The conscientious gardener : cultivating a garden ethic

265 Pages·2011·2.98 MB·English

by  Sarah Reichard

The Conscientious Gardener
The publisher gratefully acknowledges the
generous support of the Ralph and Shirley Shapiro
Endowment Fund in Environmental Studies of the
University of California Press Foundation.
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iii
Sarah Hayden Reichard
The Conscientious Gardener
Cultivating a Garden Ethic
Foreword by Peter Raven
University of California Press Berkeley Los Angeles London
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University of California Press, one of the most distinguished university presses in
the United States, enriches lives around the world by advancing scholarship in the
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University of California Press
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University of California Press, Ltd.
London, England
© 2011 by The Regents of the University of California
Designer: Nola Burger
Text: 9.75/14 Palatino
Display: Filosofia, Benton Gothic
Compositor: BookMatters, Berkeley
Indexer: Thérèse Shere
Illustrator: Bill Nelson
Printer and binder: Thomson-Shore, Inc.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Reichard, Sarah H.
The conscientious gardener : cultivating a garden ethic / Sarah Hayden Reichard ;
foreword by Peter Raven.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 978-0-520-26740-4 (cloth : alk. paper)
1. Sustainable horticulture. 2. Native plant gardening. 3. Pests—Integrated

control. I. Title. II. Title: Cultivating a garden ethic.
SB319.95.R45 2011
635'.048—dc22 2010028833
Manufactured in the United States of America
20 19 18 17 16 15 14 13 12 11
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
This book is printed on Cascades Enviro 100, a 100% post consumer waste, recycled,
de-inked fiber. FSC recycled certified and processed chlorine free. It is acid free,
Ecologo certified, and manufactured by BioGas energy.
v
Contents
Foreword by Peter Raven vii
Introduction: The Land Ethic 1
one. The Skin of the Earth 5
two. Water, Our Most Precious Resource 36
three. Should You Go Native? 55
four. Aliens among Us 77
five. The Wild Kingdom 95
six. Preventing and Managing Pests 118
seven. Confronting Climate Change 149
eight. Recycle, Reduce, Reuse, Repurpose 167
Epilogue: Toward a Garden Ethic 181
Acknowledgments 189
Appendix: Global List of Invasive Garden Plants 190
Glossary 226
Resources 230
Index 243
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foreword
More than two-thirds of the 310 million people who live in the
United States actively garden or have an interest in gardening.
Americans constitute about 4.5 percent of the world population but
consume nearly a quarter of the world’s resources. The way in which we
live, therefore, has a major effect on the global ecosystem, and our gardening
has direct and important effects on our common environment, both locally
and farther afield.
In her engaging, personal style, Dr. Sarah Reichard calls attention to the
many dimensions of sustainability in gardening at a time when the subject
has attained special interest. The “flight to the suburbs” that characterized
the United States following the end of World War II led to not only the
destruction of a great deal of productive farmland but also the creation of
millions of new gardens of a size and scope that had been achieved only by
the very wealthy in previous periods of history. In general, the frequency of
gardens per individual in the modern, industrialized world is probably as
high as it has ever been for any set of urbanized or semiurbanized people
in history. The warp and woof of many modern communities largely con-
sists of their gardens and yards. But the network of gardens and the whole
style of suburban and urban living in the United States presents special
challenges. Flooding from poorly designed gardens erodes stream banks
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vii
viii foreword
and often causes flooding downstream. Pesticides applied in part of the
system drift to other places or contaminate the water running off individual
gardens. As the great environmentalist Rachel Carson demonstrated in the
1960s, excessive use of pesticides—including herbicides—not only poisons

the environment but soon proves detrimental to human health as well. In
gardening as in farming, overdosing with chemicals or disregarding the
health of the soil soon leads to ecological disasters. When these disasters are
played out in many gardens simultaneously, whole regions suffer.
Dr. Reichard presents the environmental context alongside every strategy
for creating a sustainable garden. Particularly timely is the discussion of bio-
swales and rain gardens. Both capture rainfall and other precipitation near
where it falls, and both kinds of gardens are spreading rapidly as people
realize the problems associated with the excessive use of hardscape in heav-
ily settled areas—the result is always periodic flooding. (Enlightened utility

companies, such as the Metropolitan Sewer District in St. Louis, are basing
their fees on charges related to the proportion of hardscape on a particular
property instead of on general taxes.) Quite appropriately, gardeners are
also increasingly attempting to identify and use native plants, constitution-
ally well suited to the regions to which they are native. But not all native
plants are equal, and some should not be cultivated in home gardens. Many
plants have wide ranges and are hugely variable genetically, so everything
labeled as a single species is by no means equivalent in its characteristics,
and care must be taken in selecting the particular strain of native plant to
be cultivated.
Drawing on her rich, practical experience as well as her expertise as
an environmental scientist, Dr. Reichard informs us about what we can
do to make our gardens more healthy, lively, interesting, and functional.
Her research on cultivated plants, especially in relation to their potential to
become weeds, her efforts to promote the conservation of endangered native
species, and her work with both university students and the general public
have equipped her well to explicate the subjects she addresses in this book.
foreword ix
The global human population has tripled during my lifetime. More than
one billion of the earth’s seven billion people are malnourished, more than one
hundred million of them on the brink of starvation. Rates of consumption per
person are skyrocketing upward along with population growth, and many
of the technologies to which we have become accustomed during the more
than two hundred years following the Industrial Revolution are dangerous
to human health, the proper functioning of ecosystems, and global sustain-
ability as a whole. Indeed, the Global Footprint Network estimates that we
are currently using 160 percent of the sustainable capacity of the Earth on
an ongoing basis, up from 70 percent as recently as 1970. There are no easy
answers to the dilemma in which we find ourselves, but inaction is not an
option. The conscientious gardener fits into the heart of global sustainability
and can make important contributions to the health of our planet. This loving
and responsible guidebook can direct our steps as we make our way together
into the future.
—Peter H. Raven, President, Missouri Botanical Garden, St. Louis