A Garden on the Edge

About the Book

Daily life for most of us, particularly Americans, frequently achieves a pace that becomes busy to the point of being harried. As one activity spins into another, each day distinguishes itself little from any other day. In a like manner, our immediate surroundings of buildings, products, or media set a uniform scene for our lives. Meanwhile, the sameness spreads from one place to another relentlessly leaving cities and suburbs where once could be found bucolic countryside, native landscape, and wildlife habitat. Many people seek an escape. That escape need not be far away. It can be as close as a home garden, particularly one based upon a natural design that belongs where it is located. Particularly well suited to providing an escape from the mundane is a garden filled with native plants that belong in the general area of the site and that are chosen to specifically fit the conditions of the site. By being within such a garden, the authenticity of its site lets both people and wildlife know that they are home. A garden that provides such authenticity finds itself resting gently on the land gracing the site with a natural style that belongs. That garden breaks away from some of the conventions of design promoted by various media and the horticulture industry that intend first to sell profitably produced plants and landscaping material across the nation. Media promoted gardening styles, including the plants in them, besides intended for use just about anywhere come in and out of fashion and use. One year’s set of must-have plants and landscaping materials promoted by the media replaces another in succession. Meanwhile, the horticultural industry, naturally in pursuit of as much business as possible, touts varieties of plants for garden use that are adaptable to as wide an area as possible. As a result, similar-looking gardens or at least the plants in them appear across the country and even around the world often out of context of the area in which the garden grows. Having the latest plants and garden style at a minimum provides a point of conversation for the gardener and visitors to the garden even if much the same plants and landscaping appear across town or across the continent. Just as uniformity in garden styles and ubiquitous plants seem nearly to overtake suburban and urban areas, a movement to landscape with native plants has begun to gain acceptance. Any gardener can be a part of this. The effort to include native plants reflects a desire by some gardeners and landscapers to create a garden anchored with a sense of the place that includes the garden. This new direction may be happening just in time. More and more native habitats disappear leaving fewer places for the native plants that lived there, not to mention the wildlife that joins them. Both native plants and wildlife need new places in which to live. Home gardens that incorporate places for native plants and wildlife may be those sanctuaries. All gardeners are in fact gardening on the edge of an era in which widely dispersed cultivated gardens may be the key in continuing the existence of some plants and maybe even some of the other living things that go with them. In order to show an example of how a new garden style incorporating native plants can be done in nearly every garden, the story of the evolution of the gardens at Windflower Grove has been used for illustration. Growing on the tallgrass prairie of central Iowa along a woodland edge, the gardens continue to be the author’s own life work, which continues on as it has for over sixty years. Many specific methods proven in the gardens to work for growing native plants are shared in order to make inclusion of native plants a little easier for others. Gardening with inclusion of native plants and encouragement of wildlife gradually evolved over the years at Windflower Grove into a garden style that can be described as heritage habitat gardening. Specific rules of the style are few and flexible in o

About the Author

Lorin Knapp has been gardening over more or less the last sixty years at what are now known as the gardens at Windflower Grove. As the years passed, he became interested in native plants particularly when it became apparent that most of the plants that had always been on the site of the gardens were native to the area around central Iowa. This grew into an interest in the birds and butterflies that had been around the area and ultimately adding native plants to the gardens that were best for particular kinds of birds and butterflies. He thought that the best way to pass on his knowledge about how to incorporate native plants into any garden was to a book A Garden on the Edge.