Recently we received notice that our garden at the Joyce L. Sobel Family Resource Center on San Juan Island was awarded honors in the inaugural Design Futurist Awards from Pacifc Horticulture. Garden designers from the entire west coast region were invited to send in their entries for modest sized gardens. There were two co-winners of the top prize and we were one of 5 additional honors. It is quite a thing to be honored in this way by a very esteemed jury. We are in the amazing company of other designers, landscape architects and passionate plantspeople. The judges were “blown away” by the results achieved on a tight budget in a remote location and some of the comments were: “Extraordinary.” “I just was really moved by this one.” “They were very creative, doing a lot with little.” As Juror Daniel J. Hinkley put it “the value of the future impact of such an award: at best, this kind of recognition inspires even better work in the future, from non-award-winners and the award winners themselves to live up to such recognition.” This is certainly something I take to heart and will endeavor to make even better gardens that support biodiversity, address climate crisis, showcase native plants and engage human beings for the well-being of all. Please read below for more about our garden.
As Pacific Horticulture says “We envision a resilient world dependent on the thoughtful cultivation of plants”. I do too.
A Sunday afternoon, late September 2021, alone in the garden I was peering at the sandy ground and the still small plants that are almost invisible. They were hanging on after one of the hottest summers, having sent roots down early in the previous late winter, cool spring, finding their way to moisture and microbes, friendly fungi. I noticed a young person with a younger person in a stroller on the sidewalk. Sundays in this part of town are nearly vacant of human traffic except for the older couple on their recumbant bikes, reliable in their kind words and cheerful ways. These younger people had fixed their soft gazes on the sticky buds and flowers of the gumweed that was having its moment of yellow glory; the yellow season had arrived. The gunweed was alive on that sunny afternoon with leaf cutter bees whose bellies were velvety gold with gathered pollen. I said “You are welcome to touch them. The buds are sticky. The bees are friendly”. And they did, and they smiled. “We love this garden” they said quietly almost hushed.
leaf cutter bee on Grindelia (gumweed)
In the middle of 2020 I was invited to design a pair of gardens around the newly enlarged Joyce L. Sobel Family Resource Center on San Juan Island. Jennifer Armstrong, director of the center, had the vision that creating something beautiful to surround it would greatly enhance the lives of all those who pass through and work within the center that provides so much care to our human community.
We began to imagine these gardens as places also filled with the more-than-human lives that share our land, that are the lives we humans depend upon and bringing much needed joy to all of us. We imagined them as places to grow less common native flowering perennials, bulbs and shrubs that support this biodiversity in myriad ways and to encourage other gardeners to do the same.
It will continue to change over time but the first three years have shown us the potential and I look forward to engaging with this garden and all of the people who support us, inquire and question and learn as we grow and observe.
When I became aware of the Design Futurist Award that Pacific Horticulture announced in the first part of this year I knew that sending in our garden was the right thing to do; why not share our experience and encourage similar gardens for communities in our region?
I could not envision that we would be awarded something though I did feel the garden beautifully answered many of the criteria outlined in the application; supporting biodiversity, community well being, sustainablity in changing times. But our garden was small, scruffy, different, we had little money, I was a locally focused horticulturist who mostly tells people not to do anything, and in an isolated community trying something I had seen no one else try: planting exclusively PNW native perennials in a similar fashion to so-called prairie planting or “new perennial movement” plantings elsewhere in the world. I wondered if we could create a garden that would be seen as beautiful in enough conventional ways and supply the benefits for our local insects that native perennials do best. I also revived a method I started to use in the first years of this millennium: sand and gravel as planting bed and mulch, because it works superbly and suddenly the wave was growing for that method too.
The overriding motivations for this garden were to create and nurture as many life forms as we could while being a beautiful place for people too, to use as little fossil fuel, inputs and plastic as possible in its creation and maintenance, and to care for it with biodiversity and health at the forefront of our minds.
As with any garden that is as full of different plant species as this one the progression of it will be dynamic and we are starting to see that already in the moving populations of plants as they spread by seed, colonize and shift and in some cases, disappear.
The number of flying insects has been tremendously exciting and affirming: this oasis in a sea of mown grass and non-native shrubs is a haven for those insects, and birds, that until now had little to forage upon, shelter and reproduce in. Next year we have plans to perform a monthly “bio-diversity audit” to ascertain just who is using and living in our little garden, but a brief count on a cloudy mid August day, past the peak pollen and nectar period, yielded over 20 species of bee, fly and wasp present in the garden; not even counting the moths, beetles and butterflies . By planting native thistles we have goldfinches in the later summer, by planting native asters and fleabane we have hoards of songbirds foraging for seeds for their winter fat. We have sand nesting wasps (harmless to humans) and clouds of bees who have found the bare sandy ground for their broods. We have raccoons then feeding on those very broods. Mown grass is a wasteland. Let us say that over and over again. Good for ball games, bad for most life on earth. This garden is a small voice in the chorus singing of how planting native flowering perennials can bring insect populations to your garden easily!
Going forward we plan to implement our thoughts on involving children in the garden with tea and art making, crafts, insect bingo, pollinator meet and greets, flower crowns and all other manner of ideas. We hope to be hosting tours and inspirational talks for gardeners to take what we have learned and try it at home.
This garden is completely open to deer, raccoons, dogs, cats, leaves from the neighboring parking lot strip planting, foot traffic and trash. The only plant I take particular care to protect is the Camassia and I caged the oak and other small trees and shrubs for the time being. The deer do love the camas especially, just as humans do, and I spray them with something unpalatable so we get to see them bloom. Otherwise the plants are rarely browsed even though I know the deer families are present at night because I can see the footprints clearly in the sand.
Watering is something that I did in the extreme “heat dome” of the summer of 2021. As it was the first year for the plants I did what I felt was needed to help them survive. Occasionally I will hand water some of the more thirsty plants when very dry and this is to keep the garden in as many good graces as possible as many of our local residents are still learning to see it as a garden and not a patch of rough ground and weeds during the driest times when some plants will go dormant and when we leave the dead stems and seed heads standing all winter long for use as shelter by insects and birds. This past summer the plants have matured enough to make this watering less needed. Eventually I foresee zero need for water as the plant community shifts and those that really cannot go without are edited or just fade away as the plant community changes and adapts.
One day the Garry oak will tower over the small meadow and the manzanita and arbutus will make spaces of dry shrubland adding to the scene but for the near future we will continue to nurture our flowering perennials, grasses and bulbs for the joy of humans and the benefit of all creatures.
Please don’t hesitate to contact me if any more information is desired, a tour wanted or seeds wished for.
Please see my website “journal” page for detailed lists of plants used. Soon there will be a dedicated page on the site just for this garden. Thank you for reading.
www.wildcatkin.com 360-317-6795
references: https://pacifichorticulture.org/articles/and-the-design-futurist-award-goes-to/
http://www.wildcatkin.com/journal
Orcas Island Garden Club lecture archive: https://www.orcasislandgardenclub.org/presentations.html#2022February 16th 2022