasses and wildflowers--is showing up in unexpected places: in residential front yards and in the landscaping of schools, banks, and public parks. Exciting and environmentally friendly, these native combinations have a wild look that is especially soothing to city eyes that are tired of the horticultural regimentation around them.
Today' conventional land-scaping of lawn and evergreens is static. A monotonous green, it stays much the same all year. In fact, most of the effort involved in its upkeep is aimed at keeping it in an unchanging state. In vivid contrast, landscaping that employs grasses and wildflowers is dynamic. It changes with the seasons: It is tender lettuce-green in spring, bright with wildflowers in summer, and almond--and wheat-colored in winter.
Longing For Nature
This kind of landscaping is nostalgic, and that perhaps is the reason for its growing acceptance and popularity--it is landscaping reminiscent of an earlier, more natural era. Today, not everyone is lucky enough to live amid nature. In some places, development has obliterated all that was wild and spontaneous for many miles around. In vast urban centers, many people's windows overlook a modern-day wilderness of concrete and asphalt. In the heart of cities or wherever shopping malls, crowded highways, and parking lots dominate scenery, the longing for a little untrammeled nature is great.
In the United States, developing uncharted territory into a country of bustling cities and towns connected by a network of highways across a vast continent occurred at a rate unparalleled in history. Virgin country became farmland and then town in the course of a single lifetime.
In Wisconsin, in the late 1920s and early 1930s, the pressures of agriculture and urbanization were so intense that naturalists became concerned that the fragile prairie ecosystem might disappear. Aldo Leopold was instrumental in establishing the first large-scale planting of prairie grasses and wildflowers at the arboretum of the University of Wisconsin in Madison. The
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