Gardening with a Sense of Place

Recently I attended the first meeting of a new garden club. Nine ladies gathered in the community lodge of a residential development in the North Carolina mountains. The rustic building, complete with wooden rocking chairs on a wide front porch, overlooks a small river running through a narrow mountain valley. We met inside by a large stone fireplace beneath a chandelier of hickory twigs, and we introduced ourselves.

“I’m from south Florida,” said one person. “Anything you want to know about palm trees and ferns, I’m your girl.” The next lady spoke lovingly of her ornamental azaleas in her last home in Atlanta. Another said she was from Phoenix, where gardening is all about the lack of water. As rain drummed down on the tin roof of the lodge, she continued, “I mostly grow cactus.” Others there were from Chicago, Houston, and Connecticut.

The enthusiasm of the group was high with everyone ready to share and learn about gardening in the mountains. As garden lovers, we were kindred spirits.

When my turn came, I said I was a landscape architect who had practiced in Montgomery. “When I moved to the North Carolina mountains 14 years ago, I became interested in gardening with a sense of place.”

As I said those words, I realized something I never had before. At that moment, I understood that in my garden in the mountains, I have been trying to express its special location and honor its sense of place without even knowing I was doing so.

My garden is on the top of a mountain with mountain views everywhere. There are distant mountains, close mountains, and mountains obscured in summer but revealed in winter. The flowing lines of the garden design reflect the flowing lines of these mountains. When the architect and I first visited the site, he said, “We’ll put the house here on top of the mountain.” “No,” I said, “we’ll put the garden here.”

While creating my garden, I have been enhancing views and planting native plants and building with local materials. But until the moment I spoke at the garden club, I had not realized all this boiled down to respecting the land where I live and expressing its special sense of place.

The geography professor at The North Carolina Arboretum asked a class I was in years ago, “Don’t you want to understand where you are?” My garden is located on the edge of the Blue Ridge Mountains, where the Blue Ridge Mountains meet the vast piedmont plain of the southeastern United States. From my garden, I can see the Blue Ridge escarpment where the mountains rise sharply from the piedmont. I can watch clouds form as warm, moist air from the Gulf of Mexico hits the escarpment and rises over the mountains. I can see the Eastern Continental Divide where water on one side flows to the Gulf of Mexico and water on the other side flows to the Atlantic.

Some people who move to the wooded mountains of North Carolina begin landscaping by hiring a crew of workers to clear out everything but the biggest trees. They “clean up the site” and then plant whatever the landscape contractor brings in. However, when new owners strip out the understory on a wooded lot, they lose the opportunity to discover what is already there and flourishing. I think people do this because they lack awareness of a sense of place, of what is appropriate and special for that location.

KNOW YOUR GARDEN SPACE

So how do you create a sense of place if your garden doesn’t have views of the San Francisco Bay, the Mississippi River, or the Smoky Mountains? How do you create a sense of place if you live in a suburb?

1. Explore the site. Before you “clean up the property”—whether it’s an existing yard or an undeveloped plat—find out what is already there. Walk the property with a nurseryman, landscape designer, or knowledgeable friend who can identify the plants and tell you about them. This is especially important in the winter when it’s hard to know what’s what. I have seen new homeowners cut down choice flowering trees and shrubs because they didn’t understand what they were.

2. Protect the original soil. On an undeveloped site, fence off areas where contractors cannot drive, park, store material, or dispose of materials. The native soil is precious; it’s the place where wildflowers and seasonal perennials will appear, and it’s just what native plants require to flourish.

3. Find—or borrow—a focal point. Study the area where you are going to build your garden to see if there is a special feature. It could be a view, a handsome stand of trees, or perhaps a specimen tree. Hopefully you can find something on your property, but it could be at a neighbor’s. If the feature is next door, then design your landscape to bring it into your garden visually. When you hide the property line, the feature becomes part of your garden. Do this by screening out the fence or wall which separates the feature from your garden.

4. Keep it local. Another way to reinforce a sense of place is to build your garden (and your house too if you are building the house) with local materials, such as local stone, brick, or wood. Study your neighborhood to see which plants flourish there. If it’s an old, established neighborhood, this is a good way to choose your plant palette. Investigate which of these handsome trees and shrubs are native. Make an informed choice to mix in native trees, shrubs, and perennials with the non-native ornamentals that you might want. Often the largest and most successful trees in the neighborhood are native to the area because they were growing there before the area was developed.

5. Don’t give up hope. You can be mindful of place even if your garden is in a new residential neighborhood where the developer has cleared all the trees and vegetation and scraped away the existing topsoil. Look outside the development to see which trees and shrubs are flourishing in older, nearby neighborhoods. Established areas are more likely to have the original soil intact and a palette of native trees and shrubs. Bring in topsoil to build your garden. Educate yourself about native trees and shrubs for your location, and include them in your design, secure in the knowledge that planting natives will support the food chain and ecosystem and attract native insects, birds, and butterflies. Learn about the butterflies that come to your garden. Feed the birds. Get to know them and their song.

Nothing makes me feel more connected to my garden than watching a bluebird splashing silver light in the birdbath. I am delighted when I discover a bird’s nest in a tree I have planted. When I watch the miracle of a butterfly float into my garden and alight on a flower, I truly feel connected to nature and my own special sense of place.

By Mary Walton Upchurch

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