Right plant, right place.
It’s a saying with which most gardeners are familiar; if a plant is misbehaving in your bed, it’s not a bad plant, it’s just growing in the wrong place.
Right plant, right place is a lesson with applications in environmental stewardship as well. And recently, long-time volunteers Holly Kendall and Suzanne Tucker faced the realities of this adage while tending the native rain gardens of The Nature Place.
For nine and seven years respectively, Holly and Suzanne have acted as the primary stewards of The Nature Place’s native garden beds. Both women have gardening in their blood: gardening is a family tradition passed down between the Kendall women – in fact, many of the native flowers growing across The Nature Place first took root in the nursery beds of Holly’s sister’s private garden – and before retirement Suzanne had enjoyed a lifelong career in horticulture.
Despite sharing a lifetime of gardening between them, Holly and Suzanne were surprised when mountain mint – a pollinator powerhouse – launched an aggressive campaign in one of The Nature Place’s rain garden beds, choking out its surrounding native neighbors.
Holly and Suzanne knew that mountain mint had combative tendencies, but the extent of its encroachment caught them both off guard. The right plant – a perennial known for supporting an abundant and diverse array of pollinators – was in the wrong place.
No one knows these gardens better than Holly and Suzanne; after years of planting, weeding, watering, and transplanting, they have earned the clout and trust to manage this landscape with little oversight from Berks Nature. The two quickly identified the right place for their mountain mint: a vacant bank in need of some filler, perfect for plants that don’t like to share.
In the mountain mint’s place, Holly and Suzanne planted coneflower, black-eyed susan, and tickseed – species that are popular with butterflies and birds – plus cardinal flower in the damper areas close to the bed’s drainage grate – a known favorite of hummingbirds.
“Gardening is all about trial and error,” says Suzanne, who edits her own garden at home each year to optimize sunlight, soil conditions, and moisture.
Mountain mint growing at The Nature Place.
This is true whether you plant the traditional exotics that have long dominated American nurseries or with the native perennials that call Pennsylvania home (and of course we recommend the latter); to garden is to constantly edit.
Undoubtedly, this is one of the joys of gardening; for even after a lifetime of gardening, nature has lessons yet to share.
“You’re always learning new things,” says Holly, “and you learn more by doing it!”