Growing Gardens and Community: A Conversation with Fellow Meditators, Kathy & Barry

“This is something that brings me joy—and if I can convey that to someone else, it gets them started.”

Periodically in my newsletter I hope to highlight the ways in which fellow meditators and yoga practitioners are engaging the world, doing what they’re inspired to do. Last month, I spoke with Kathy Schollenberger and Barry Stahl about their work with native plants and their program, the Audubon Wildlife Habitat Program in Prince George’s County. Read on for inspiration and practical insight. (My reflections on this conversation can be found here.)

Phil: Hi, Kathy and Barry! Thank you for taking the time to talk. I have to say I’m so excited by the work you do. It beautifully threads a needle of engaging people in their local environment while giving them a sense of agency. How did each of you become involved with native plants?

Finding Native Plants

Barry: I worked for many years professionally as a horticulturist. I was taught traditional ornamental horticulture, planting principally European plants and Asian plants and calling those good plants. Part of my journey was to discover that we have so many wonderful native plants here and that they’ve been neglected over the years. Professional horticulturists have primarily promoted non-native plants. 

So, it began with discovering more about native plants. Then I retired. But I didn’t want to retire from working with plants. I love plants. I began volunteering about the same time Kathy and I met, and we developed this interest together, both in our home garden and then in the work that we started doing in the community.

Kathy: I grew up watching my dad garden and learned a lot from him. Little by little, I planted the sizable plot around the house with non-natives because that’s what I had learned, and, as Barry has said, that’s what was on sale.

A neighbor down the street who knew about native plants long before I did began to kind of nudge me about it. I did a Master Gardener training, but that was in the time before Master Gardener training did anything about native plants. And then Barry and I did a master naturalist training together where I got much more of an introduction. The rest of it is history, as they say. 

It’s given me an insight into the natural world that you can’t possibly get with a traditional kind of gardening. In traditional gardening you’re not gardening in a real ecosystem. It’s an out-of-whack ecosystem. Now we’re putting the plants that belong in our garden, and helping other people to do the same. That means we attract the insects that belong with those plants and the wildlife that come to eat the insects or the plants. We’re now fitting into the real ecosystem, the one that’s meant to exist here. It’s pretty great!

A Gradual Shift in Perspective

Barry: It was a very gradual shift, I think, for both of us. I could have taken my story back even further to when I was spending my summers in the Catskill Mountains, and my parents were very lenient. They just let me wander off into the woods when I was two and three years old. Somehow, I managed to come back. 

Phil: That seems a little risky, Barry. 

Barry: Thankfully, it worked out well. After I graduated from college, I did office work, and somewhere along the way, it struck me that I was always happiest just being outside. Those times in the woods were formative, and I made a career shift. I was meant to be and work outside. 

In the course of doing that, and in the time that we’ve been working on this project, the necessity for shifting to native plants struck home more and as did the reality of accelerating climate change. Also, there was an aesthetic shift around what makes a beautiful garden as well as a functional garden. Your eyes change when you start looking more closely at something and in a different way.  And that’s what happened with the shift from non-native ornamental plants to a more native garden. 

From Control to Connection

Kathy: For me, the shift really is that feeling that everything I learn about is interconnected — this insect is dependent on that plant — and that every little fact about these relationships is connected to something else, something bigger. Nature is just so amazing. It’s awe-inspiring. That is what happens if you’re doing this kind of gardening. 

I feel that way when I walk in the woods — that you’re part of something and that it’s a real privilege to be there. 

We’ve ended up in these communities where nature is somewhere out there, as if we’re here and nature is over there. It’s in a park and so you go visit it in the park. 

But the idea of this program that we set up comes from Doug Tallamy, an entomologist at University of Delaware. He spearheaded this whole movement and talked about our separation from nature, inviting us to look at the land that we have, whatever it is, whether it’s a patio or a balcony or a window box or a front yard, and imagine what it can bring. The title of his first book is “Bringing Nature Home”. The idea is we can return to connection with nature in a much more daily way. 

Where to Begin – Entry Points for Everyone 

Phil: That leads me to a couple of things. I want to know more about your program and how someone gets started. How does one get their feet wet in the world of native plants?

Barry: There are a lot of entry points. One can get into it however it works for them. 

Some people are very attracted to specific plants. The gateway for them, I’d say, would be to get a small group of plants that they like. They can visit a garden center or visit a public garden and see what they like. It’s especially helpful if there are labels or signs on those plants. Start making a list of plants that really appeal to you, and then depending on what kind of space you have, what kind of time and energy and budget, find those plants and choose how many and in what sort of container — be that a pot or a yard — and start doing a planting. Pick a small spot if you’re working outside, rather than getting overwhelmed by the whole mess and recognize that some patience is required. You do a little at a time and then you expand on that.

For other people, sometimes you’ll start with mapping. You’ll look around your whole property, start looking at where there’s sun and where there’s shade, where there’s moisture, where there’s dry spots.  We’ll recommend particular plants for those areas. 

People have different ways of learning, different ways of seeing the world, so it could be very particular. It could be spatial, but whatever way they learn best is a way for them to get into it. 

Gardening for Function

Kathy: Also, we’ve visited people whose central interest is vegetable gardening. That’s another entree into native plants because most are not native. They require a lot of help from insects and those insects in the main are not going to be attracted by those vegetables. They need the native plants. So if you’re planting natives in order to increase the production of your vegetable garden, you’re going to choose the native plants that are pollinator magnets or magnets for other beneficial insects that will take care of your potato bugs and your tomato hornworm and that sort of thing. That’s very specific.

Barry: Also, people might say, “Oh, I love butterflies. I want a butterfly garden.” Or, “I love birds. I want to attract birds,” or, “I love color, so I want plants that are particularly colorful.” Or, “I want plants that are going to be in flower over the course of the whole season so that there’s always something that looks good or something that’s beneficial to the environment.” 

All those are ways in which people identify something that’s personal to them, a preference, something that they’re looking for. It makes it easy to develop off of that and to be able to suggest, “This is where you should start.” 

Phil: It makes me so excited to hear all these different gateways, some make me perk right up. Personally, I’d love more birds. And butterflies. 

Kathy: A couple of times we’ve visited people who are particularly interested in odors and perfumes. Things that smell nice. There are a lot of plants that have lovely fragrances. 

Sometimes people are planting a garden that will be less attractive to deer. If they have a family of deer in the garden, then that may end up being a prime focus. 

Designing a Wildlife Garden

Barry: It’s important to say too that we’re not just talking about the plants that are in the garden. In the wildlife garden you have to think of shelter for nesting spaces, you have to think of safety. If you’re interested in birds, well, do you need to put up bird boxes as well? Bird baths so that the birds have water? Do you need to be sure to have shrubs so that they can hide from predators? Leafy areas where they can build their nests? Protections on your windows, decals, and so forth, so that you’re not attracting them, only to get them killed in a collision. These are all elements that you think of in wildlife gardening which go beyond the plants themselves and all the other elements that make up an ecosystem, a wildlife garden. 

Kathy: Also conserving water — keeping the water on the property. We talk a lot about simple water conservation, like planting grasses, native grasses that have really long roots, or creating a berm swale arrangement that will capture water. The goal is ultimately to keep that water on the property in order to conserve it and have it there for wildlife and for its own health. 

We also talk a lot about ways of planting. For example, not disturbing the soil because the soil takes many years to become rich soil and if we dig in it, the way I was taught to do, then we’re destroying it. The recommendation now is that you disturb the soil as little as you can. Also we encourage planting more densely and in layers. The layers above will shade the layers below. Having ground layer will cool the ground and having plants closer together will keep out things you don’t want. 

Barry: And leave the leaves as well. Traditional gardening was silly in so many ways.  You know, pick up every leaf, put it out on the curb, let the city take it away. Go out and buy mulch instead, sometimes purple or red from chipped up pallets and furniture and so forth. Meanwhile, it’s just so much less work and makes so much more sense and so much better for the environment to leave the leaves that are full of insect eggs. You just keep them on your own property. 

Then there are things like rain barrels. We encourage people to do that for conservation. We tell them about rebate programs where they can actually get money back for installing a rain barrel or for planting trees. We provide people with a lot of resources on how they can learn more about these things and where they can get help. 

The Wildlife Habitat Program

Phil: Speaking of some of those resources, could you say more about your program?

Kathy: The Audubon Wildlife Habitat Program in Prince George’s County is an all-volunteer operation limited to residents of PG County, since it’s just the two of us running it. We have trained 60, 70 people. At any given time we have probably 25 volunteers who are doing visits. People sign up for a visit, we send two volunteers. Barry and I are often one of those volunteers, but often not. 

The homeowner or renter has received some materials ahead of time and so knows a little something about native plants. We try to make sure that they get the big picture idea of a homegrown national park. This is Doug Tallamy’s idea: that there’s no place left to create habitat except the property that all of us have control of. And if we could each get rid of 50 percent of our grass and plant it with native plants and observe all these other kinds of practices that Barry and I’ve been talking about, we would have a homegrown national park.

Then we walk the property with them. They let us know ahead of time what their particular concerns or interests are, and also what their experience is. Often we visit people who have never done any kind of gardening. Sometimes they’re people who already have some native plants, but don’t quite know where to go from here. There’s a lot of information online so people can get overwhelmed. Often people are looking for a specific place to start. 

We really encourage people to go step by step. The idea is that by the end of that visit they will have some priorities set for themselves and a plan to move forward. In addition, we have a report template that we’ve developed over the years and it has a whole panoply of resources on it that we include based on the interests of the person we’ve just visited. There’s a summary of the visit with the priorities. We emphasize that gardening is a long-term project to help people bite off only what they can chew financially and in terms of energy and time.

From Overwhelm to Empowerment

Barry: Joy is a big thing for us too and for people that we visit as well. When you go online and you type in native plants, you get a billion hits. It doesn’t inspire joy. It’s overwhelming. It’s just too much. It might as well be no hits at all, right? 

But if somebody comes to your house and guides you through a process, whatever your process is, empowers you to do something, and leaves you saying, “You know, I think I can do this,” it takes them to a place that they couldn’t have envisioned before. It’s only through the power of personal interaction that that happens. 

This is something that brings me joy and if I can convey to someone else that this is something that you can enjoy it gets you started on that path past the usual obstacles:  “I don’t have a green thumb,” “I’ve only lived in an apartment,” “Why can’t I do this?”  Instead, it’s encouragement. It’s a pep talk as well as information. That’s the magic formula for making this successful. 

Quietly and Revolutionary

Kathy: It’s very, very satisfying for us. This is revolutionary in a lot of ways. Because I have control over what I do on this little piece of land that life has given me, I don’t have to ask anybody. I can just do it and I can really make a difference. So it’s very empowering. It’s that kind of empowerment that we’re trying to give to other people. 

I find myself often introducing myself at a visit or introducing the program by saying we think we’re saving the planet. I feel really good about that. In some little way we’re helping a lot of people take some little steps that could save the planet. I might be delusional, but it’s a joyful delusion. 

Barry: I think too how fortunate we are, that we share this, Kathy and I. This is something that we work on together. I think it deepens our relationship as well. Then we bring in other volunteers, we form relationships with them, and it just expands from there. It’s the kindred spirits that deepen the experience more and more.