Gardening To Get To Know a Very Specific Piece of Land

"There’s no landscape that’s so damaged it’s unworthy of repair."

Welcome to this week’s Garden Study Interview! Here’s the basics of how we do these:

• You don’t have to be an expert, just enthusiastic

• I make a document with some basic questions and send them off to future interviewees, so 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

• The comments are what really make this space shine, so please do so with abandon (and go back and check out new comments on older posts. You can find all previous issues editions here.)

And as always, if you know someone who’d like Garden Study, please forward this their way — but make sure to guide them to the specific way to *opt-in* to Garden Study emails, which you can find here.

And if you’d like to volunteer for a future Garden Study interview, here’s where you sign up (it might take years to get through them all, but I’m committed). And if you missed our first interview from last month on managing a culinary garden at a winery, check it out.

Now here’s Jess talking about gardening as a way to get their own little piece of land in Northwest Ohio (plus tips on how to really get to know wherever you garden — the insurance maps is genius)

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Name and Pronouns:

Jess, they/them

Where do you garden?

I’m in Northwest Ohio, which was Zone 5 when I was growing up and is officially Zone 6B now. I know there is a general warming trend, but the thing that catches my notice locally is the increase in extremes: we’ve had winters that are much milder than my childhood overall, but with short cold snaps that get down into the negative teens, or hot May weather followed by snow. It sometimes makes me want to put everything in pots so I can be in control and protect everything, but that’s…not the attitude I want to bring to gardening, and also (I remind myself) way too much work. 

I have a 10th-acre city lot that I've lived on for a few years, that started out as just lawn with some evergreen shrubs. I dropped a vegetable garden in the middle where there's the most sun, and I'm working (slowly) on bordering the lawn with perennial beds. I'm trying to mix plants that are practical for me (fruits and herbs) with habitat that’s usable for wildlife (native plants, water, shelter) and still keep space for plants that I love just-because (big showy flowers, nice smells.)

My actual property is really just a mix of clay soil and fill, but I’m in the larger Oak Openings region, a part of the transition zone from the eastern forests to the central prairies, so there are nearby nature preserves where the land can change from low swamp to high sand ridge, or thick forest to open scrubland, within a very short distance. And I love the ecology of this region, so I’d like to have a little bit of all of it in my yard. 

I love what you told me about gardening as a way of getting to know a specific spot of land.

It’s kind of the opposite impulse to wanting to put everything in pots, or the blank slate you mention below — I want to know what’s already on the slate and actually (to stretch this metaphor) what the slate is made of. 

Getting to know it from the bottom up: the geology determines the soils and the pathways for groundwater, which affects the plants that will grow there, which affects the top organic layer, the microbial community and the bugs and wildlife…and that’s without even getting into the weather or the land use history. Every place is so specific.  Urban and suburban developments get billed as having flattened out or destroyed that specificity, but so much of the real soil layers are still there, and so much of the biology can come back, once there’s something to come back to. Nowhere is boring! Some things are lost forever, I don’t want to pretend otherwise, or minimize habitat destruction, but I hate that destruction can be used to write off whole regions (like abandoned urban sprawl, or post-fracking towns, or the entire midwest.)  There’s no landscape that’s so damaged it’s unworthy of repair. 

Also, site research combines “online rabbit hole that eats an afternoon” with “technically, working on my garden!?” which is irresistible to me. This used to also be “technically, part of my job” when I worked for a county conservation office, and it was one of my favorite things to do. 

For any given address, I like to look at:

• the Web Soil Survey for the current soil and groundwater situation. The USDA is starting to add more ecology and information here too; I looked up my ecoregion when it first came out and was amused to discover it categorized as a “warm moist sandy depression.” Not wrong!

• regional and municipal maps for elevation changes and underground infrastructure (my city and county have a great Open Data platform with this stuff, it’s definitely worth seeing if there’s one local to you. LiDAR mapping can often show subtle elevation changes that are obscured by the land cover but will still affect how water moves over an area)

• Google Earth for near history (you have to install Google Earth Pro to see past aerial photos, but it’s free) 

• old insurance maps for farther back (these are free with a library card for my area, and free in the Library of Congress digital archives for many US cities.)

Google Earth has aerial photos going back to the 1980s for Northwest Ohio, and those are great to click through to look for the cause of issues on a property. Does a spot get flooded out every May? Is there a huge brown spot in the grass every few years? That spot that seems like you can water and water and nothing ever thrives…was there a tree there 15 years ago? Was that spot that feels impossible to dig in, actually where a gravel driveway used to be? 

Going farther back, Ohio’s library system has Sanborn fire insurance maps digitized for almost every town and city, so you can see the outlines of all the structures ever built on a property, helpfully labeled things like “coal shed” or “textile mill.” Locally, there’s been both a rise in interest in urban farming and a rise in concern about lead and arsenic in soils — Sanborn maps can’t replace soil tests, but they can at least give people an idea of potential hotspots, and help come up with a testing pattern. 

Going down the historic map rabbit hole also makes it viscerally clear that I’m gardening, hiking, all of it, on land that was made available to me by theft and war crimes. I know that’s true nationwide, but it highlighted, for me, the regional dirty dealing that went in a straight line from the Treaty of Greenville to “there are no federally recognized tribes in Ohio.”  I don’t really know how to talk about this.

A couple of years ago, this mural went up on the grain silos along the river downtown, honoring the first farmers of our region. I like how they talk about the land’s connection between the past and present, how you can acknowledge history without pretending that it’s just history, that it’s over.

How does your background in conservation intersect / inform how you think about gardening? 

I think this is changing all the time, as I have gone from publicly funded conservation to working private landscape and horticulture jobs, but it still always reminds me that I am gardening in a specific place. The land affects my gardening and my gardening affects the land, no matter the scale. This is a ~4,000 square foot lot, yeah, but all 4,000 of those square feet are in the Maumee River watershed, which is the largest watershed in the Great Lakes, which is the largest freshwater system on the planet. 

Growing up here, I definitely took the abundance and safety of clean water for granted. I moved away and worked as a biotech in the National Park Service, where the emphasis was often more on preservation — monitoring and protecting remote, fragile landscapes — rather than conservation, how to care for the land and water that people use every day. I came home and started at the county conservation office right around the Lake Erie water crisis, when a toxic algal bloom fed by agricultural fertilizer runoff shut down the drinking water supply for half a million people. The state poured money (is still pouring money, with some success) into incentives for farmers to reduce fertilizer use, restore wetlands, and generally improve the water-filtering capacity of their land.

Obviously, backyard gardening is on a different scale, but for my own yard, and really every property I look at now, I automatically ask the questions that came up in farm conservation and water quality planning: where does water enter this property? Where does it leave? Where can my garden catch and filter runoff, getting it as clean as possible before it enters the stormwater system? I got involved with a local rain gardening program that hosts rain barrel workshops and a great master gardener class focused on green stormwater, and now every time I look at a downspout I’m half-evaluating how it could be redirected into a garden.

Less abstract habits left over from conservation work: whenever I see bare soil I want to cover it up, whether it’s with mulch or plants. I have a lot of rain barrels. I’m always trying to evaluate plants for both how they will look, and what they will do, ecologically, in my garden. I have a maple in my front yard that I wasn’t really excited about when I first moved in — I don’t love their appearance, and I always thought of them in terms of shedding branches and getting their roots into sewer lines. And my maple definitely does both of those things, and it’s annoying! But it also has dry crunchy leaves every fall that make incredible mulch and compost, and has saved me a ton of money on mulch as I get new beds started. It’s a crucial part of my gardening now. 

There are also weeds that I have a higher tolerance for because I know they’re playing a role in the garden as a whole. I was warned when I moved in about the burdock that’s all over our neighborhood, with horror stories of its 6-foot taproots and how people could never completely eradicate it from their yards. And now I have this patch by my driveway that I think of as my discount fertilizer stash: 

That deep taproot means the plant can pull nutrients and water up into its huge leaves, which are also shading out the meaner weeds, and which I can shred for my compost later in the year. The grapevine that I used to feel overwhelmed by is giving me and my neighbor some privacy, and is also going to become stuffed grape leaves in a couple of weeks. A woman in the area who raises caterpillars is coming to get the stinging nettle plants soon, because she’s trying to attract Red Admiral butterflies. Any plants that she leaves behind are getting chopped for nettle tea fertilizer. 

It’s not tidy, and now that I’m looking at this photo I’m not actually sure I want to leave it in, but it’s a working part of my garden as a system. 

There is also plenty of rhetoric, and some practices, from public conservation that I don’t want to inform my gardening. There are plants that are more like a single-use kitchen gadget that I know isn’t all that practical, but I love anyway.  My waffle maker and my peonies don’t serve multiple roles or optimize the space they take up or whatever, but they bring me a lot of joy.

What’s your favorite nook/corner of your garden, and when does it really shine?

There’s a literal fence corner between my neighbor’s yard and mine that is almost to the point where something is blooming from May to September - right now it’s the ninebark, the wild rose in June, a little lull in July, then the woodland sunflower in August and asters in September, which is probably my favorite. It’s not even 10 square feet and it’s not tidy at all, but it’s so full. I love looking at it. 

Here’s the space right now (featuring the rain barrel that I’m definitely going to clean now that I have taken this photo, yikes) and then last September with the asters blooming. I’m going to try to cut and root those suckers off the top of the ninebark this summer.

(Now)

With Asters!

If a friend was starting with a blank slate of a garden, what three plants would you recommend as steady, reliable workhorses? 

-For vegetable gardening, I think legumes are a great place to start - peas if you’re starting in early spring, or beans for the summer. They sprout and grow quickly, will cover a vertical or horizontal space, and often have great flowers. I grow scarlet runner beans for the flowers as much as the beans. Beans are also a good indicator for herbicide residue in soil and compost, which can otherwise be difficult and expensive to test for.

-For flowers, Rudbeckia hirta black-eyed Susan, comes up fast, fills in well, and has thick beautiful foliage for when it’s not flowering. It’s not a long-lived perennial, but it’s a great instant-gratification plant, and by the time it dies out you’ll have either fallen in love with the foliage and know that you want to re-seed it, or you’ll feel ready for something else.

-I think of elderberry as a great introduction to caring about shrubs. A gateway shrub. They grow fast, are forgiving to prune, and come in varieties with different and interesting foliage.

-Extra: I wouldn’t necessarily plant violets, but I think of them as a steady, reliable workhorse in the background! If violets show up in a blank slate garden, I’d let them do their thing as groundcover/early color/defense against meaner weeds.

What are your garden nemeses, and how have you attempted (or failed) to deal with them? (Potential nemeses include: various animals, slugs, morning glory, a specific type of weed, your own pet, etc. etc.) 

I am definitely my own worst nemesis in my garden. Uneven motivation, indecisiveness, and inability to execute my ideas all drive me nuts. It’s gotten better in the last couple of years as I have acknowledged, medicated and learned to work around ADHD, but it’s definitely still frustrating. I appreciate the Garden Study attitude about perfectionism and want to keep it in mind more.

I used to also fight the deer and rabbits, but I am pretty resigned to this sort of thing now: 

Past nemesis. I have surrendered, and am trying to think of it as a cuteness tax.  

I did discover this spring that groundhogs will bite through the heavy corrugated tree protectors I put around baby saplings for a work project, so they might go back on the nemesis list. They can’t even eat the sapling once they’re broken it! It’s just, what, entertainment? 

What still intimidates you about gardening and/or your garden? 

Aesthetics. I’m trying to lay out a new front bed and I get so uncertain about making it look right - and part of the problem is that I couldn’t tell you what I mean by that, really, except that when my sister and mom lay out plants they do look just right, and when I do it, even if I like the design I have in mind, they don’t. Somehow. (My mom has been gardening for 50 years and my sister is a horticulturalist, is how, but that’s hard to remember sometimes.) 

Once the plants are established, I’m usually either happy with how they look, or more confident in what I want and comfortable with moving them around. But a new bed has the same intimidation level as a blank page.

What do you most often think about (or listen to) when you’re out in the garden? 

Sometimes I get stuck thinking about family or work problems, and will look up to realize I’ve been weeding resentfully for an hour and I’m actually miserable. I have been listening to audiobooks more to try and prevent that spiral. A book I have read before makes for good background noise - right now it’s the Hilary Tamar mysteries, which I have loved for years but could never find the complete recordings of until new editions came out this spring.

Sometimes I think out imaginary essays about whatever I’m doing in my garden, or remember bits of nature writing that I have read and loved. (I think about the opening of Braiding Sweetgrass basically every time I see an aster.) But sometimes I get to a place where my mind is just sort of making white noise in the background and I’m thinking in sensations instead. I wish it happened more often. 

What are your future dreams for your garden? 

I’m looking forward to filling in these perennial border beds around my backyard, and making it feel like a more sheltered, private place. (I imprinted hard on The Secret Garden as a kid.) I’m excited to harvest and cook more from the edible ones, especially the hazelnuts, which will be a few years coming if they take off at all. And I’d love to slowly expand out my front beds until there is no more grass, but I want to do it in a way that doesn’t stress out my neighbors. There isn’t an HOA or anything, but our neighborhood has gone through some shit, and for the neighbors I talk to at least, their tidy front lawns are less about control or one-upmanship, and more about feeling present and safe, signs that we all care about this place and we’re going to stick around. 

Finally, this is your chance to crowdsource freely from the Garden Study community. What do you want to ask? 

I ripped out the overgrown yews in my front foundation bed and now I have this big, blank, vertical space.

The before (when I first bought the house)….

And after (this week, with a few plants in and one yew left to go):

I don’t want shrubs or trees that close to the house again, but I’m not sure what to put, instead, for that back layer of the bed. What do you have up against your house? (Dahlias??)

Thank you so much to Jess for sharing their garden story — I can’t wait for the comments section on this one!