Removing invasive species

We've been freeing the slope below our small (urban) mountain house of invasive species.

Or, really, I should say my gardening companion has been doing it, with my encouragement.  It's made a huge difference to date;  first, he tackled the Japanese honeysuckle, English ivy climbing up trees and walls, and now is rooting out English ivy sprawled along the forest slope.   He's all the way down to the intermittent creek in the ravine, and is making great progress along the creek bed.

Enjoying the hard physical labor, he's ventured forth on the lower slopes of adjoining lots, too, clearing trash as well as weeds.  The results have been great. What was a sea of green honeysuckle and ivy in winter is now bare branches and a rich understory of fallen leaves (with bags and bags added from our neighbors' collections).

We're plotting additions of woodland wildflowers to accompany the shrubs and trees that have already been added (all characteristic of cove forests).  That'll be my gardening challenge, as we 'landscape' the paths down to the garden studio (now in the planning stages, but hopefully construction to begin in the new year) and beyond.

It's fun to think about restoring a weedy, overgrown ravine to a semblance of a natural plant community.

Maybe someday, if and when a greenway is established along the creek, folks will talk about the enthusiastic homeowners (the botanists) who transformed the slopes along the creek.

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Restoring nature

Restoring nature isn't easy, nor is it always possible. It's what we need to do, in our communities, gardens, and home landscapes, however.

So, I was glad to read a story in the NY Times today about a significant restoration project in Manhattan.

Nature is resilient, but today, needs help to restore a semblance of what's 'natural.'

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Restoring earth

Geez, that's a pompous sounding title for a post, but I'm thinking about restoration and stewardship of the land where we live. I had an interesting meeting with a group of folks interested in promoting local food and growing your own vegetables today, and it's got me thinking.

My gardening companion and I live in a wonderfully diverse (biologically) part of the world, the Southeastern US, but the area that we live in -- the Piedmont -- has been shaped and dramatically altered by agriculture and logging, but increasingly more recently by development. Sprawling strip malls, cluster developments around intersections, 'big box' stores, supposedly needed supermarkets, fast food places, gas station/minit-marts; frankly, none of these are attractive at all.

Subdivisions aren't much better (I always think of the classic Pete Seeger song about the San Francisco suburb of Daly City-- 'they're all rows of ticky-tacky, and they all look just the same'). And the mega-house subdivisions, ugh.

But hopefully, even in a conservative area, we're considering how to balance land use with preservation of natural areas, and conservation initiatives to support farm and pastureland preservation.

But I do think we need to think about restoring 'earth' -- that is, patches of land that have been abused, abandoned, paved over, turned into lawn, subjected to substandard landscaping, left as vacant lots, etc....into something that's either restorative in terms of habitat for wildlife or productive in terms of food. And all the default plantings in commercial landscapes could be turned into wildlife-supporting habitats with native plants.

Something to dream about.

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