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Keeping your backyard 'green'

Grow Native designers ready to plan landscapes

By RENÃ…E JEAN
Daily Journal Assistant Managing Editor

Friday, October 10, 2008

She makes it look easy, but with 4,000 or more plants to care for annually, it is a big job. Linda Resinger is in charge of the Mineral Area College greenhouse and with the help of horticulture students sees that the plants are put in pleasing places to beautify the campus.

She is the landscaper for this year’s Grow Native! Landscape Challenge along with Jan Dellamano, a native plant expert and private land conservationist for Missouri Department of Conservation.

The Grow Native! Challenge ended June 24 and is now in the selection phase of the project. Area garden clubs and environmental groups will name a winner from the 17 applications received from St. Francois County residents.

Resinger and Dellamano are enthusiastic about the challenge ahead.

“I am getting some ideas and I am excited about it,” Resinger said. “I’ve gotten into the plants. Looking at them, I think that you could use them in a bed and still have the same effect as using everyday landscape plants. You just need to use certain plants in certain areas so you can get color in all seasons.”

Resinger has always been interested in landscapes that look naturalized, so the idea of using natives in formal landscapes particularly appeals to her. The reduced maintenance of an established native plant bed is also appealing.

“Who wants to stand there with a hose for two or three hours after work?” she said. “People want to go out and enjoy their yards in the evening. When you have to put too much work into it, you don’t get to enjoy it as much.”

Dellamano has been working with native plants in the landscape since 1980.

“If you think of the landscape as an art form, native plants add to the palette of material you have to work with,” he said. “It’s like giving a painter another palette of colors to use.”

Dellamano likes to mimic nature in the landscapes he does. “I am inspired by unique landscapes I see in nature when hiking or floating or hunting or fishing, and I like to try and create a similar look in a created landscape. A lot of what we see in nature can be kind of wild and oversized to work with at the smaller, intimate scale of our yards and gardens, but if you keep looking, you will eventually see something that does work at that smaller scale — like a rock outcrop with ferns and wildflowers, nestled in the cracks and ledges, or a patch of wildflowers with a striking combination of color and foliage or a single species like wild ginger that has formed a beautiful weed-free groundcover.”

Natives also afford the gardener an opportunity to be a good steward of the environment on their own property.

“These are the plants nature intended to grow here,” Dellamano said. “They are adapted to where my home is, and they add to the environment. They do not cause problems like many non-native (exotic) plants do. I want to be a good steward of the earth while I’m here (what we now call ‘green living’) and I try to do what I can to fit that role. Among those choices such as recycling and conserving energy, landscaping with native plants is the most satisfying of all for me and I get to work with it hands-on and enjoy the results right in my own personal habitat — the place where I live.”

Since becoming familiar with native plants, Resinger said she sees many opportunities to use them to address landscape problems in a cost-effective manner and reduce the need for irrigation — and she is eager to share the knowledge with students at the college.

“The students here at Mineral Area College are our future greenhouse owners and landscapers,” she said. “I am excited to be part of the Grow Native program, and I am hoping with working here at MAC that I will be able to pass it on to the future.”

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