Tag: nativeplants

Announcing the Winners in the 2024 Native Garden Contest

Thirteen delightful native gardens, four winners!

Once again, members of the Native Garden Contest workgroup were amazed at the native gardens our neighbors are creating and caring for in the greater Towson community. This year, 13 gardens were submitted for our Native Garden Contest, and each one was filled with diverse native trees, shrubs and plants that created an oasis for pollinators and wildlife, and in many cases, addressed problems with storm water runoff.

Photos of some of the gardens entered into this year’s contest.

As we have in the past, we divided the gardens into four categories: Homegrown National Park® is for yards that approach or have exceeded 70% native plants, and also have made strides in reducing the lawn. Gaining Ground is for gardens where homeowners have been making significant progress to raise the percentage of native plants and still have room left to expand in the future. Breaking Ground is for new native plant gardens that may be fresh but are sure to make an impact! Seeds of Change is a category of special recognition for gardens that impact both the ecosystem and the greater community.  

Homegrown National Park®

Rujuta Narurkar and her husband, Rahul Bharadwaj, won the Homegrown National Park category for their gardens, which are designed to handle storm water in the property surrounding their Lutherville home. They received a grant from the Gunpowder Valley Conservancy and with their help, installed a backyard rain garden in 2021. Last fall, they installed a second garden in their deeply sloped front yard. This garden is designed to handle runoff during storms through a series of swales built of wood chips, which slow rainwater. Shopping at the local Kollar and Herring Run nurseries, they dug in attractive native plant species to absorb and filter pollutants.

The front yard is filled with flowering native plants, and three swales constructed of wood chips slow the flow of storm water to allow the garden to absorb as much rain as possible during storms.

Gaining Ground

Olivia Cumming and her husband, Eitan Stromberg, began their native plant journey when they transformed the “hellstrip” between the sidewalk and street three years ago. Now it waves with 2-foot-high Shenandoah switchgrass interspersed with New England asters. Next they removed more than half of the lawn and dug out non-native nandina, liriope and Japanese holly in front of the house, replacing them with native shrubs including clethra, viburnum, witch hazel and grey owl creeping juniper. A slow-growing tupelo (black gum) tree—planted as part of the GTA’s program with Bluewater Baltimore—and a mature American holly provide habitat for birds. Two curving stone pathways bisect the front yard, where Olivia estimates she has planted about 50 natives in the past 3 years. The front yard of their Anneslie home attracts pollinators as well as neighbors who see her well-designed beds – plus her new Bay Wise certification sign – and ask how they can get started with native plant gardening. 

Masses of flowering native plants and grasses now cover two thirds of the front yard.

Breaking Ground

Jane Anthon decided back in 2022 that she would no longer use pesticides or fertilizers in her Anneslie home, and in 2023 she began adding in native plants. Today, her backyard is home to a surprising diversity of native plants and shrubs, including brown-eyed Susan, chokeberry, hibiscus, winterberry, obedient plant, goldenrod, penstemon, cardinal flower, Joe Pye weed, coreopsis, coneflower, false indigo, and inkberry. She has several water features in her yard for the birds who share her yard. Because she frequently hosts family gatherings where children play ball and yard games, she’s keeping her back lawn for now, but continues to find native plants and tuck them into beds along the perimeter and in a few small beds she’s created in the center of her yard.

Swamp rose mallow and Brown eyed-Susans in front of the garden shed.

Seeds of Change

The native plants in the bioretention garden at St. Pius Catholic Church routinely attract wildlife. Even more impressive, however, is the unseen work going on beneath the black-eyed Susans, purple coneflowers, goldenrod, fleabane and swamp mallow blooming in the heat.  The garden filters stormwater from a half-acre parking lot, capturing pollutants like grease and oil from vehicles. The water slowly seeps into the ground rather than rushing into nearby Chinquapin Run, a tributary of Herring Run, and then on to the Chesapeake Bay. Constructed in 2016 with grants from Bluewater Baltimore and the Chesapeake Bay Trust, and designed by Cityscape Engineering, maintaining the bioretention garden (mainly weeding out thistles and other invasives) is a labor of love for the volunteers of the Social Action Ministry at St. Pius.

A view of a section of the bioretention garden at St. Pius, which can store than 20,000 gallons of water.

Special Recognition

Kay McConnell has gardened in her home near Lake Roland for more than 30 years and has learned to pay attention to how water and sun move across her wooded property to help her choose the native plants that now thrive there. She believes in repurposing materials, such as fallen tree logs and stones, and loves native grasses and ferns. She designed the native gardens at Friends School, and has helped many Towson-area gardeners start the process of designing native gardens in their own yards.

A hillside garden in spring.

To see all of the finalist gardens in the 2024 contest, please see our contest webpage at https://www.nativegardencontest.com/2024-contest

The use of Homegrown National Park® is used with permission from Homegrown National Park. Please check out this website and join a nationwide effort to restore our environment through sustainable garden practices in our own yards.
https://homegrownnationalpark.org/

A special thank you to all of the gardeners who have entered our contest over the years. We wish we could give each one of you an award for all of your hard work to create the beautiful and sustaining yards you maintain in our community.

Removing Invasive Vines at Loyola Blakefield

by Ray Heil

As a practicing landscape architect, I’ve planted thousands of trees in my career.  Planting a tree is always a hopeful experience; we’ve always understood that if we can assure that the new tree is established after the first 3 years, the odds are good that it will continue to grow successfully and confer multiple benefits on the community.  But this is no longer true, due to the proliferation of aggressive invasive vines in the urban and suburban areas of Maryland.  We’re all familiar with stories about kudzu, “the vine that ate the South,” which is not a major problem in central Maryland, but what about English Ivy, Porcelain Berry, and Oriental Bittersweet, which are “devouring” our local trees?  You can see these invasive vines everywhere along local roads covering our trees and inhibiting their growth.  Depending on the size and vigor of the tree, these aggressive vines can be fatal.     

Volunteers removing invasive vines from trees
An example of invasive vines on mature trees. These vines were removed by Green Towson Alliance volunteers at Blakehurst Retirement Community in 2019.

    

Towson’s Loyola Blakefield High School, despite its continual growth, still enjoys stands of native tree species along the peripheries of its campus, and in protected stream buffer areas. As a member of Green Towson Alliance, I have been actively removing invasive vines from native trees in parks and private properties for a number of years.  For three years, Loyola Blakefield has invited me to talk about invasive vine removal and to lead field work with its students.

In August, I worked with 45 sophomores and their teachers during orientation week.  My in-class presentation included two short videos: on the importance of native plants with Doug Tallamy, and how to remove invasive vines from trees. (You can access these videos on Youtube.)

After introducing myself and the Green Towson Alliance, I tried to engage the students with questions, like which county do you live in? (Most were from Baltimore County, some from the city, but 4 other counties were represented.)  I told them that I am concerned about the world they will inherit, and about how emissions of greenhouse gases, particularly carbon dioxide, are forming a “blanket” in the earth’s atmosphere that is holding in the sun’s heat and warming the planet.

I provided a simplified description of how a tree takes in carbon dioxide, combines it with water and sunshine to create energy for the tree to grow, and gives off oxygen, making it possible for us to breathe.  I discussed the important role plants play in providing oxygen to support other life forms, pointing out that during the very early years of the earth’s evolution, there wasn’t enough oxygen in the atmosphere to support animal life, until plants appeared.

I described the particular importance of plants native to central Maryland in supporting the native insects and birds with which they co-evolved, and ultimately, in supporting us.  So, removing invasive vines from native trees is something we can all do to mitigate climate change and address the decline of native insect and bird species.

Photo courtesy of Doug Tallamy

I asked if any of them want to be engineers. A few students raised their hands, and I asked if any of them had ever thought about the possibility of creating a machine that would take in carbon dioxide and release oxygen to the atmosphere?  Some thought that was possible.  Then I pointed out that we already have a “machine” that does just that: the tree. 

I asked why they think it is 5 degrees cooler on the Loyola campus than it is in downtown Baltimore. This led to a brief discussion of the heat island effect in cities and the benefits of trees in cooling the atmosphere.

Finally, I pointed out that my generation has made major mistakes in the way we have treated the natural world because we don’t understand it very well. As students, they have a great opportunity now to learn about the natural world in depth, so they can preserve their home planet for themselves and future generations. 

After a brief review of the tools we would use in the field, and of what vine species we would be removing (mostly English Ivy this year) and which to avoid (poison ivy), we trooped out to the stream buffer on campus, which is “protected” from cutting but not from invasive vines.  Fortunately, I had cut English Ivy that covered a large white oak there last year, so I used that tree to demonstrate what we hoped to accomplish, and to point out that the ivy, while dead on the tree’s trunk, had started growing again at the base and would have to be removed from the roots.

Quiet but attentive in the classroom, the students were active in the field, and worked almost 2 hours removing ivy vines from trees.  I worked along with them but was exhausted after 60 minutes.  Their teachers kept the process going. 

I hope to be invited again next year to work with Loyola students.  They seem to be increasingly receptive to our message.  They are the future, and they are inheriting a world in profound need of ecological restoration.   

Ray Heil is a Professional Landscape Architect, and a Certified Maryland Master Naturalist. He is on the Executive Committee for the Green Towson Alliance, and is a Lead for the Homegrown National Park Workgroup.