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Landscaping for Wildlife—A Complete Garden Makeover
Plants & Gardens News Volume 15, Number 3 | Fall 2000
by Janet Marinelli
One evening this past spring, Bonnie Worme was cleaning up after dinner and preparing to whisk the kids off to bed when her husband, Ed, appeared in the kitchen.
"Come outside," he said, leading her toward the back door of their Long Island, New York, home.
Dusk was beginning to settle over the garden, that magical time when colors blur, familiar shapes become mysterious, and the last birds lingering around the feeder retreat to their roosting spots.
When they got out to the yard, Ed stopped and said, "Listen." Suddenly, the hush that often accompanies nightfall was broken by the faint singing of treefrogs.
It was as if long-lost friends had reappeared. Even today, Bonnie's face lights up as she recalls the loud chorus of frogs and insects that once serenaded the neighborhood at night.
"We used to lie in bed listening," she remembers. "It sounded like a symphony."
After two years of quiet, wildlife is finally returning to the Worme yard, a 61 1/2- by 100-foot property located in a typical suburban neighborhood with comfortable single-family houses surrounded by manicured lawns and a smattering of mature trees. When Ed and Bonnie bought their house in 1986, the back of the property adjoined a small but lush deciduous woodland with hundred-year-old trees, flowering dogwoods, viburnums, and native honeysuckle vines. The patch of forest was an oasis of wildlife habitat amid the turfgrass. The Wormes enjoyed watching a wide variety of birds, frogs, butterflies, and bees, as well as small mammals such as possums. "No matter what time of year," Bonnie says, "there was always something happening—always color, always critters."
The biggest thrill was when hawks showed up. On Christmas morning in 1996, a new video camera under the family Christmas tree was barely out of the box when a red-tailed hawk appeared in the backyard. Bonnie grabbed the camera, ran to the kitchen window, and filmed as the hawk, perched in a tree, dined on a holiday meal of fresh pigeon.
Supplemented by backyard feeders, the woodland nourished large numbers of birds that attracted the hawks the family loved to watch. "The ecosystem was there; the whole circle was there—amongst us!" exclaims Bonnie. "We were a part of the circle."
Unfortunately, as is often the case for the few surviving parcels of open space in suburban neighborhoods, the woodland's days were numbered. The tall trees were razed to make room for a huge house. In moved the new owners, down came the remaining small trees and shrubs, and up went a daunting, six-foot stockade fence. Meanwhile, another new neighbor moved in next door. Down came the mature trees and shrubs adjoining that side of the Worme property, and up went another fence. The Wormes were boxed in by six-foot fences, and most of the wildlife disappeared.
The Wormes tried to compensate for the loss of wildlife habitat. They transplanted mature shrubs to provide the birds with shelter and nesting places. They put up additional birdfeeders. Nevertheless, the frogs were gone, the number of songbirds was greatly diminished, and the family no longer saw red-tailed hawks.
Disappointment turned into hope last year, though, when the Wormes won a garden makeover contest sponsored by Audubon magazine. Last fall, the yard began a transformation back into the wildlife refuge it once was.
For the Birds
"My major objective was to improve the wildlife habitat on the property, especially for birds," says landscape designer Damon Scott of the East Norwich, Long Island-based firm Ireland-Gannon Associates, who created the blueprint for the new plantings. Birds have a handful of basic needs, which are provided for in the landscape plan (view plan). They need safe places for nesting and resting. The new clump of upright junipers against the backyard fence fulfill this important function. Such evergreens—dense with needles year round—are preferred roosting and nesting sites, and birds seek shelter in them during storms.
Birds also require food and water. Consequently, Scott replaced conventional landscape shrubs like forsythia and yew that offer little for wildlife with an assortment of trees and shrubs that provide food in all the seasons. For example, three grape vines were planted against the back fence. These vines, in the landscape designer's words, feature "a beautiful large grape leaf and, in summer, a rack of luscious purple grapes" to which birds flock. The fruits of the newly planted American cranberry bushes and winterberry hollies persist into winter, providing much-needed food for the birds and a visual feast for the family, especially when the bright red berries stand out against the snow. Several types of feeders were located in the garden to supplement the food provided by the plants. Scott also added a couple of "dusting areas," where birds can groom themselves by kicking soil up onto their feathers. The soil here is mulched but left unplanted.
A birdbath with a heater provides the birds with a year-round source of water, and doubles as a place where they can bathe and cool off in the summer. Birds are especially attracted to dripping water, so the birdbath was outfitted with a drip attachment.
Larger birds also drink from the pond that Scott created as the backyard's focal point. The 3- by 5-foot pond is lined with flexible plastic and surrounded by flat stones. Gravel covers the bottom, and the deepest area (about 3 feet) boasts a large rock under which fish can find shelter. The pond is planted with hardy water-lilies and cattails.
The landscape plan also emphasizes mass plantings of shrubs with different sized branches on which birds of different sizes can perch. Among them are red-osier dogwood (a relative of the flowering dogwood already present in the Worme yard), which has bright red winter twigs and grows rapidly into a multi-stemmed thicket, and dwarf fothergilla, another adaptable native shrub with beautiful flowers as well as a dense habit. Two pink-flowering horsechestnuts were located in the backyard to replace some of the lost deciduous trees.
The landscape redesign wasn't confined to the backyard or to birds. In the front yard, Scott enlarged a flower border that runs along the driveway and sweeps around the front of the house, replacing lawn, which is virtually useless to wildlife, with clumps of beautiful wildflowers to provide nectar for butterflies. Among the butterfly magnets are such summer bloomers as purple coneflower, with large, pinkish purple daisy flowers, and coreopsis, with a profusion of cheerful yellow blossoms. In the backyard he located a large planting of gayfeather, a showy wildflower with tall spikes of nectar-rich rose-purple flowers in late summer.
It will take a few years for the trees and shrubs to mature into lush wildlife habitat. Yet in its first winter, the landscape was already paying dividends. The family observed more overwintering birds than ever, including chickadees, nuthatches, titmice, and cardinals galore.
On February 24th, the Wormes were treated to a sight they thought they'd never see again. A red-tailed hawk swooped down to get a good look at a plump mourning dove feeding by the birdbath. The hawk hung around for a while in a nearby tree, then took off. Six days later another hawk appeared. This summer when the wildflowers began blooming, bees and butterflies showed up in force.
The backyard ecosystem is being restored. The circle has been unbroken.
Brooklyn Botanic Garden Director of Publishing Janet Marinelli is editor of BBG's renowned series of quarterly gardening handbooks and the author of Your Natural Home and The Naturally Elegant Home. Janet is a champion of the gardener's role in the preservation of the planet, a philosophy that informs her P&G News column, "Down to Earth." It's a philosophy that also serves as the bedrock for her latest book, Stalking the Wild Amaranth: Gardening in the Age of Extinction. In Stalking the Wild Amaranth, Janet tells of her quest for a landscape art that protects disappearing species, both flora and fauna. It's a gardening journey marked by humor—ecologically sensitive gardening needn't be a dreary affair, Janet insists. "We can do our part," she says, "and still have flair and fun."