I've just come back from a week in South Carolina where I was helping my daughter collect data for her PhD dissertation. She's studying ecology, and her dissertation involves looking at a species of blueberry that grows naturally both in bottomland habitats, where it gets flooded regularly, and in upland sites, where it's often very dry. She's hoping to find out if the plant is developing adaptations that are particular to each site, and whether it is cross breeding across sites.

In the last three years she's taken cuttings from plants in both sites and in what are called ecotonal areas, areas that bridge two ecosystems (upland and bottomland). She's identified each of these cuttings so that she'll know its source, rooted them, taken the rooting cuttings back to Ithaca, New York, where she's studying, spent the winter subjecting them to all sorts of lab experiments, and then returned many of them to South Carolina where she plants them again, so that she's got upland plants in upland, ecotonal, and bottomland sites, bottomland plants in all three, and so on. Each year she repeated this, adding new tasks: cross pollinating plants and then collecting their seeds and sprouting them, then planting them out. She's also collecting leaves from the plants so she can analyze their DNA. Thousands of blueberry plants. Each one, she measure and records. This all adds up to thousands of hours of tedious work. I never realized before what hard work science is.

My part of this hard work involved walking with her through her sites and writing down the measurements, or mortalities, as she located each plant and measured the diameter of each shoot and the height of the tallest one. "2.5," she'd call out, "1.7, 0.3. Height is.... 27!" And I'd write it down and go on to the next plant. We did this for 8 hours every day, and then we'd go back to the cabin and she'd go on for another hour or two. 7 days of this. On the last two days we were working as fast as we could so we could get all the information recorded before we both had a to leave.

While it was great to get to spend so much time with her, the work itself was tedious, boring, and, when I started helping with the leaf collection, physically difficult. Walk a few feet, bend down to collect leaves, put them in a coin envelope, straighten up, walk a few feet, bend over... You get the idea. You can't sit on the ground, or even kneel, because of the chiggers.

But the place is knockout beautiful. It's an Audubon preserve, about 40 miles north of Charleston, called the Francis Beidler Forest. If you're in the area, make a point of going to see it. The bottomland is all Baldcypress – with those fabulous knees – and Sabal Palmetto, and the upland is Turkey Oak, another oak I don't remember the name of, Long Leaf Pine (which when it first sprouts is as funny a plant as you'll see), Tulip Tree, Sweet Gum, and Musclewood (one of my favorite understory trees). We canoed to her bottomland sites, and on the way we saw alligators, turtles, Anhingas, Great Blue Herons, and Kingfishers. I really love it there.

All this gave me a lot of time to think about gardening.

And here's some of what I was thinking: In the earliest history of gardens, the garden was a place walled off from the dangers of the wilderness, where people could go to refresh their spirits and feel safe. The gardens were about enclosure, shade, and water. Islamic gardens, based in part on the oldest garden models, are among the most beautiful in the world, with central rills and shady areas for sitting. (When British tourists first went to the middle east, they didn't recognize these as gardens, because for English people, the garden is a site for walking, not sitting.) Because water is so precious in dry countries, these gardens required considerable effort and they were prized oases. In later history, gardens lost some of their walled qualities, as the distant prospect got incorporated into the garden design. But to prize the view means feeling more comfortable about what's out there; mountains, forests, savannahs, and plains – and even pastureland – became picturesque, not scary.

Today we've inverted the relationship between nature and civilization: we have to wall off the wilderness so we don't ruin it, and our gardens in some ways attempt to bring a little bit of nature back into city and suburban areas which have been paved and built so that their original ecosystem is unrecognizable.

Unfortunately, all too often, the nature we bring into our yards isn't native to the place at all. Some conversations we've had in the gardening group lately bring that into focus: we are imprinted with the landscapes of our youth and we want to replicate them where we are (e.g., lilacs in Florida) but they just won't grow. In my case, I grew up in New Jersey, and I love rolling hills, rhododendrons, and flowering dogwood. Sucks to be me in Chicago, right? Flat, flat land, alkaline soil, and too cold for Cornus florida. So what to do? I could continue to plant flowers from my childhood, which I did for many years with frustrating results. I could try to find substitute plants that are similar (but what's like a rhododendron?). Or I could adopt that 60's philosophy: If you can't be with the one you love, love the one you're with.

So I spend time doing prairie restoration in the forest preserves in Cook County, and through that I've learned to love the plants that are native to this place – Pagoda Dogwood (the flowers aren't as nice as the eastern cousin, but the form of the tree is gorgeous), Red Twigged Dogwood, which flowers and fruits all summer long, bringing birds to my back yard, the Hickories and Oaks of our native forests, the coneflowers, black-eyed susans, Hydrangeas, Joe-Pye Weeds, and Butterfly Weeds. I've also studied horticulture and become enamored of non-native plants that will perform well in our climate, and I'm certainly no purist about natives. But the native plants have associations with soil organisms, insects, butterflies, birds, and mammals, that increase the biological diversity of the whole area. So I try to focus on them.

This is what leads me to consider the possibility that home gardeners could also become part of restoring diversity to our lands. We all know that habitat loss is pressuring lots of species to the point of diminished populations. Would it be possible to string together enough home gardens to improve migratory flyways? if we bring back the native associations will that help to boost populations of endangered butterflies? If we compost and stay away from chemicals in the soil, can we help improve the diversity of soil organisms? Can we, in other words, help to bring a bit of wilderness into our cities and suburbs, can we become part of the solution instead of part of the problem?

I'd love to have this conversation with any of you who are interested: how can we make gardening more of a 'green' activity? How can we contribute to increasing biodiversity, decreasing energy consumption, conserving water, etc?

Depending on what I hear from you all, I'd like to continue thinking out loud about these questions, and I can intersperse those blogs with more practical ones like choosing bulbs or winterizing the garden. But I want to reflect what you're interested in, so please comment on these questions or contact me directly.

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