A Less Judgy Route to Native Plant Gardening
Talking Native Plant Garden Design with Allyson Greenlon
Welcome to the Edition Three of the Garden Study Interview!
The basics of the Garden Study Interview:
You don’t have to be an expert, just enthusiastic (although in this particular case, our interviewee is indeed an expert)
I make a document with some basic questions and send them off; if you have ideas for questions to include in future Q&As, put them in the comments
The goal is to include all types of gardening (container, flower, patio, community, desert, mountain, vegetable you name it) and zones; please be patient, I promise we’ll get to all of them
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Now here’s Garden Study reader and *Native Plant Garden Designer* Allyson Greenlon talking about how she arrived at this work, changing our understanding of “lushness,” and why a weed is “the right plant in the wrong place.”
What’s your gardening story? (aka, how’d you get here?)
My earliest memory of being fascinated with plant diversity was when I was in the fourth grade and was assigned in school to “build a mission”, as was infamously part of school curricula for kids in California in the 1990’s (and beyond?). I came up with the idea to build mine out of as many different types of beans and legumes as my mother could find in the grocery store. I still recall the vivid experience of falling in love with the diversity of beans and their beautiful seed coats. I was obsessed with my mission made of beans.
In middle school, I harvested papyrus plants from the lavish landscaping around the suburban Los Angeles backyard pool my parents had only recently installed and spent three days making two sheets of paper for a project in which I was assigned to present on Egypt.
In high school, I learned to make pH buffer solution from cabbage for my chemistry class and could not get over the vivid purple color derived from the boiled leaves - I could not believe plants could make such a color.
I credit my first mentor, professor Katherine Courtney from Moorpark College, for encouraging me to pursue studying plants in college and eventually graduate school. She would be the first of many amazing mentors (all notably women), and as I continue to grow and become a mentor myself (shoutout to my amazing mentee Liliana), I strongly believe in being the voice of plants to help connect people to them.
I hadn’t gardened much before pursuing work as a professional horticulturist. I was first trained as a botanist, which is the science of knowing plants and how to distinguish between plant species. I used my botany skills working in various places assisting with research such as post-wildfire regeneration monitoring, wetland restoration, and agricultural habitat interfaces. I pursued further education in horticulture with the intention of working in botanic gardens or herbaria (see below), during which time I apprenticed in two botanic gardens and a farm.
Plants are beautiful. We all hopefully know that. I love them for the ways humans cannot exist without them both literally, for food and warmth, and unknowingly, in the way they fundamentally bring people together, either across a region or in the same garden or even over a craft using perhaps plant-based textiles or, of course, a pot of soup made from a recipe passed down across generations. I see the ways plants improve our mental health on a short, impromptu walk through our neighborhoods (try it!); I also see people travel from far and wide with great intention just to stand amongst the tallest trees in the world, and feel so much joy and awe. I ultimately started gardening because I want to facilitate this connection between people and plants.
Can you please tell me everything about 1) plant museums and 2) what you did at one?
There are two main types of plant museums. The first one, that most folks are familiar with but might not realize that they operate as museums are botanic gardens. The plants (aka “specimens”) cultivated in botanic gardens compose “living collections”. The cutorators and other staff that maintain these collections usually implement a “collections strategy”, or simply put, some goals and standards that are unique to each garden or even an individual collection within a garden and guide the cultivation, maintenance, and display of each garden.
While anyone can show up and appreciate such a collection for it’s beauty and solace - which is enough in itself - if they are interested they can often find that the cohesion around a particular garden is driven by wanting to preserve, research, or highlight the flora of say, a given region, culture, people and/or use, sensory experiences such as touch or smell, or other theme. Botanic garden collections fundamentally exist to connect plants to people.
The lesser known plant museum is called an herbarium (plural: herbaria) aka the dead plant museum! Herbaria exist around the world, established in tradition with western or scientific approach to understanding plants. They are often but not always associated with one of the following: universities, science or natural history museums, botanic gardens, or even public agencies. The plants in herbarium collections are collected while alive and methodically pressed onto paper such that the parts needed to identify them are present and preserved.
Historically, western explorers and others kept personal herbaria, and, over time, these collections became the backbone of collections that are now aggregated into institutions which today are focused on civic duty and public engagement (like for teaching and research). Herbaria can be as small as a cabinet with a stack of 50 specimens, or contain millions of specimens. The largest herbaria in the United States, in order of biggest, belong to: the New York Botanical Garden (7.3 million specimens), the Missouri Botanical Garden (6.3 million specimens), Harvard (5 million specimens), and the national collection at the Smithsonian (4.3 million specimens).
Similar to botanic gardens, an herbarium collection can have a collections plan that prioritizes the documentation of certain plants, such as plants of a given region, a tribe, agriculturally significant plants, etc. Plants are often, but not always (especially with tribal herbaria), organized according to their linnean taxonomic classification. This means that closely related plants (of the same family, and further, genus) are kept together.
Most herbaria are generally not open to the public on a daily basis like botanic gardens, but rather prioritize the use of their collection for research purposes. However, I worked at two herbaria in which I did a lot of outreach with the public (The University of California, Davis aka “The Center for Plant Diversity” and UC Berkeley aka “The University and Jepson Herbaria” Now, I admit that dead plants pressed on paper pack less of a punch than a stunning living garden. But these collections hold so much information that meets the eye and I loved sharing that with whoever would listen.
If I arranged a tour of the herbarium collections, I would reach for specimens that were hundreds of years old and show visitors how they told stories about our history and culture and how we interacted with the land; I would show plant specimens of those that no longer exist; plants in which the beautiful blue pigments of the flowers are still vibrant after being preserved 50 years ago; I would also make sure to bring out specimens of something familiar to most, such as redwood trees or the wild ancestors of vegetables like lettuce or carrot (both weeds now in some places but so it goes), and I always make sure to put a flannelbush specimen underneath a microscope so folks can view the tiny hairs (known as trichomes) that are shaped like beautiful starbursts.
As a garden designer, how would you describe your gardening philosophy, and how has it evolved with time and experience?
In my formative years studying botany, I vividly recall feeling sad and disappointed by the plants I noticed again and again in the front yards where I live here in the Bay Area. My first thought was why, when it came to ornamental landscapes (note here, we are not talking about edible plants), was there so much less diversity than the wild. Why are people planting the same mundane plants again and again? Furthermore, why did people feel like the plants that have existed here long before most of us were not good enough for them? From my perspective, it felt like our planted landscapes continue to reflect toxic colonial practice and otherism. Almost a decade after first having these thoughts I became a garden designer.
I arrived as a designer from a completely different perspective. I had extensive knowledge of plants and wanted to share that with anyone who was open to it. My garden philosophy is firstly driven by plant diversity. I love to include as many different taxa (a given group of plants. I avoid using species here for technical reasons related to the concept of horticultural plant varieties, cultivars, hybrids, or as is often the case in my work, “nativars”). If someone knows very little about plants, my garden hopefully stops them in their tracks with a gut punch. They don’t even have to understand what they are looking at, but hopefully they feel that sense of awe and wonder and hopefully pleasure.
In addition to eliciting that “wow” feeling with plant diversity, I value the use of locally native plants; generally, the more we engage the use of plants that would occur within a 50 mile radius of the planting site, the more we promote ecological benefits in urban areas as well as reduce the carbon footprint required to landscape a space. The garden industry unfortunately is, like most things, subject to high-jacking by capitalism. The cost and footprint behind rewilding a space or even simply building a garden can be overwhelming. If someone is new to gardening then please don’t sweat this part and just know that stewarding land at all is the first and most important step and arguably a radical act in itself.
But in my position, I believe I have a duty to think carefully about doing it right. We have been landscaping negligently for a long time. In addition to thinking about the gas and water and other resources used to create gardens, there is an unfortunate history of introducing many destructive invasive plants through the horticulture industry. These vary by region, but some examples include Bradford Pear, English Ivy, Himalayan Blackberry, Tree of Heaven, and Kudzu. Many plants fell into this unfortunate outcome simply because people like fast results and “lushness” — this is truly a fatal flaw of humans, with far reaching consequences that begin with plants and are relevant far beyond topics I know about. But like I always tell my son, a weed is just the right plant in the wrong place. And doomsday aside, I am excited to be a part of a movement at the forefront of progressive gardening that is ready to expansively raise our expectations about how we care for these spaces.
When I look at the gardeners on my island, most of the older ones have gradually moved towards more and more and native plants with time. There’s something about trying to get things to grow in a place that don’t naturally grow there that’s very, well, 42-year-old woman trying not to get wrinkles (I’m owning myself here, to be clear). But I also get very prickly when people try to be prescriptive about how I’m personally trying to figure out aging. Let me find my way there myself!!! Which is long way of asking: have you found that sometimes people need to find their own way to native plant gardening?
Absolutely. Effective outreach requires meeting people where they are at. Gardening in coherence with native ecosystems requires more context that not everyone has. One of the challenges I feel about my work is having spent a lot of time getting educated about something that is also so innately human; everyone has their own relationship to and understanding of plants, and although some could use some clarity and understanding, anyone’s relationship to their surroundings like landscapes and farms are valid. We live in a complex modern world that disrupts a lot of basic human experiences, our connection to plants being just one of many. But, I measure success one native plant garden at a time, and believe that each one has the potential for far-reaching impacts that increases awareness of protecting the wild, preserving natural resources, and relearning what “lush” looks like.
What are your overarching tips for gardeners looking to get started making their garden (or part of their garden) more resilient? (Either from scratch or an existing garden)
If the internet is your primary way that you seek to get educated on topics relating to gardening, generally stay wary of any blog or product site that makes claims of how to garden, including even non-profits that are maybe centered around a specific type of gardening, even if it is intended to be ethical and sustainable. These resources are more likely to offer biased information even if well-intended. The internet is about as full of fluff when it comes to gardening as it is about medical and health-related information. So approach it as such. Master Gardeners are a useful resource, but they are generally trained by professionals who work for state-run Agricultural and Natural Resource (ANR) agencies - these tend to derive best practice advice for topics on fertilizer, water, pest control and other topics, all derived by science-backed studies when possible. So try to learn more from the ANR websites first.
If you can, source plants from small local nurseries that grow native plants in your area. Don’t rush it; hold out for high quality plants during the right time of year for your area. If you are not sure how to look for plant material and check its quality, at a minimum choose smaller, one-gallon or less sized plants. The pot should have more soil than it should have roots. If the roots are constricted by the pot the plant will have a hard time transitioning to life in the ground. Poor plant quality often contributes to what people misinterpret as a “black thumb”.
And my sage wisdom…..Your garden will not be built in a day. It is a journey not a destination. Enjoy the process. If it does not involve a lot of trial and error that leads to growth (of both plants AND humans!).....Can we even call it gardening?
How do you keep joy for yourself in your own gardening practice? (And what’s your favorite part of gardening???)
I find a lot of joy when I pay attention to how plants shift day to day and throughout the year. Flowers are just beginning, but there are fruits and seeds (remember it began with beans for me!) and all the rest of the plant to enjoy. Look closer (get a hand lens!): the patterns in the bark of the tree, the hairs on the underside of the leaf, the veins where color is lost as plants begin to go dormant, these are just a few additional ways I continue to find joy in plants. I love the expanded sensory experience plants beyond just sight: taste, of course, smell and touch help me tune in to both the place I am as well as the body I inhabit. I also find that I feel grounded with and accepting of the passage of time when I notice it through the process of plants throughout the year. You will always feel rushed and gobsmacked when you look at the time on your phone (or in my case, the infinite alarms and reminders I rely on to get by in this busy life). But you will feel connected to time and space in a primal way when you notice the way time and space moves along with you - plants can help you experience this!
My favorite part of gardening is, surprisingly, weeding. Though it ultimately can become, at times, my greatest grief. But not just weeding. There is nothing I love more than sitting side by side with someone I love, preferably with a cup of strong black tea in tandem and the morning light painting the scene beautifully, while we weed and talk about our lives, experiences, and the world as if we have all the time in the world. Perhaps there is great irony here, as a lot of the philosophy of the work that I do is counter to the culture that is responsible for the movement of weeds around the world. I would also go as far as to say that despite the complicated reality of the way humans leave their trace on the land, it is in everyone’s best interest that we find joy in the chaos, embracing our past, staying rosy-eyed for the future, and all the while touching soil and being present together with people we hold dear. If all else fails, just try to touch soil every day.
You can learn more about Allyson’s work and find her contact information on her website: moonpiegardens.com
Do you have questions for Allyson? General thoughts about your own journey towards native plants? Let’s chat all day in the comments (after touching soil).
"There is nothing I love more than sitting side by side with someone I love, preferably with a cup of strong black tea in tandem and the morning light painting the scene beautifully, while we weed and talk about our lives, experiences, and the world as if we have all the time in the world."
So lovely. I really appreciate your framing of weeds and weeding.
Gosh, I look forward to Garden Study each week!
I love this. Learning about native plants can be so fun and doesn’t need to be virtue signaling or self-righteous. It can be a way to really fall in love with your local region