The Plants Are Coming Home
Partnering with natives to crowd out invasives.
The land comes back to me in waves of beaked panicgrass and patches of false nettles rippling downslope toward their former marshy home. It speaks its name through the calls of redwing blackbirds, lost to this place decades ago but returning now to the bluestems, goldenrods, blackberries, bayberries, and swamp willows. It rings in my ears on warmer evenings, taking on the voices of spring peepers and American toads descending upon their natal pools. It flashes its sparkling blasts from the pasts through the language of fireflies who’ve lately expanded their haunts even to the front yard adjacent to the road.
To people who visit, it might seem like a subtle return. But for someone who has watched and felt and heard the longings of this little patch in central Maryland as closely as I have, it is a gathering of strength after years of suppression. It emanates from every niche and inch of this stretch of soil and water that was desecrated in the mid-70s for development. After my husband and I moved here in 2000, the messages grew stronger with each pokeweed, boneset, sumac, milkweed and walnut that sprouted rebelliously out of the dusty lawn: This is not your land. I cannot be owned. You can drain me, fill me in, build on me, but one day I will be back. And I will call all my friends back too.
It didn’t take long for me to become a willing co-conspirator, working together with the land to regain lost ground. As the native plants rose up out of the aging turf that once smothered the 2.23 acres surrounding our home, I tried to learn their stories. Where had they come from? Were they always here in the seedbank, or did they arrive on the feet, feathers, fur and droppings of animals? Why did they pick a particular spot to sprout in? Who did their leaves and flowers feed? Who did they associate with? What did they need me to do (or not do) to help them thrive? Most intriguing of all, what would their role be in rebuilding habitat?
As a movement, we native plant people spend significant time pondering the origins, habits, and harms caused by invasive species. We debate removal methods and obsess over the appearances of each new sprout of stiltgrass or twining stem of Japanese honeysuckle. But how often do we get to know the forgotten local flora already living in our communities? What if we spent just as much time nurturing the less-loved natives hovering around the edges or weaving their way uninvited through our more intentional plantings?
Over the years I’ve watched many people lament the invasives in their gardens while simultaneously removing natives that could help keep those invasives at bay. Eventually I wrote an article called “How to Fight Plants with Plants” to outline a gentler, more habitat-friendly and successful approach:
- Guerilla garden by inserting natives into patches of invasives
- Practice preventive planting to hold the ground with vigorous natives
- Encourage native volunteers wherever possible.
There was nothing particularly original about these proven methods, which have long been in the toolbox of ecologically minded gardeners. All it takes is patience, observation, and a willingness to experiment.
"...this is not a formulaic process. There’s no exact recipe."
Six years later, I realize I should have highlighted in bold, italic 80-point font that this is not a formulaic process. There’s no exact recipe. Growing a natural garden or restoring habitat is not like baking a cake. Plants are fluid in their behavior, their responses contextual. They are living organisms whose growth and survival depend on factors both within and outside their control: their own chemical makeup, soil, weather, and surrounding plant and animal communities. Even individuals of the same species can have varying chemical responses to herbivory or to competition from neighboring plants.
Nothing turns out quite the way you think it will, and that’s part of the fun and fascination of working with nature. But there is one guaranteed result: When you take your cues from the land and treat the process as a partnership, you’ll see more abundance and diversity with each new season. Here are some tips for getting started.
Find the Bright Spots
After we stopped mowing the back field, it was a beautiful meadow of broomsedge and purpletop grass for a time, shining purple in fall and rusty orange with sparkly seedheads in winter. But we didn’t follow the prescribed routine of annual mowing because turtles inhabited the space. It wasn’t long before the inevitable occurred, and large stretches of that pioneering broomsedge gave way to stiltgrass, fescue, and other remaining vestiges of the old lawn. In other contexts, maybe it would have been tempting to burn it all with fire, but the wood frogs, pickerel frogs, and American toads leaping about the raggedy field instilled a duty of care in me—and a new kind of patience I’d never possessed before.
As I vowed to replace one patch at a time through the slow smothering method of killing grass with cardboard and newspaper, I discovered that in some areas the self-seeders were doing a better job than I was. Each summer brought volunteer patches of blue mistflower and beaked panic grass spreading into ever-widening circles. One of the single false nettles that popped up at the bottom of the meadow near the woods became a 15-foot-wide expanse. In a shadier area where I had planted woodoats, nimblewill filled in the gaps and helped seal the edges. A former herb garden shaded out by volunteer tulip poplars was on its way to becoming a garlic mustard haven when Canadian clearweed decided it was a great place to settle down and raise a prolific family.
I began to think of these areas as my beacons, or “bright spots” that radiated across the landscape. It was a mindset instilled in me in my previous career, when a life-changing leadership book helped me navigate some seemingly intractable situations. “To pursue bright spots is to ask the question ‘What’s working, and how can we do more of it?’ ” wrote coauthors Chip and Dan Heath in Switch: How to Change Things When Change Is Hard. “… [T]his obvious question is almost never asked. Instead, the question we ask is more problem focused: ‘What’s broken, and how do we fix it?’ ”
Focusing on the negatives in a landscape is all well and good when it clears the way for something better. But that approach can become all-consuming and deflating. What plant person with a heart wants to spend most of their existence pulling plants out? By looking for the bright spots and widening their circles, we can maintain our motivation and momentum. As the Heaths wrote, “These flashes of success—these bright spots—can illuminate the road map for action and spark the hope that change is possible.”
Avoid overclearing and leave no ground uncovered
Rather than focusing solely on getting invasives out, then, we can concentrate on letting natives in. Sometimes that’s no easy task. Vigorous native plants endure negative aspersions similar to those our culture has historically assigned to confident women, and they’re cut down for being too “aggressive” or yanked out for asserting themselves in an area that wasn’t prescribed for them.
Many organizations I otherwise respect perpetuate these indignities. The false nettle that I’ve come to love for its ability to crowd out stiltgrass is described on one native plant site as “very attractive when young” but tall and weedy as it matures (and don’t we all get a little weedy?). The group deems it inappropriate for home landscapes and relegates it only to broad-scale habitat restoration. Such judgmental attitudes toward plants also do a disservice to the animals who rely on them—in this case, the red admiral, Eastern comma and question mark butterflies who lay eggs on false nettle.
Removal of any plant, whether native or invasive, opens up new opportunities for others to move in. One of my clients decided to nurture nearly every native volunteer on her woodland property but refused to keep a small pokeweed patch that was inherently self-limited by sloping topography and a stream below. Her efforts to pull it out were counterproductive, creating the perfect substrate for nearby nonnative wisteria to take over even more of the land.
Large-scale removal also sometimes destroys the only shelter and escape routes available to birds, amphibians, reptiles and small mammals. Leaving every native plant possible mitigates these effects and also makes less work for you in the end. Often when I find a native oak, sweetgum, redbud, black cherry or tulip poplar, I add leaves around it and cage it in place for temporary protection from herbivores. When I see wildflowers coming up among invasive grasses, I pull the grasses to encourage herbaceous natives to spread. To keep the invasives from reseeding when possible, I use a battery trimmer around the burgeoning patches of natives. When time allows, I dig up or smother larger patches of invasives and replace them quickly with plugs or transplants of sedges, ferns, and vigorous groundcovers.
Moving slowly through the landscape reveals treasures you might have otherwise missed. When my neighbor cut down his white pines, the newly sunny area became a hot spot for invasives. But beneath those plants Allegheny blackberry and American hollies also sprouted and are now thriving, even as I still work to remove the remaining autumn olives and honeysuckles.
Match plant personalities, and look for competitive advantages
“What plant fights goutweed?” “Do you know of a native that will help me outcompete lesser celandine?” “What can I plant to keep English ivy at bay?”
These are typical questions prompted by my original article on fighting invasives with natives, which highlighted a takeover of invasive garlic mustard by native golden ragwort. Many readers reported their own successes: cup plant and Canada anemone holding its own against goutweed, for example, or fragrant sumac outcompeting ivy and periwinkle. Though each situation and plot of land is different, some combinations have proven to be replicable in multiple environments. One reader even suggested creating an OkCupid resource for native-invasive pairings (though the comparison isn’t quite apt, as we want these plants to be fighters, not lovers!).
Through experimentation in my own garden and those of clients and friends, I’ve found a number of combinations that help me regain ground for natives: violets vs. mock strawberry; Jerusalem artichoke vs. burning bush sprouts; Virginia creeper vs. English ivy; mountain mint and black raspberry vs. mugwort; nimblewill, woodoats, false nettle and blue mistflower vs. stiltgrass; tufted hairgrass and Eastern woodland sedge vs. old turf; golden ragwort vs. practically everything. Sometimes these discoveries are accidental, as when I notice a volunteer native reclaiming land. But often these antagonistic pairings are an intentional outcome of thinking through plants’ individual characteristics: When does the invasive leaf out? Is there a native that will break dormancy at the same time or even earlier so it can get a leg up on the growing cycle? Does it retain basal foliage, like beardtongue, or is it evergreen, like ragwort? Do herbivores prefer the plant or steer clear of it?
Considering how an invasive plant spreads can also give you some ideas. Is it an annual, like invasive stiltgrass or native fleabane, or a perennial, like invasive wavyleaf basketgrass or native tufted hairgrass? Does it spread by seed? Does it spread primarily underground by rhizomes? Does it do both? What natives might be able to match its apparent desire to take over the world? In reality, all of these plants are simply trying to survive just like everyone else, and understanding their growth strategies can help us either encourage or suppress them.
Think beyond groundcovers and single species.
It’s tempting to view individual stalwart natives as miracle solutions, but plants thrive on teamwork. Taking a more layered approach builds resilience, as multiple species play different roles in restoration.
In 2019, we still had an ever-expanding 30-by-10-foot patch of mugwort. Over the years my husband and I had tried to clear it a couple of times, after roots of the European herb hitchhiked into the garden with family-heirloom asparagus. Eventually it crowded out both the asparagus and the surrounding lawn. Mugwort’s roots are tenacious and allelopathic, and our pulling efforts barely made a dent. Other than hosting ladybugs, the plants seemed to be dead ends for wildlife.
There were bright spots, though. Black raspberries moved into the very end of the patch and made it its own. A volunteer walnut sapling, protected from herbivores by the strongly scented mugwort, shot up tall enough to add a little shade. Encouraged by these unflappable natives, I enlisted the help of other vigorous species in my efforts. As I pulled mugwort and smothered roots with cardboard and wood chips, I also added mountain mints in the sunny spots and golden ragwort in the shade. Next came aromatic asters, wild basil, Robin’s plantain, beardtongue, tall goldenrods, woodoats and wild bergamot, interspersed with wild strawberries around the edges. At some point splitbeard bluestems showed up on their own, and the smooth sumacs and lyreleaf sage I’d added nearby began meandering into the space too.
Some of these plants grow together in the wild; others don’t. In this more cultivated space, some species have already started to take over as others retreat. The plants will form their own communities over time as they help me accomplish my primary goal of replacing a monoculture of low ecological value with a diversity of species that are now buzzing with life. Just four years after I started enlisting worthy native competitors in my mugwort removal campaign, hardly a sprout can be seen anymore. My cumulative time spent pulling remaining bits of mugwort has dwindled to less than an hour per season.
Home at Last
I’ll never have the “perfect,” natives-only space. It’s too large, and there’s too much disturbance at every edge: farmers who cut down trees behind us and sell them for timber every 20 years; neighbors on both sides who hire lawn services. In pockets of the land, we have stiltgrass and miscanthus, Bradford pear seedlings and burning bushes, multiflora roses and invasive honeysuckles and bittersweets. Even as I remove them, I know there will be more to contend with in future seasons.
I’ve made my peace with the process, partly because the balance has shifted so far in the other direction. Weaving together across the landscape, native trees, shrubs, vines and wildflowers have not only held their ground against encroachment but actually pushed forward, expanding their presence each year. Human lives are short, and we expect instant results. But many plant lives and communities naturally extend far beyond our earthly reach, their relationships decades and even centuries in the making. Rather than defining an exact destination and expecting nature to conform to our ultimate visions, let’s enjoy the journey. Let’s celebrate with the birds, butterflies, bees, beetles, chipmunks, frogs, and many other creatures who can once again recognize their favorite plants in our evolving habitats—and finally fly, crawl, hop, leap, and dig their way back to their homelands too.
A practical guide and the comprehensive list of plants, and their nemesis, mentioned in this post can be viewed, and/or downloaded here.
All images are © Nancy Lawson.
Nancy Lawson is the author of The Humane Gardener: Nurturing a Backyard Habitat for Wildlife and the recently released Wildscape: Trilling Chipmunks, Beckoning Blooms, Salty Butterflies, and other Sensory Wonders of Nature. A certified Chesapeake Bay Landscape Professional and master naturalist, she co-chairs Howard County Bee City in Maryland and co-launched a community science project, Monarch Rx, based on discoveries in her habitat. Her work has been featured in The New York Times, The Washington Post, O magazine, Ecological Entomology and Entomology Today.