Summer 1999

[TEXT ARCHIVE WEB-PUBLISHED MARCH 2002.
ORIGINAL PRINT PUBLICATION DATE: SUMMER 1999.]

Purple Maniacs Welcome!

By Glenda Daniel and Jerry Sullivan

Consider two models for your relationship with your yard. In one model, you are an absolute dictator. In the other, you enter into a dialogue with the plants and animals that share your property. We can call the first of these the Burpee model and the second, the Chicago Wilderness model.

The Burpee model — and we could just as well call it the Ortho model or the Springhill model — offers you large and beautiful flowers in familiar and absolutely predictable shapes and colors. You fill out your order form confident that the seeds, bulbs, and naked root transplants you select will — if you treat them right — perform exactly as the breathless prose in the catalog promises (minus an adjective or two). Your daffodils will take the winds of April with beauty. Your peonies will enrich the heavy air of June. Your mums will reach their peak just as cool nights signal the approach of fall and winter. For as long as these plants live, they will act their parts on order, filling their allotted space with color in their several seasons.

Yet your relationship with them is a bit one-dimensional. The ecosystem is beautiful but shallow.

In thinking about the Chicago Wilderness model, we might start with the story of the migrating milkweed told to us by Skokie residents John and Jane Balaban and then repeated in various forms by every natural gardener we talked to. Native plants — plants grown from seeds taken from the wild — like to move around. You plant them tidily in a flower bed. They grow and flower richly. But next year, they sprout four feet away in the middle of the lawn. For John and Jane, it was a purple milkweed, a respectable plant of open woodlands and savannas. The first year, it grew where they planted it. The second year, it grew along the other edge of the sidewalk, and the third year it was out in the lawn. We are familiar with plants spreading by rhizomes, but we tend to assume that the original plant will stay put while its daughters grow around it. The migrating milkweed just packed up and went. There was no sign of it in its original home.

The plants in the catalogs are like golden retrievers. The purple milkweed has a bit of the coyote in its genes. It moves; it may decide to take a year off now and then, remaining underground for a whole season. A delicate forest bloom like the wood anemone — freed from competition in the protected environment of your yard — becomes an aggressive producer of runners. Every year you will find yourself cutting back the wood anemone to keep it in bounds. Instead of beautiful but predictable, your yard is suddenly beautiful and surprising. You watch and learn.

Wild columbines are spreading nicely through the minuscule patch of semi-shaded ground that we have designated our savanna/woodland garden.

This year we discovered a small columbine sprout forcing its way up through a crack in the sidewalk that borders that garden. Other people may have dandelions and purslane and similar low-rent weeds growing in the cracks in their sidewalks. Our sidewalk weed is one of the most beautiful native wildflowers in the Midwest.

If you let some pieces of the wilderness into your yard, others may follow. Jim and Jean DeHorn, who have surrounded their bungalow on the northwest side of Chicago with more than 30 different species of native prairie and woodland plants, tell of the sphinx moth they saw hovering around the prairie flowers in the front yard and the tiny hawk moth they found last year feeding on — and perhaps pollinating — the evening primroses that grow along the edge of the alley.

One day Jean discovered an unusual butterfly feeding on nectar from her wildflowers. The field guides told her it was a Milbert's tortoiseshell. She thought she had something rare and extraordinary. When she told scientists at the Chicago Academy of Sciences about it, their response was: "Yes, there were a lot of those through here in the past few days."

You could take that response as disappointing. The amazing rarity turns out to be commonplace. Jean took it as evidence that her yard was hooking her up with a larger ecosystem. Movements on a regional scale are an accumulation of movements in small places, and her yard was one of those small places.

The Balabans report a range of unusual pollinators including colorfully named wasps like purple maniacs and great golden diggers. New pests also appear, like the milkweed beetles that somehow located the one backyard in all of Skokie that had suitable food plants. One year, a flock of goldfinches — the only ones John and Jane have ever seen in their backyard — arrived just in time to gobble up all the developing seeds in the flowers of their false dandelion (Krigia biflora).

Most gardeners are interested in attracting birds to their yards. The main contribution your garden can make to the health of our bird populations is as a spring and fall oasis, a temporary stopping point, a source of food and shelter on the long journey of migration. Planting flowering shrubs and trees is a proven strategy. They don't need to be native to work. The two sour cherry trees in our backyard proved to be magnets for orioles, warblers, and even hummingbirds during spring migration when the trees were in flower. Native viburnums, hawthorns, and dogwoods offer spring flowers and fall berries for passing birds.

There is an air of eccentricity that clings to the idea of natural gardens. Some communities even have laws that require that every house be surrounded by the sort of regimented landscapes that demand heavy annual applications of chemicals to maintain their uniformity and sterility. In the minds of the people who created those laws, the natural garden seems to be associated with houses hidden among tall weeds and rank shrubs where hermits live with armies of house cats.

But most "wild" yards have nature and civilization mixed. Lawns, after all, are fine places for volleyball games. Our own lawn shares space with the World's Smallest Prairie, a patch of ground measuring 10 by 15 feet. Through the summer it entertains us with two species of blazing star, compass plant, wild bergamot, butterfly weed, prairie dock, big bluestem, Culver's root, and northern dropseed. Entertains us, too, with an assortment of butterflies and bumble bees. But in early spring, when we desperately need some greenery and some big showy flowers, the prairie is dormant. At that time of year, the World's Smallest Prairie sprouts daffodils and tulips straight from the Burpee catalog.

Aesthetically, natural gardens broaden the palette, introducing new colors and textures to our artificial landscapes. Practically, they may be difficult to propagate but, once established, they can thrive with much less tending than the domestics require. Plants whose genes have been burnished by 10,000 Midwestern summers can get through an August dry spell unwatered, and our native Rosa carolina can handle January without the covering that hybrid tea roses often require.

Most natural gardeners were inspired to try to recreate a bit of prairie or woodland on their doorsteps after looking at the beauty of our natural areas. John and Jane Balaban got interested on woodland walks where they photographed wildflowers. Jean DeHorn can trace her interest to a single talk by Bret Rappaport, president of the Wild Ones Natural Landscapers, Ltd., at a conference on attracting wildlife in urban areas. "We had already stopped putting pesticides on our lawn, because we were feeding birds," she said. "So our lawn wasn't looking too great, anyway. Jim had suggested that we either re-sod it or expand the flower garden. I hurried home that day to get there before he started laying sod."

Most neighbors of city wildflower gardeners are fairly tolerant and even somewhat interested. Jean DeHorn said one neighbor tries to walk by the DeHorn's house when running errands because it looks different every time she passes.

This reaction isn't universal, of course. The first year of Jean's garden, a woman stopped by to watch her weeding for a few minutes. Finally she shook her head sympathetically and said, "It will take you a long time to get rid of all that."

Sources:
The following is a partial list of some local, well-known nurseries supplying native plants and seeds:

For advice, counsel, and wild plant fellowship, contact:
Wild Ones Natural Landscapers, Ltd.
c/o Bret Rappoport
180 N. LaSalle Street
Chicago, Illinois 60601
(312) 845-5116

Glenda Daniel, director of the Urban Program at the Openlands Project, is married to Jerry Sullivan, a naturalist with the Forest Preserve District of Cook County. Their garden lies at the northeastern corner of Chicago's 40th Ward.