By JIMMY ROGERS
Credit: Jimmy Rogers
Native gardening has not only grown more popular in recent years, but the techniques and approaches have matured as well. Where home gardeners might have once added a few native plants among their existing ornamentals or dedicated a garden bed to supporting butterflies, more and more, gardeners are casting their gaze to the lawn and asking, “Why not there, too?”
Jessica Bolz and Brian Coyle are the leaders of Laurel for the Patuxent (L4P), a nonprofit that seeks to promote sustainable communities along the Patuxent River. In 2023, they began looking for a way to help interested Laurel homeowners learn how to replace turf grass with native plants. They partnered with the National Wildlife Federation (NWF) on a grant application to the National Fish and Wildlife Foundation (NFWF) and won enough funding for five gardens.
Calling their initiative the Laurel Native Habitats program, Bolz and Coyle asked residents in the greater Laurel area to apply to have a portion of their lawn replaced with native plants. As L4P’s gardens project manager, I helped narrow 19 applicants down to five. The task was difficult, as we received many stellar applications. Ultimately, we chose a group of participants spread across Laurel’s neighborhoods who had each done a little native gardening on their own.
During this time, I had the chance to meet with Mirele Goldsmith, who holds a doctorate in environmental psychology and is on the NWF Sacred Grounds team. Goldsmith is an expert in changing human behavior to solve environmental problems, and she suggested the pivotal approach to combine our participants into a single cohort that would learn and garden together for the duration of the program. Suddenly, our program focused on community, not just free plants and training.
We took the cohort idea and ran with it. Instead of conducting site assessments individually, we invited the whole team to visit each other’s yards, so they could see where their peers were starting from and share challenges they had faced so far. I took these opportunities to teach plant identification and the benefits of native plants, and discuss the phases of garden creation. Each site visit ended with a mini design session so the team could start planning their new gardens with me.
Next, we brought in wood chips to smother the existing grass. Veteran Tree Services, a Laurel business, offered to bring wood chips from shredded trees right to each of our participants.This dramatically simplified our project, as we didn’t have to load and move chips from a central location.
The cohort model provided another unexpected benefit: savings on labor costs. We had planned to hire professionals to move the wood chips and install the plants. However, with five energized team members, plus a few additional volunteers, we had no trouble spreading the wood chips ourselves. In fact, I think our group bonded most closely during the hours we shoveled wood chips together.
When I sat down to finish the garden designs, I realized we could plant twice the expected area, a little more than 100 square feet per garden, because we saved so much on labor. In order to choose the most appropriate native plants, I started with the conditions. Most lawn areas have dry, full-sun conditions and poor, compacted soil. Fortunately, many meadow plants thrive in such conditions, so I could rely on a wide selection of native species. I also tried to add a unique spin to each design, such as creating a native cactus and yucca garden for a couple who recently moved to Laurel from New Mexico.
We learned an important lesson about smothering grass during the project. Following a procedure that has worked for me many times, we cut the grass low, buried it in 8 to 12 inches of wood chips and left it to cook in the sun for five weeks. Normally a layer of wood chips that deep is enough to begin hot-composting the grass into mud, roots and all. We were surprised, though, to see wire grass (Cynodon dactylon) climbing up through the wood chips. One of our gardeners also had quite a lot of other grasses remaining after we pulled back the wood chip. My theory is that the extreme drought during the smothering period kept these grasses from decomposing. We also didn’t see mushrooms popping up on a daily basis, which normally happens during deep chip smothering. In future years, I plan to try watering the wood chips if I don’t spot mushrooms in the first few weeks.
With the grass mostly defeated, I sourced more than 100 plants for each garden through my company, Vibrant Gardening. We got all five gardens planted in nine days, creating about 565 square feet of new garden, total, and reducing the same amount of lawn. Each garden will bloom continuously from March to November and will eventually grow dense enough to suppress most weed growth. These five gardens contain a total of 39 species of plants native to Maryland.
I hope everyone in Laurel will congratulate our new gardening ambassadors on their new gardens and new skills. We plan to weed together in the spring.
If you’re interested in participating in Laurel Native Habitats yourself, L4P is planning to organize another cohort next year. You can find more information at laurelforthepatuxent.org or follow us on Facebook.
Also, NWF Sacred Grounds is always eager to find new congregations to work with, so if you belong to a house of worship in Prince George’s County that’s interested in planting a native garden, do reach out to Naomi Edelson, the program director, at edelsonn@nwf.org.
