Rinda West Designs - Garden Sanctuaries for Chicago
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Gardens and Ecosystems

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. We are imprinted with the landscapes of our youth and we want to replicate them where we are 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.

I have spent 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?