Gardening with native plants helps us connect

There are many reasons for gardening with native trees and shrubs. Perhaps the most significant force at work is our desire to feel closer to nature. As Janet Marinelli points out in “Stalking the Wild Amaranth: Gardening in the Age of Extinction,” many of us feel compelled to go beyond creating gardens that simply look like nature and are striving to create gardens that act like nature as well, gardens that provide suitable habitat for wildlife, that recycle resources, that foster biodiversity. In short, we are interested in creating sustainable landscapes, in the marriage of ecology and landscape design.

Growing native shrubs and trees is a decision to be intimately involved with the landscape, for much of their beauty is subtle. Even the commercial successes have elusive qualities that we miss unless we walk into the garden, look closely, stick our noses or eyes in the right place, in the right season. For example, you must look closely to notice the bronze freckles spattered on the golden autumn leaves of summersweet clethra (Clethra alnifolia), a native species popular for its sweetly fragrant summer flowers.

I have been labeled as something close to addled for suggesting the landscape use of speckled alder (Alnus incana ssp. Rugosa), an aggressive colonizing wetland shrub without brilliant spring or summer flowers, without showy fruit or handsome fall foliage. But I do praise this plant, particularly when returning from a favorite winter walk where alders grow at roadside, their long, drooping, purple-brown catkins covered with snow. It always brings a smile to see such rich color amid the bleakness of winter, and I never tire of it.

Then one early spring day, the snow melted by bright sunlight, the color of the catkins changes to more of a yellow-brown as the first grains of pollen appear. Winter in Maine would feel incomplete without the catkins of speckled alder, both the showy male catkins and the smaller female catkins that later will become small persistent woody cones. Speckled alder is the only common New England native shrub that displays catkins of both sexes on winter twigs.

Named for the white, warty lenticels on its bark, speckled alder can be found growing in colonies along the banks of streams and ponds, in low, wet openings in the woods, in swamps and bogs. And this is where it should be grown in managed landscapes, naturalized in wet areas with willows (Salix spp.), nannyberry viburnum (Viburnum lentago), and gray birch (Betula populifolia). While extremely tolerant of flooding, it is intolerant of shade and should be planted in open areas.

Alders are important members of wetland communities. Before they turn woody, the female catkins produce tiny winged nuts that are a favorite food of red polls and other songbirds, waterfowl, small mammals and deer. Alders are nitrogen-fixing plants capable of adding up to 5 grams of nitrogen per square meter of topsoil per year. Their roots anchor the soil and prevent bank erosion. And they enrich our winter walks.

Growing native shrubs in our managed landscapes allows us to feel an intimacy with the diminishing natural world. Walking slowly through the natural garden, we can let the common names of these plants evoke their subtle beauty: meadowsweet, steeplebush, beaked hazelnut, sweetgale, speckled alder. For many of us, living with these plants instills a sense of hope. Maybe it’s not too late to feel connected to nature.

Send queries to Gardening Questions, P.O. Box 418, Ellsworth 04605, or to reesermanley@shead.org. Include name, address and telephone number.