Gardening Nature’s Way: Bringing native plants into your yard

On a late afternoon in May, Pam Durrant, her husband David, and I watched a Baltimore oriole adding to its nest in a sugar maple overhanging the stone patio at their farm.

The oriole was tucking a long piece of grass into the nest. David noted that the long grass was essential for the nest but couldn’t be procured in a closely manicured yard where the grass would be kept too short. As many Harvard Press readers know the Durrants from their column on birding, this seemed like a perfect transition to our topic, native plants.

Pam Durrant. (Courtesy photo)

Pam Durrant has worked as one half of Durrant Design in Harvard since the 1970s, as well as having served for many years on the boards of organizations such as the Harvard Conservation Trust and Native Plant Trust. She also grows organically almost all of their year’s supply of vegetables. Durrant is an excellent resource on native plants, although she says she started out from a background of general landscape design. “I’m a plant person—I just like plants,” she emphasized while explaining that she thinks of herself as someone who continually learns about native plants rather than as an expert.

Although reluctant to claim expertise, Pam readily shares her knowledge—for example, by leading guided walks on conservation land for the Garden Club of Harvard. In fact, any conversation with Pam about native plants is punctuated by getting close to the subjects, turning over a leaf, or pushing foliage aside to check out a stem.

She notes that when readers are out walking on conservation land or along the road, in early June, they may observe the following native plants in various stages of bloom: wild geraniums, Solomon’s seal, daisy fleabane, wild strawberry, mapleleaf viburnum (in shady oak woods), arrowwood viburnum (at the edge of woods), and silky dogwood, among others. She recommends iNaturalist to help identify a plant and encourages readers to do a little research to understand the plant.

Hiking the Appalachian Trail in Maine in the 1980s—in particular, observing the high-elevation alpine-zone grassland in the Mahoosuc Range—struck a chord with Pam that continues to resonate into the present. She notes how critical it is to observe native plants growing in their habitats in order to understand how they may look and behave in your garden; additionally, readers may find inspiration from the work of talented horticulturalists displayed at Garden in the Woods in Framingham and Norcross Wildlife Sanctuary in Wales. Besides appreciating their beauty, Pam notes the environmental benefits of native plants—for example, they sustain more diverse birds and pollinators than do non-native ornamentals and are better adapted to their environments, and so use less water and grow well organically.

Learning how to identify native plants growing naturally in your yard or public spaces takes work, but the art of observation is rewarding. Pam explained that, along with former Bromfield science teacher and botany Ph.D. Dorothy Andrews and conservationist Bob Reed, she used to go out weekly in all weather, armed with Newcomb’s Wildflower Guide. Their group worked through the printed dichotomous keys to categorize plant characteristics and arrive at identifications, while observing tree buds in the winter and blooms in the growing season. Pam also took classes through the Native Plant Trust, and has worked as one of its plant conservation volunteers who monitor rare plant populations across the Northeast.

There is no end to what you can learn about plants, Pam emphasizes. “It is good to understand what you don’t know as well as what you do know.”

    
Catherine Warner is an enthusiastic amateur gardener who got started by following her dad around the garden and later worked on an organic farm while in college. After a detour as an academic historian, she now stays at home with her son and serves as a member of both the Garden Club of Harvard and the Community Resiliency Working Group.