[gentle music] - Daryl Beyers: My name is Daryl Beyers.

Let me tell you just a little bit about who I am so you will basically believe the stuff that I'm about to tell you.

I do have credentials.

I studied landscape architecture and landscape design at the University of Minnesota, and that was where I got my degree in environmental design, and I became a-- After school, I became an estate gardener and I got into gardening that way.

So, I learned gardening on the job, which was kind of fun.

Since then, and that was, that was back before, you know, in the other millennial, millennia, was in the 1990s that I got out of school and started doing gardening work.

And so, I've designed gardens, mostly on the East Coast.

I moved from-- My wife and I moved out to Connecticut in 2000, and that was where I spent 20 years making gardens out there, though originally I'm from Wisconsin.

I grew up here.

The zones are similar.

I've gardened in lots of different zones, different, you know, kinds of winters.

I was gardening up in Minneapolis.

It's colder up there than it is here.

And then, I also gardened for a little while in Georgia.

I was on an estate there.

And then, now we actually moved out west, and I live in far northern California and I'm in a zone nine, which is a whole different world.

So, I love to try different things, but the majority of my work has taken place in a very similar zone to where you're at.

And as a landscape designer sort of coming into properties and wanting to work and, like, people need things from me, sometimes they need a hedge or they need some privacy screening or something else like that.

And after doing it for 25, 30 years, it gets pretty boring to just do the same thing over-- a row of Norway spruce or a row of this.

And it got kind of dull, and so, I was always trying to think of newer ways to think of, think about it.

And so, one of the first things I ever did was my screening trees.

Instead of a row of trees, I would do-- create screening groves and sort of combinations of trees and sort of thinking that way.

Now, the good news was, when I studied landscape in school, the way that academia seems to work is they're always about two decades ahead of the industry practices.

And so, I had learned a lot of these concepts of, you know, permaculture, regenerative agriculture, habitat gardening, and things like that, but I wasn't able to practice it in my profession until really just in the past ten years or so.

And so, along the way, I decided that, like, maybe there's a better way to do a hedge, right?

And I landed on the idea of the habitat hedgerow.

And so, I kind of took the concept of a hedge and backed it up into hedgerow and then added the extra layer of creating habitat.

In other words, places for the birds to live, the toads, the butterflies, all those good insects that we need in our garden to create an ecosystem in our garden.

And that landed in this program.

And so, I've taught this as a two-hour class once, and I did this talk yesterday.

So, you're new to me, right, so this is new.

But the work isn't new to me.

I've been doing this for about five years now, making these kinds of gardens, and so I wanna share it with you.

So, we'll start by looking at a little history of the hedge.

The history of hedgerows in particular.

And so, it's the kind of thing that started in Europe, and they were, these things were planted in order to keep the cows in the fields, to keep the people out of the fields, maybe, and stuff like that.

So, it was like a barrier.

These hedgerows were designed as barriers in the fields in Europe.

And places in England, hedgerows in France are a big deal.

So, there is a-- If you're ever interested in making a traditional English-style hedgerow, there's a technique to it that is a lot different than just planting a row of shrubs.

That's kind of an automatic, but there's a pruning practice that goes with it.

The way that they'd form these kinds of hedgerows is they plant things kind of at an angle, and then they prune it so things grow up, and it becomes like a thicket that you can't get through.

A deer can't get through it.

A pheasant could probably barely get through it.

And so, that's the-- That was sort of the origination of the idea goes back to these, you know, hedgerows, but, like, you know, man-made, human-manufactured, you know, human-made hedgerows in Europe.

So, that's the initial-- That's where we got the idea of a hedge for our gardens.

And this is what we think of when we think of a hedge, right?

One plant planted in a row.

The old arborvitae, right, screening.

Seen that.

If you got deer, that ain't gonna work, right?

But you know, the hedging that you trim, and you can keep it clean, and it's kind of like an English gardening style.

Italian gardens do it.

Even French gardens will do a lot of, like, clipped hedges and stuff like that.

It's a monoculture, so it's not necessarily adding to any diversity in your garden.

And oftentimes, these are nonnative plants to begin with.

And what you're gonna find out as I continue to talk about the habitat hedgerow, the key to the answer-- the key answer to everything about, "How can I make habitat in my garden?"

is, "Plant native plants."

That's the answer.

It's just like when I teach my soil classes to my gardening students, they're like, "How can I make my soil better so my plants will grow better?"

You add compost to it.

It's the answer, right?

It does lots of different things.

It provides lots of different things.

It helps for water retention and for fertility and stuff like that.

So, there's a single answer about creating a habitat garden and that is, grow only native plants, because those are the plants that the birds are gonna want, the insects are gonna like and that are gonna fit with where you live.

So, that's the first trick, but it can get a little bit more involved than that, and that's what we wanna do.

But a hedge is kind of just this basic thing.

Designwise, then we get into something called a mixed shrub border.

You may have seen things like this at, like, Olbrich Gardens or some other botanical gardens, or, like, nice, kind of expensive gardens maybe at somebody's house.

I've done stuff like that out east, and I never, like, ran into the really wealthy client in Wisconsin yet, so maybe if you're here, let me know.

[all laugh] But anyways, you sort of do this mixed shrub idea.

And so, it's a combination of shrubs with different forms and textures and flower times, and you combine them.

And a lot of it has to do with creating this depth and interest.

And you can see, looking at this, these images, that there's a lot of different things going on in what we call a mixed shrub border.

Now, the issue is that typically, this would be, these would be not necessarily native plants.

Now, what a lot of you might be finding out is, you know, the native plant thing has caught on, finally.

It took a while, right?

The interesting thing is, about seven, eight years, when it really started to kind of get that good traction, maybe ten years ago, people would go to garden centers and realize that a lot of the plants that were at the garden centers were natives.

They just didn't advertise it as a native.

You know, Linderas, like, spicebushes and Fothergilla and cool stuff like that.

Even a lot of the Viburnum shrubs that we grow, they're all natives and they've been selling 'em for years, but they're also selling lots of stuff that isn't native.

You know, things that come out of the mountains in China, you know, hydrangeas and rhododendrons and all sorts of other stuff.

So, they might not necessarily be an invasive, though, if you look closely, that is a red barberry, and that is considered an invasive, so don't plant it.

They're illegal in lots of states.

I think-- Are they illegal here yet in Wisconsin?

Maybe not yet.

And so, it's because the birds eat the fruits and then they spread them and then they grow.

They grow up in the woods.

So, it's considered an invasive.

But the mixed shrub border idea is all about, like, different heights and textures and colors and form, you know, foliage and stuff like that.

And so, we graduate from that into what we call a habitat hedgerow.

So, it's the concept of a hedge, and, but it's mixed plants, so it's not that traditional hedge.

So, it's kind of like that mixed border idea, but it's all native plants.

And actually, there's a few other things that we have to think about when we combine these plants together to form this habitat hedge.

If it was just gonna be a mixed native plant, you know, native plant hedge, that's one version.

And actually, that was sort of the earlier versions that I would do, 'cause I have transitioned into doing more and more natives over the years just because, just due to the fact that they just belong in the garden and there's less maintenance and they establish better, and all those other good things.

But to turn it into a habitat hedgerow is a different idea where there's gonna be more layers to it.

So, it's not just gonna be the shrubs.

And the other piece of the puzzle when it came to doing all this stuff, is that we had to go-- 'Cause for a little while, I was an editor with Fine Gardening magazine, and so we had to take lots of pictures of gardens and things like that.

You may have heard about that magazine.

It's fairly well-known.

And we could not-- I could not get a picture of a garden that looked like this into that magazine.

The design director would not allow it because it was messy, right?

It was-- It's weedy, it's messy.

It's like, no, that's goldenrod.

That's not weeds, right?

And so, it was really hard to get people to accept this kind of a look 'cause they were used to this look.

They were used to the mixed shrub border out of England, Christopher Lloyd and Gertrude Jekyll and all those people, right?

And so, the idea was, how do we get them to accept this?

Now, the good news is, in recent years, people understand that it's important to use native plants and to promote this sort of environmental or sustainability factor.

And actually, in a lot of ways, if there's one takeaway that I give you in today's talk, it's the idea of thinking about your garden-- and everybody gets it now, which is nice-- thinking about your garden as an ecosystem.

Whenever you go to a lot of these talks that you'll see that are being offered at the expo, it's all about kind of the way that we think about our garden.

So, philosophically, it's kind of changing the way that you look at it.

And it's like, it's not just decoration in the front of my house.

It's, I have a little ecosystem in the backyard, you know?

And then, go, like the permaculture lady.

PermacultureWorks, right?

We talked to her before I came, before I came up here to do this.

And her whole backyard in Madison, she's doing this, like, permaculture thing.

And so, it's a philosophy of gardening that we can take forward and push forward.

But this is the kind of thing that you could do in a more traditional landscape scene, but, like, it can work and do all the things that a normal hedge would do.

Create that privacy, do windbreaks, but also on top of it, provide habitat for birds and other little critters, and especially insects and things like that, okay?

So, how does it really work?

The way that we get it to work is it's all about building structural complexity.

In other words, having a canopy, having understory stuff and actually also having that ground layer.

So, the first couple of times that I did my habitat hedgerows, 'cause, you know, some of it was just, like, saying, coming up with a new term and getting the client to, like, bite on it, right?

"It's a habitat hedgerow."

That sounds like a cool thing, right?

And then, I didn't actually, I didn't, like, think it-- Like, the very first one that I did, I did all shrubs.

I just was, like, stuck closer to the hedge idea.

But what's really important is you got to get the tree-- You have to have a small tree built into there.

That can be very helpful.

That's an added layer.

Some birds will only nest higher up, right?

And then, the shrub layer is gonna fill in underneath there.

It's kind of with different heights, different life cycles, different flowering times.

Different fruiting times, that's another important factor.

Something that fruits earlier, or that, maybe like a trilobum Viburnum that holds its berries into the winter 'cause they don't taste as good, so it takes a while before the critters finally wanna eat those.

And then, you're sort of, you know, building that layer in.

And then, so I figured that out.

I was like, "Okay, let's work a tree in there."

And then, the final step is to get that ground layer in.

So, it really is a garden that you're making.

It's not just a hedge.

It's, we call it a hedgerow because the primary plant is our shrubs and things like that.

But at the same time, there are other plants that are involved with it, part of the scene, okay?

So, a diversity of trees and shrubs and kind of, and dense growth on the ground.

And we'll get more into that a little bit later, right?

But this is the structure that you're building.

This is the kind of structure that you're building to create a complete hedgerow.

So, it can look like something like this.

Your dense, a dense hedgerow like this can be multifunctional.

It can work for that privacy, it can work for windbreaks, and it can work for wildlife.

That's kind of what we're doing.

So, a hedge, typical hedge, though you might get, like, a lot of birds to nest in some privet or something else like that, but it's not gonna be that same kind of habitat.

They may be able to nest there and fly in there and hide there and get out to the birdbath, you know, safely, but they're not gonna eat it and eat the insects that land on it and do all that other good stuff.

So, this is an example.

I pulled this from Donna Schmitz, who does landscape design.

And this is what we call a pollinator hedgerow.

And what I really wanted you to look at, not so much the plants, 'cause at the end of this talk, I'm gonna give you some plant choices that you can include with it.

So, we got to do that.

And you're gonna take pictures of the screen and all that other good stuff, okay?

So, that'll come, so be patient with me.

But a setup like this, you know, things that look like this.

Now, she's a designer in the Pacific Northwest, so it's a different plant palette anyways.

But this is a scheme that you could work with, with the three decent-sized trees, lots of shrubs mixed in, and then herbaceous stuff kind of down below.

So, this is sort of the scheme that you're looking for.

And it looks a lot like a traditional mixed border, but it's gonna, what's gonna determine it, turn it into a habitat hedgerow or a habitat border, is gonna be the plant selections that you use, the plants that you use.

This is another version where there's some trees.

There's a canopy tree.

That's the bladdernut.

And then, there's a serviceberry and a dogwood tree that are sort of what we would call subcanopy trees.

And it's this layering that really makes a difference.

Now, the good news is, if I was teaching it just as a straight garden design session here, I would talk about that layering.

I would describe that.

I brought-- I did bring some of my books along with me today, just in case you get interested in them.

And so, my first book was a gardening skills book.

It's called The New Gardener's Handbook.

The next book that I have coming out is called The New Garden Designer's Handbook, and it's the design version of it.

And there's a whole chapter, there's a whole section of that book that talks about canopy.

Subcanopy, which are, like, the smaller trees, understory, which are all of your shrubs and stuff like that, and then the ground plants, and that's your herbaceous perennials, ferns.

Not just ground covers that spread across the ground, but, like, you know, a six-foot grass, to me, is a ground plant.

It's the herbaceous stuff that goes underneath.

And so, you start designing things like that.

That's what, a hedgerow is gonna be built like that.

But hedgerow also doesn't have to be a line.

So, look at this.

It curves around the backyard.

So, if you have a small backyard, this could be a little curvy thing that you could kind of add in there.

But it's about that tree, and it's typically not-- It's not gonna be, like, the 80-foot oak or the 60-foot maple, right?

That's your top, top canopy.

And so, that can function within the garden.

You can create it around a tree like that, but you really have to get some of these other kinds of mid level trees in there.

And then also, unless you wanna have hawks, you know, we have the hawks will go up in the tall trees or maybe the eagle, right?

There's a lot of bald eagles around here.

And then, you get down to the shrub layer, and then you work down into the ground layer.

And it's about combining these different plants in these different sort of arrangements.

And I did wanna show a couple of simple plans that basically just give you a sense of the kind of thing that you could do.

But these could, based upon the different species that would be in this kind of a design, this could be a very traditional ornamental garden, right?

You know, that could be a Japanese maple and those could be azaleas, you know, and these could, you know, there could be lots of nonnatives in it, and it would be a nice design.

But if you do it as the habitat design, it's gonna be your plant selection.

So, you kind of think about this sort of arrangement.

An important and another big important piece of this whole thing is the way that these native plantings, especially the habitat hedgerow, will help you create these ecological corridors, okay?

So, a suburban yard can actually turn into, you know, so here's one version, right?

The traditional thing that we may have seen, I have to, you know, full disclosure, I didn't grow up in Grandma's garden.

I grew up on four acres of lawn, and it was my job to mow the lawn.

Tina can-- My sister can attest to that.

And I think that's why I spend half of my, you know, most of my career ripping out lawn and creating gardens and stuff like that.

So, you see a lot of properties that look like the one on the left there, right?

There's some trees, maybe, you know, a little bit of a windbreak on one side or another.

And then, it's just kind of a lot of open space.

Now, what you could do, which a lot of people do, is they turn that lawn into a meadow or they play around, you know, they can, you know, scrape out as much grass as they can and kind of turn it into something else.

Or they could do kind of what we're seeing that in the picture on the right-hand side, where they're making these, you know, on the fringes there, there's these hedgerow zones where there's a density to them.

That's the most important thing about a hedgerow, is that it's deep.

If you're stuck with just a three-foot stretch, like three-foot-wide stretch, it's gonna be really hard to do it, and you're really not gonna be able to do it.

You need about six to eight feet to twelve feet to twenty feet with a little depth there, and you really can make it happen, because then you can interplant lots of different things.

And so, you can see the difference that you come up with when, you know, just the way the property looks different.

And the cool thing about it is then these little ecological corridors that you're creating in your own property will connect to the neighboring properties, hopefully.

And not, maybe not everybody, but it's a piece of the puzzle.

And that's really, in a lot of ways, to kind of get back to the social aspect of a lot of this stuff.

That's the way that we're gonna be able to do this and change things.

You know, there's always gonna be people where it's like, "I want my lawn.

"I got my Scotts Turf Builder, I've got yew, "and, you know, some basic shrubs.

"I like barberry, so I'm gonna plant it.

I don't care."

You know, and that's gonna happen.

But, like, the more properties that turn, that go from the thing on the left, that turn into the thing on the right, is getting us closer to building an ecosystem that actually would be what you could call self -- you know, more sustainable, and just done right, you know?

And then you avoid all the chemical fertilizers and you add compost and don't spray with pesticides and don't do all that other stuff, right?

But you can get there.

And so, the habitat hedgerow is a piece of this larger puzzle.

'Cause you can see, they kind of got like a meadow garden down by the water.

You should definitely never have lawn go right up to the edge of the water.

And it's a piece of the puzzle.

So, it could be a part of your property or a section of the property is kind of what we're getting at here.

And this is the look, this is the thing.

This is the look that you're gonna get.

This is the native shrubs in the wildlife garden at Prairie Nursery Company.

And so, you have to be ready for that look.

Now, like I said, 20 years ago, they weren't ready for this look.

The general public was not ready to have this, to look at this and think that, "I'm not on a nature hike.

I'm in my backyard," right?

But the good news is we've gone past that, and now we can do this kind of thing in the smallest little backyard.

But there is an aesthetic to it that you have to accept.

And the fact that you're in this room means that you're all in on it with me, right?

[audience laughs] So, I don't have any lawn guys that I'm gonna get in an argument with, right?

When I tell them to leave the leaves on the lawn, right, that whole bit?

We'll get to that.

There's a slide coming up.

So, that's the look.

So, let's talk about some of the keys to designing a habitat hedgerow.

We'll get through some plants.

Native shrubs are the very best at creating habitat for wildlife, supplying food, cover, and nesting sites, even in urban and suburban sites.

It's all about the natives, okay?

These are our selections that we need to do.

These are the plants that we have to grow.

They're gonna create, help create that habitat.

Even a single native shrub, a nice big Viburnum in the corner of a small lot, is gonna start creating some habitat, right?

And there are other things that are gonna-- You can plant other things that are gonna attract, you know, swallowtails, and they'll lay their eggs on them and they'll pupate and they'll eat it.

You plant some milkweed.

That's why people like to do milkweed, so the monarchs will lay their eggs.

I did a bunch of milkweed for somebody once, and then he called me, and he took a picture, and there was, one of the caterpillars was on there, the monarch caterpillar.

And he's like, "What is this thing?

"Should I kill it?

Should I squash it?"

[audience laughs] And I was like, "No!

"What are you doing?

That was the whole idea."

But they're big and they're fat.

They look a little bit like a hornworm if anybody's ever grown like, you know, garden.

And so, it freaked him out, and I was like, "No, that's how-- "Like, it's amazing.

You got, like, 20 of 'em, you know, so let's do it."

So, that's, so it's the natives that are gonna create that habitat.

The shrubs are the big piece of the habitat hedge, right?

So, there's wild, you know, there's meadow habitats, there's woodland habitats.

The hedgerow habitat, you know, is primarily gonna be our shrubs, though it's nice to work in that tree, that medium-sized tree, and then you have to do the lower layer.

You get year-round interest with flowers, fruit, foliage, and form, right?

So, you'll get those spring flowers of Viburnums, a lot of early spring bloomers with the Viburnums, you'll get fruit from Viburnum.

I'm talking a lot about Viburnums, so it's a good choice, however.

You'll get some fruits later on.

You might get really-- And you'll get some really good fall color too.

The foliage picture there is of a Fothergilla.

You guys know about Fothergilla?

Some of the best fall color in the world because the leaves, they'll even look better than this sometimes.

There's, like, five colors in that one leaf.

So, a lot of these guys will give you a lot of really good color.

And then, also you have to think about the shape of the plant going through the winter.

In general, if I was just teaching this as a regular, you know, plant, planting combo design class, it'd be, you know, always go for three-season plants at a minimum.

So, it has to have three seasons of interest.

It's a flower, there's a fruit, and there's a leaf.

It has a really cool form.

It doesn't bloom, but, you know, you get, you know, really cool leaves, and maybe there's a fruit that's attached to it.

Like the flower isn't very significant or something like that.

But you want three-season plants.

That's the goal.

And you can do the same thing in your hedgerow.

And shrubs are what get it done.

I teach a whole shrub class too, but we do that one, like, every three years.

It's hard to get-- There's, like, six people that wanna do that one.

[all laugh] But it's fun designing with shrubs, right?

It's all the-- actually, let me kind of-- I'll just throw this out there since we're here and I got you.

The shrubs are actually the plants that you have the most intimate relationship with in your garden because they're as big as you are.

Trees are, like, up there.

The other stuff is down there.

You're, they're next to you.

They're like your friend standing next to you.

So, the shrubs are important.

Combine and layer them.

Tight groups are best for nesting and shelter and foraging.

This is an example where I kind of go the opposite of the way that I plant an ornamental, a regular ornamental garden space where I get everything properly spaced, you know?

I don't overplant.

If I'm planting another, a Viburnum shrub, that'll be our example again, and it's gonna become six feet wide, I make sure that the one, anything next to it is three feet away, right, so it'll space out.

Now, it could take time for that to fill in, but I can underplant with other stuff and it'll kind of get there over time.

With a hedgerow, especially a habitat hedgerow, you plant closer.

You're better off starting with smaller plants and getting them tighter in.

You really want that messy, kind of combined look to it.

So, I will tight-- I will plant that stuff a little bit tighter because if I plant two spicebush next to each other, they're gonna become one big spicebush.

They're just gonna knit together, and they're gonna grow into the rambling rose and stuff like that.

So, the way that you do it is gonna be different.

So, tighter groups are what's gonna make a difference.

So, it's a little counterintuitive to traditional landscaping, though I've known plenty of landscape contractors that like to overplant because more plants, you know, more money, but... And then, you got to come back and edit it out and it's a big pain.

Use varied sizes.

Another fun trick.

This, a lot of this relates to just regular design too, but for the hedgerow as well.

You know, some four-footers.

And this is the mature size, right?

You want those layers of that structure.

So, there's some two-foot shrubs.

You know, there's some Linderas and spicebushes.

There's some four-foots, the Fothergillas.

There's some 12-foots, the Viburnums.

There's stuff in between, dogwoods.

Pick plants with lots of different heights and widths and things like that.

Work with different sizes so they're not-- It's the opposite of a traditional hedge where everything kind of grows the same height.

Because the other good news about it, if, I know there was like a "ways to make your gardening life easier" talk today.

It's, I call it my "lazy guy gardener" techniques.

The good news about a habitat hedgerow: no pruning.

Don't have to prune it.

That's another bonus.

So, that's-- So, you mix this stuff together, different sizes, and the wildlife are gonna like that.

They're gonna like the different levels and stuff like that because it'll attract different kinds of birds and different kinds of critters.

Some birds nest on the ground and feed on the ground.

Other ones need, wanna be up a little bit higher.

Some wanna be way up high.

Here's the other one.

This is the one that I learned on my second foray into creating a habitat hedgerow, 'cause the first time, I didn't underplant enough.

At all, technically.

We came back and did it.

Underplant with perennials.

Surround your hedgerow with native grasses and flowering perennials to complete the habitat.

You have to do the ground layer.

So, it can't be a bunch of mulch.

It can't be a lawn.

It's got to be native ground cover plants, basically.

And at the end of the lists, we'll see those.

The insects that are gonna live in there are gonna be food to the birds, and the insects are also part of the life that's inside of there.

There could be toads in there and salamanders and all sorts of fun stuff.

One thing I will tell you, I tell this to anybody that wants to listen to it.

If you have frogs and toads in your garden, if you have amphibians, you have a healthy garden.

They're the first ones that can get poisoned and get killed from, like, some kind of contaminant or something going wrong.

We have lots of little geckos in our garden back at home and a little, like, I guess that's what they're called, like the thing from the insurance company or whatever.

And they cruise around, and I know that things are right because they're there 'cause the insects are there.

If they're there, the insects are there.

And so, they're eating all those guys and doing all that.

So, they live in that underplanting, right?

And so, you can establish that, and it can look nice.

It can have cool stuff in it, but it can't be, you know, a traditional Vinca.

It can't be Pachysandra.

I don't know if you guys do a lot of that here.

There's a lot of stuff that you really can't do 'cause it's not supporting any of the habitat.

So, you have to work with different plants, and we'll look at those.

Underplant with perennials.

Now, the "leaving the leaves" bit, okay?

So, if you're gonna leave all that underneath, in a lot of respects, that ground cover of perennials is what we would call a living mulch.

It's the stuff that's like, you know, you know, it works as mulch on the ground, right?

[clears throat] The next step, besides just growing that stuff on the ground to create that living mulch, is to let the stuff that falls on the ground stay on the ground, okay?

Now, it can be a little bit tricky.

There's something called a soil food web.

Has anybody taken a soil class that understands about the soil food web?

That's like, the soil food web is what breaks down the organic matter that falls on your garden floor, right?

And if you have a very active soil food web with lots of little insects and microorganisms and stuff like that, then it'll break down really quickly.

And you can tell-- You can figure out if your soil food web is good by, like, just take some clippings of something, throw it on the garden, and see how long it takes to rot.

If it's still there two weeks later, you don't have a very active soil food web.

Otherwise, it'll just kind of disappear.

And here's the other-- This is the secret.

This is the secret to the whole thing, right?

And this is beyond just habitat hedgerow.

The way that soil science works, the plants need a healthy soil to grow their best, right?

So, you guys know that.

That's part of the deal.

Letting the stuff that falls off the plants that you grow break down in the soil around those plants creates the proper chemistry situation of the soil for the roots of those plants.

So, in other words, all the maple leaves that fall around the maple tree are supposed to stay there and rot.

And that actually creates the fungal connections and things like that, whereas if you took some other, you know, stuff from another kind of a tree and let it rot around the base of that tree, it doesn't create the same kind of chemistry in the ground underneath.

So, once again, less work.

Let it all fall on the ground.

It looks messy, that's cool, that's your aesthetic.

It's rotting into the soil.

But you do have to set things up and get that soil food web up and running.

Otherwise, you can just end up with, like, a lot of detritus that doesn't break down.

And so, maybe for the first few years, if you don't have good soil, you'll need to take some of that out and compost it and then bring it back.

But ultimately, you wanna leave this stuff, right?

It's an essential part, and it's also an essential part of continuing to create that ecosystem, it says on the slide, right?

It's home for the insects.

It's home for the salamanders and the toads and stuff like that.

So, you leave the leaves, so you don't have to take 'em out.

Now, maybe somebody's sitting there and thinking, "What about my oak leaves?"

right?

Oak leaves don't break down as quickly.

So, it takes, like, three years sometimes for an oak leaf.

So, I often remove a good portion of the oak leaves and let-- and compost it somewhere else and use it elsewhere.

So, that's the one exception.

But otherwise, maple leaf, it'll rot by the end of the winter.

Doesn't matter.

So, you don't have to rake all-- Even if it's, like, three-foot pile, it becomes a four-foot-- a four-inch pile by the end of the year.

Just let it happen one year and see what happens.

Definitely in your garden beds, that's what you should be doing.

It's home to all those insects and nesting birds, so it's part of the process.

Leaving the stuff that falls off the plants is part of the care of that garden.

So, if I was to say, "You need to prune this and you need to feed that and you need to do that," well, take this advice in the same way, right?

And so, I talk about, a lot about the how-tos of gardening, but the way that I teach gardening and talk about gardening is I explain the why-dos of the how-tos.

I was given that one by Joe Gardener-- Joe the Gar-- Joe Lamp'l, right?

I was on his podcast once, and he came up with that, and I was like, "Dude, I'm stealing that.

I'm gonna use it."

He got where he got for a reason.

He knows how to set that stuff up.

But that's really the way to think about this stuff.

So, when I tell you to leave the leaves, I want you to understand why I want you to leave 'em.

And it's because it's gonna improve your soil, it's gonna improve the habitat of the hedgerow and things like that.

And they are gonna continue to improve the ground underneath, right?

Just leaf litter does it.

But the pieces of the plants that fall down, you know, hopefully nobody here is cutting back their perennial garden in the fall, right?

You're not supposed to do that.

But, you know, and a lot of it'll rot away over the winter.

And then if there's, like, dry stalks that are poking up, you know, in the springtime, you come and cut those down.

You can take those away.

But that detritus layer is important, and it actually feeds the soil and makes the soil better over time.

It can take years if you don't have good soil.

If it's been the Scotts Turf Builder program for the last 30 years and now you're gonna rip out the lawn and start making a garden.

But you got to build it up.

Quick tips for choosing the plants, and then we'll actually get to the plants.

Broad-bottomed shrubs and dense-branched trees are the perfect choice for your hedgerows.

So, not tall, leggy guys, right?

The things that sucker are gonna be even better.

Things that grow a lot of suckers out of the ground, right?

Broad bottoms because the birds can flit inside, in and out of 'em.

They'll knit together better as a group, so they just work better.

So, you're kind of going for those.

So, not like tall, kind of spindly things.

You know, Carolina allspice, which is a great shrub, right?

Tina's died, unfortunately, in her garden.

But that's a little rangy and leggy, right?

It doesn't really grow densely.

It's a great plant.

You can grow it in the shade and they're really pretty, but you wanna go with broad-based shrubs and densely-branched trees.

So, not like, oftentimes-- There was a picture of a pagoda dogwood on that plan.

That's really not the best choice 'cause they end up creating, like, an open canopy, right?

You want the dense, messy canopy 'cause that's what the birds feel safer in that one.

Ramblers, like wild rose.

Things that, like, travel and move through the other stuff.

So, pick those kind of guys.

The whole idea is that it's gonna be, like, a tangled mess, and that's what you're going for, okay?

That's what's gonna work as a habitat.

And if you do the right combination of plants, and you can still think it through as a design, still plan on it.

It's like, this is gonna bloom then, and this is gonna look like that then.

And it's kind of, spread those across the length of it, so you can kind of treat it like a traditional design, but you're gonna let it become a mess.

You're on purpose making it a mess.

That's kind of the deal.

So, that's nice too, right?

But like I said, you have to like what it looks like.

So, maybe it's not in the front yard.

Though I have done this kind of stuff in front yards.

It takes a little convincing sometimes.

Vines growing into trees.

There are some good native vines.

What was the permaculture woman talking-- She was talking about the kiwi vine, right?

So, you could just grow it up a tree.

It's just added complexity.

It's added cover.

So, just plant it next to the tree and let it shoot up into it.

It's just gonna add something to it.

Just more biodiversity for the whole collection.

And it really can be kind of fun.

You could sort of, like, just goof around and see what you come up with, right?

Come up with your own combos, come up with your own designs.

Stick to natives.

Create all three layers.

See what happens.

If there's, like, a sparse area where you don't see anything happening, just go get a two-gallon shrub somewhere, put it in there, and add it to it, right?

And build it.

You might not get it right off the bat.

It might not happen right away.

You might have to tweak it as you go, but just keep-- And then add a vine in.

You know, just sort of play around with it a little bit.

So, let's get to the plants because here's the, here's the money, these are the money slides.

There's more, much, much, many, many more plants than these that you can use in a habitat hedgerow.

It's basically any native.

But these are the ones that I have, I've worked with myself personally and I think are especially good.

So, get your phones out and take pictures.

The trees.

Hackberry, love hackberries.

I only really see them in the Midwest.

They would be native where I did a lot of my work in, out in the East, but they really don't use them.

But I see them more often here.

It's a Wisconsin tree that people will grow.

Wide range of soil, so it can take really crappy soil, even if, you know, and still work.

Full sun, part shade.

zone 3 to 9.

So, you guys are good for that.

Hackberries are a good one.

It does make a fruit, and it's a good kind of nesting tree for the birds.

It's not a fruit that you're gonna eat.

The old serviceberry.

You guys know about Amelanchiers, right?

Ten to twenty-five feet.

Really depends on the species that you get.

There's a lot of different species out there.

Moist, well-drained, kind of variable soil.

It doesn't want to sit in wet soil, so not on the edge of the pond.

But it doesn't really like, they don't really like to dry out either, so you got to be a little bit careful with that.

It has to be well-drained.

It doesn't wanna sit in water.

Full sun to part shade, depending on the species.

And the zone, 2 to 8, is dependent upon the species, but there's a lot of different serviceberries out there, Amelanchiers, that you could use.

Kind of a medium-sized tree.

We often get them multistem, though I've planted them as single stem.

It could be your one tree as a single trunk, but you can also get multistem ones, and nice flower in the spring, and then they make fruits and the birds hang out in 'em a lot.

Good form for the winter garden.

Nice branching and stuff like that.

So, it adds to the winter garden.

Black gum.

This is one of my favorite.

Wet spot?

No problem.

Plant a black gum.

Thirty to fifty feet, so this is a bigger tree.

It'll grow faster if it's wetter.

It can take a lot of different soils, but it really does like wet soils.

I've used it on the edges of wetlands and things like that.

Full sun, part shade.

So, you know, not full shade.

It's not a forest tree, under the forest tree.

And then, zone 3 to 9.

I don't have it in the picture here, but totally awesome fall color.

Scarlet red, like really good reds.

So, a great, really pretty tree.

If you got a wet spot, a spot where the ground just doesn't drain, start your garden right there with a black gum.

That's another way to think about design.

Start with the tree, think about the shrubs, get in the ground layer.

So, a single tree can be the beginning of a whole design.

Love black gums.

Eastern red cedar.

So, here's the evergreen.

These guys are tough.

Thirty to sixty feet.

I've never seen a 60-footer.

Dry to moist, well-drained.

Full sun, part shade.

Two to nine.

Zone 2 to 9, you can grow that one.

That's super hardy.

You know, they're not the prettiest evergreen, but they're super durable.

And the birds are gonna love it.

They're gonna hang out in there and go back and forth, and they'll eat the fruit.

They eat the berries, or the drupes, technically, and kind of dig it that way.

So, they're very useful in that respect, and very hardy.

That's what I got for trees, though there are more.

What about the shrubs?

Red chokeberry, Aronia.

That's a good one.

That's like a, you know, sort of medium size, six to ten feet.

They can get big.

Heavy clay.

We got that around here.

Some of you might have clay soils.

It'll do okay, do fine.

And wet, so they like wet, they like it wet.

So, you got some weird ditch or something like that, use these guys.

Great fall color, as we can see, lots of berries.

So, that's a season, that's a season, right?

Full sun, part shade, zone 4 to 9.

So, you can grow these guys.

That's one of your, like, medium-sized ones mixing in there.

The old elderberry, American elderberry.

These are funky, but look at the fruits.

Wow.

These get, like, rangy.

This is gonna be, like, a weaver.

Kind of like the rose.

They'll reach into the other plants.

That's what they're gonna do.

If you've seen elderberry in the woods, you've seen that.

Average the somewhat wet.

Not dry soil, but also not soaked soil.

That whole mystery soil of, like, moist, fertile, well-drained soil that you read about in the magazines, Where is that stuff, right?

[audience laughs] You have to make it.

That's the, sorry, you have to make it.

But with our native plantings, we are matching plants to soil.

That's why I'm telling you the kind of soil that it likes.

That's sustainable gardening.

That's working with natives.

What kind of soil do I have?

What plants grow there?

That's the trick.

Full sun to part shade.

Don't get the cultivars.

Don't get the cultivated varieties.

There's a really pretty one that has purple foliage and a really nice pink flower, but the birds don't like it, it doesn't fruit, and it dies, like, after three years.

It doesn't work, so... But it's cool, it's really cool.

Mine died, like, three times, and then I would cut it back, it would come back, and then it finally croaked.

But I was actually-- This was somewhere warmer than where you guys are.

Straight species.

Sambucus canadensis .

There are some rules to the native stuffs where you wanna stay as close to the straight species as you can.

But there is a concept that you may have heard in the, may have heard somewhere.

It's called a nativar.

Have you heard of a nativar?

And that's a native species, but it's a cultivated variety of a native, right?

So, there's lots of coneflowers, for example.

Echinacea purpurea , the coneflower, is a native, is a native plant, but there are lots of cultivated varieties of that.

And it depends on how pure you're gonna be.

You know, you can be totally pure and only full, straight-on native species, and go that way.

Or you can play around and mix in some cultivated varieties of the native, of the native plants.

Witch-hazel.

Everybody loves a witch-hazel.

This is like an understory tree in a forest.

This is another one that gets a little rangy, but sometimes it's more like shrub size than tree size.

Moist, well-drained, can tolerate drought.

Full sun, part shade, 3 to 9, species dependent.

There's virginiana.

There's vernalis, which blooms in the late, late winter, really, earliest spring.

These are the guys, they can start blooming in February, which is really cool.

And the flowers are actually quite fragrant.

They're really fragrant, but you really got to, like, put your nose in it.

And this is another good choice, another good native choice.

It's really about the flowers.

And then, the fall color is pretty good too.

But it's a tough plant.

I like witch hazels.

Once again, but on these ones, I avoid the cultivated varieties.

There's a lot of cool fancy ones out there with really great flowers, and they just don't support the habitat the same way that the other ones do.

Lindera, northern spicebush.

You got a wet spot, these are the-- I don't see 'em get 15 feet tall.

You probably seen them in the woods all over the place.

They kind of grow in the understory, right?

Zone 5 to 9.

It's not an attractive shrub, but it's a habitat shrub.

Put it that way.

It's not pretty, but it's helpful.

I like to plant spicebush.

Buttonbush.

That one's a cool one, cool flower.

Moist to wet.

This is a wet soil area.

So, once again, you know, the perfect place to do a habitat hedge would be in some sort of ditch.

That would work out great if you had something going on like that or wherever you got something else.

Full sun, part shade.

Zone 5 to 9.

So, you're on the edge of that, right?

You guys are okay.

It's when you get up into Minneapolis and Duluth that your plant palette just, like, goes to hell.

You can plant crab apples.

You know, that's, like, it.

That's, like, it.

I sent my friend who, for his wedding, I sent him a crab apple tree when he got married.

[audience laughs] He lives in Duluth.

The old Viburnum.

Love the Viburnums.

If you're not planting Viburnums already, what is, what's going on?

You should be planting them.

There's so many different ones.

A lot of them are native.

Most-- a lot of natives.

Not all of 'em are natives.

The sieboldii, for example, I don't think is a native.

But from two to thirty feet.

They can be really big, they can be tiny.

I love the trilobums, Viburnum trilobum.

That's the one that's on the right here.

The big fat fruits.

They call it, like, a cranberry Viburnum, I think, sometimes.

Those fruits will persist into the winter and it'll, it's, like, for some late food for the birds.

So, it's really good.

Basically, because there's so many different kinds out there, there's a wide range of soils, types that it's gonna fit.

So, you can always find one that matches.

There's one that will grow, it's, it doesn't get the allelopathic problems of a black walnut.

You guys know about black walnut, and it can be hard to plant around black walnuts?

Viburnum nudum is the one that you can grow around a black walnut.

And I also found out from the permaculture woman that, like, currants and black raspberries will work around black walnuts too.

But as far as Viburnums go, there's at least one I know that will work around your black walnut tree.

But look at the berries, look at the fall color.

Really great.

They can have really nice structure even in the wintertime, you know?

That's a good choice.

Viburnums are something that you'll be able to use.

The winner: hazelnut.

Plant hazelnuts.

Look at those nuts.

That's gonna bring foragers all over the place.

They're gonna love you.

The fall color is really amazing.

It's, you know, they can stay kind of low.

They don't always get up to like that ten to sixteen feet, but they can also get pretty big.

Tolerates that soil, that clay.

And this is kind of, and another black walnut one.

That's what kind of brought me to that.

So, you can plant these around black walnut too.

I know there are people that have a black walnut tree in their yard and they can't figure out what to plant around it.

And that's one thing that you can.

For those of you that don't know, black walnut trees release a toxin from their root system and make it difficult for lots of plants to grow.

Full shade, part sun, so not out in the middle of the sun, you can grow your hazelnut.

You can harvest them and eat 'em yourself if you want.

Bayberry, another big favorite.

Love those berries.

They're there in, like, December, you see these berries.

The blue berries.

And then, that red fall foliage color.

Five to ten feet easy.

Can be really wet.

Another one that can be wet.

So, I've planted these along coastlines and things like that.

They're really tough.

So, what, zone 3 to 9.

So, you could plant this one up north and be fine.

They're super tough.

And they'll sucker and things, and they'll get kind of, they get pretty tall.

What else have we got?

The old wild rose.

We talked about that.

This is more for sandy soil.

Roses like good drainage, even if it's a wild rose.

So, sandy soil is good.

So, if you have a sandy patch, the wild rose will do great there.

It's gonna infiltrate.

It's gonna do best in full sun.

Don't plant this plant like this in the shade.

It's gonna get leggy and not be happy.

And they can be kind of, they can go crazy.

A lot of people rip these out.

I've been to plenty of gardens where they wanted to rip 'em out and they were gonna do something different.

So, but in 2026, we plant 'em on purpose.

So, that's different.

[audience laughs] And we'll get to the ground plants.

Goldenrod.

"That's a weed."

"No, it's not."

So, variable, lots of different heights.

They can get real tall.

Dry to moist.

They're just tough, they're really tough.

I know some people don't like 'em.

I had one client where I had it, I had the goldenrod in the plan, and he's like, "I'm allergic."

And I was like, "Oh, I should have asked before that," you know?

So, and I think he had bad experience with it when he was a kid, so he just had a thing.

You know, people have relationships with plants.

I find that out.

They, like, hate stuff, love stuff.

Full sun, part shade.

Species dependent on the zone.

So, mix some goldenrod in the ground.

I had somebody come up when I did the talk yesterday and she's like, "I got goldenrod all over the place, "so I'm halfway there.

I'm just gonna plant the shrubs in it."

[laughter] It works.

That's the way you do it, man.

That's kind of it.

Asters, of course.

And that's a fall bloomer, right?

There's so many different varieties out there.

Full sun to full shade.

You can do lots of different things.

So, you can definitely get asters into your ground layer.

That's the new genus of aster, Symphyotrichum.

It's not aster anymore.

They changed it.

They wanted to make it hard.

One of my new favorite plants that I've been using really in the last four or five years are turtleheads.

Chelone glabra.

My botanical Latin pronunciation is terrible.

But they do great in sun or shade.

They do like it a little bit moist, so not a sunny dry spot but a sunny wet spot will work pretty good.

And mostly I use them in shady conditions because they just-- and they'll colonize.

They'll start to spread.

There are some cultivated varieties that aren't quite as, like, durable as this straight species, so I tend to work with the straight species in a habitat garden, but I'll work with the cultivars in other parts of the garden.

Wild ginger.

Excellent ground cover.

Spreads out along the ground.

It's got to be the native one, because there was a European ginger, so it's better to use the American native.

Hexastylis is another name.

Grows low and slow, and they kind of spread all across the ground, okay?

Grasses, Panicum.

Has anybody grown switchgrass?

Loves switchgrasses, really great.

Can do really well on difficult soils.

They actually, if it's a very fertile soil, they will grow real fast and flop.

So, don't do them in, like, your perfect garden soil.

Plant them in that tricky soil.

But it can be clay or sand or whatever and they'll do just fine, they can add in there.

Lots of different species that will grow at different sizes.

This is one of my favorites, is purple lovegrass.

It's a smaller one, very drought tolerant.

It's salt tolerant, so I've used it around, like, Long Island Sound when I was gardening out there.

But you don't have to worry about that.

But the drought tolerance is nice.

And these blooms, this purple bloom, it'll start earlier in the summer and it'll last like a month, month and a half.

You get a lot out of it, yeah.

Hay-scented fern.

That's the, that's the running fern.

Sun or shade.

It's a fern that you can grow in the sun, full sun, and it'll grow if the soil is moist enough.

So, get that one.

And then, here's another fern to think about, a New York fern.

I came from-- I used to live in New York, so maybe that's why it's on there.

So, mix those things in there and kind of make it happen.

Some other resources before we get to the questions.

These are great resources to find out more about this kind of stuff.

The Ken Druse book, that's my winter read this year.

That was written in 1996.

People were thinking about this a long time ago.

We just weren't doing it.

But now, we can start, now we can do it and get away with it as designers.

Bringing Nature Home, you got to have that one.

That tells you about how the-- That's when you get to the point where you start thinking about your garden as an ecosystem.

You're thinking about that's how you're designing your plantings.

And so, that's, he kind of changed everybody's thinking when that happened.

And then, of course, Gardening for the Birds, which is a great sort of advice on, like, what kind of birds like what kind of plants, where they nest, on the ground, and things like that.

And then, if you think about it, you wanna get some other books, there's some other good books out there.

[audience chuckles] One called The New Gardener's Handbook.

Oh, there it is.

And then my new book is coming out in June.

It's called The New Garden Designer's Handbook.

So, these are books that I use for the classes that I teach at the New York Botanical Garden and for other people.

So, I got some cards for that if you're at all, if you like anything you heard today and are even remotely interested, feel free to check it out.

And that's what I got, except for questions.

[audience applauds]